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ahwhite2208-blog · 6 years

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A Thousand Days In Hell

Non-league football is a peculiar entity. For half of the teams in the National League, and certainly the rest in the steps below, it is a wonderful opportunity to do the unthinkable and gain entry to the world of full time football, a dream that so many children have and yet so few manage to live. The players are part time brickies, postmen, regional bank clerks – you know, the type of clubs and players that the BBC cameras fawn over in the FA Cup first round. In principle, it’s great. If I was a Gateshead or a Solihull fan, I might even enjoy it. But when a club the size of Tranmere Rovers fell out of the Football League trapdoor, the typical non-league experience is turned on its head.

The day before I moved to university, I stood on the terraces at Southport and watched us go 2-0 down within 20 minutes. It still hadn’t registered to me that this was actually happening, a feeling of bemusement that I’m sure most of us shared. It was meant to be a whistlestop tour of shit grounds and shit teams that we’d only ever seen in pre-season friendlies. As it turned out, we were destined to spend 1,115 days with this feeling. Denial, sadness, anger, guilt and frustration all came and went, depending on the level of opposition and how quickly we managed to concede. A wounded animal, confused and in pain, Tranmere Rovers as a collective entity was in unfamiliar surroundings. What were we meant to do? It felt like a fever dream. The hideous turquoise tracksuits, the god awful Vanarama branding, even the footballs themselves looked tacky and amateurish. Granted, we hadn’t exactly covered ourselves in glory for about fifteen years but what did we do to deserve this? Most of the players, on our side and theirs, looked like they had won a competition to play at being a footballer for the day. It was a continuation of the previous season’s atrocities, but at a level of football that was truly embarrassing to watch. We didn’t even make the playoffs in that first year, thanks to a team from Essex with about three pound fifty to their name and two P.E teachers in charge. Two ends of the spectrum and all that.

If I’m being honest, I remember next to nothing about the 16 months that Gary Brabin was in charge. I barely went to the games after September, I didn’t know who half of our players were, and I stopped caring. When you spend your 18thbirthday watching Boreham Wood beat you 2-0, something inside of you just dies. I didn’t even bother going to Wrexham. I binned off browsing the Cowsheds – probably a wise decision for anyone wanting to keep their sanity – so FlashScore and the occasional Twitter update was about as much as I could be arsed. I was used to my Kopite and Bluenose mates taking the piss out of us, but I draw the line at Sebastian from Surrey braying in the Mission smoking area about how he could never watch non-league football because his daddy gets executive seats at Chelsea. To be honest, I kept a good crowd at uni. Most of my teammates supported Championship teams like Ipswich or Preston, but even their sympathetic nods and “you’re too big to be down there, remember when you were playing us in League One?” became depressing.

On my occasional visits home in second year, things seemed to be picking up pace. The glamping tent was established (two Gamma Rays and a Sheppy’s please Mark) and we had an alright team. Nors and Harris were becoming cult heroes, we signed Steeeeve and looked like we could actually win the league. Still had to put up with the refereeing, the 12 North Ferriby fans and the voice in the back of your head that says you’re going to be here forever, but at least things were looking up. Remember though, this is Tranmere, and the good was inevitably followed by the bad. Lincoln away was possibly the worst place I’ve ever been for several reasons, the main one being that it looks like post-apocalypse Brexit Britain and the locals are the strangest mutants you can imagine. Whoever’s van I keyed: you deserved it for a) beating us, b) living in Lincoln and c) having a copy of the S*n on your dashboard. Imagine giving somewhere as desolate as Lincoln city status. Anyway, they had the last laugh because they won the league by four points and we got beat at Wembley by a team whose owner wanted to spend millions of actual Great British Pounds on a football ground made out of matchsticks.

Having a life outside of Tranmere proved to be surprisingly easy when we were dwelling in the depths of non-league. I still spent my Saturdays on the couch with an illegal stream of Phil Thompson’s nose and no money in my Betfair account, but it was a somewhat refreshing change to not be planning your life around Rotherham away on a Tuesday night. There wasn’t a chance that I was spending my free government money going to Dover or Torquay when I could spend it on weed and takeaways instead. The few aways that I did manage (hello, 20 minute train journeys to Guiseley and Halifax) were just soul crushing. The council pitch that Guiseley play on had a building site behind it, and absolutely zero incline on the terrace, which is a problem for a short arse like me. I went three times in three years and managed to see a grand total of about 40 minutes. Still worth it for the time I got sick of a 15 year old singing ‘sign on’ and told him in no uncertain terms that Sutcliffe killed his nan. There’s a couple of layers in that one.

As usual, the footballing gods conspired against us last year and we managed to get ¾ of our midfield injured before the play off final. I think we were one injury away from having a centre midfield partnership of Purple Aki and Pete Price, although on reflection the lizard would have had a better game than Lois Maynard. If he was under 6 foot, he’d still be knocking about playing for Manchester Met or wherever we signed him from, the absolute fucking fraud. I’m sure Aki would have put the fear of God into Forest Green as well. Imagine marking him from a corner, he’d have a field day squeezing muscles. In all honesty, we deserved another year in hell for that performance. I’d like to make an official apology for getting escorted off the premises for what can only be described as monumentally dickish behaviour after a long day in the sun.

Now that we’ve won there, I can finally say that Wembley is a corporate shithole without it sounding like sour grapes. Mr. Palios, tear down that arch! Christ alive, what an awful place it is to watch football. Notwithstanding the fact that it’s only ever 20% full for the National League, everything about it just drains you as a fan. It’s more like an airport hangar than an actual ground. I hear Tottenham are putting shops in their new gaff, something the Jaguars owner will almost definitely copy when he buys the place. I’m not a fan of London in general, but Wembley just takes the piss. If I can make it through the next 60 odd years of my life without ever going back, I’ll be happy.

The fact that I’ve got this far in without mentioning the referees is testament to how long the list of complaints about the National League is. Incompetent would be putting it kindly, because every single one of these clowns got their qualifications from the back of a Cornflakes packet. I’m well into my conspiracy theories, and the one about BT and Vanarama deliberately keeping us down in order to boost viewing figures sounds plausible enough, but that would require several doses of the dark arts that these morons don’t have the brain capacity for. It’s a hard job to referee a football match, made even harder if you have absolutely no common sense. The timewasting in that league is enough to test the patience of a saint. All the VAR nonsense at the World Cup is proof that the governing institutions have gone mental. You’d never finish a game in the National League if the refs had VAR. The first half against Ebbsfleet would still be going on. I could list hundreds of terrible decisions both for and against us and it still wouldn’t scratch the surface, but Ritchie Sutton getting sent off at Welling, Scott Davies being assaulted into the net at Barrow and Chester getting a penalty that was about three yards outside the box all stick out.

The last thing I fancy a rant about is the almost comedic lack of professionalism surrounding the entire setup. They absolutely ham it up to the BT cameras like the entire world has woken up at 12.30 to watch Woking v Eastleigh on a Saturday morning. Literally every tweet the official account has ever posted makes me cringe, the pundits are so painfully beige that they make Steve Claridge and his receding hairline look like Little Richard in comparison and Boreham Wood somehow managed to get away with charging to watch their highlights. The fucking cheek of it! It was a stress relief to unfollow them all, clicking each button and feeling part of my soul flowing back into me. At one point, we had no idea whether we were playing on Saturday or not, because the FA Trophy replay took priority over the league. Usually this is all sorted out as soon as possible, but because the NL fixtures are done by some fella writing them down in his ma’s kitchen, they’d got confused. They eventually told us on Friday afternoon that yes, your league game is on. I despair. Even the whole Solihull floodlights debacle got sorted quicker. Juventus’ match-fixing scandal had nothing on that, by the way. The 200 odd people who watched that replay were witness to us throwing that game. I don’t think I saw anyone in a white shirt break out of a jog, and I was all for it. I got to spend a lovely weekend in Solihull (not a patch on Birkenhead) and watch a game of football played in front of a crowd smaller than the Beechwood-Upton derby, with a fraction of the intensity. The perfect non-league experience.

I’ll finish this off by saying thank you to Mark and Nicola Palios, to everyone at the Trust and the TROSC, the Wirral Radio team, and every single season ticket holder. Without you, the club wouldn’t have climbed out of the pit. In fact, I think we’d have developed Stockholm Syndrome within the next few seasons and become like our Welsh friends. The turnaround and revitalisation of the entire structure of this football club gives us hope for the future. Not just blind hope, but optimism as well. When we were losing to Altrincham, I didn’t think that the suites would be pulling in money, or we’d have an academy setup in China. When Welling were putting us to the sword, I didn’t think we’d ever see a club that the fans are so fiercely proud of again. Thank you for not losing interest when I did. That day at Wembley has already been written about. Let us not emerge from non-league abyss blinking at the sunlight, desperate for comfort. Let us instead kick the door of League Two down, wielding dual scythes and behead Stevenage like an invading Dothraki horde.

Figuratively, obviously.

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