CLUB THAT WOULDN’T DIE
After going bust 50 years ago, Stanley’s fighting spirit is still strong despite this cup defeat
AS Accrington Stanley prepared for their moment in the limelight against Championship club Derby County, managed by former England midfielder Frank Lampard,
IT WAS bitterly cold and the snow was driving across the sloping pitch at the Wham Stadium. The game was two days away, the television trucks were starting to clog up the new car park at one end of the ground and a big tent was being erected to protect the pitch: one of t he f ounder members of t he Football League was getting ready for its close-up.
Andy Holt, Accrington Stanley’s owner and chairman, had his flat cap on his head and his phone pressed to his ear as he walks down the touchline. The view of the Coppice hill in the distance had disappeared in the white-out. Holt was feeling better and better about the weekend. ‘They won’t fancy this much,’ he said into his phone, laughing. ‘Will they b******s!’
He walked to the corner of the ground and edged cautiously up the astroturf ramp that lead to the away changing room. A workman was taking a leak in the metallic urinal. Holt cackled. It completed the picture. The red floor was cold and hard, the room was small and cramped, the showers looked tired and the tiles were chipped. It was the kind of scene that could give a cossetted new age academy kid nightmares.
‘When Roy Hodgson came here with Fulham a few years back for an FA Cup tie, he took one look at this and ordered them back to the Dunkenhalgh Hotel up the road, where they had been staying, so they could get changed there,’ said Holt. ‘ To n y Pulis brought Middlesbrough here more recently and loved it. He said it would do his lads good.’
Just before 11.30am yesterday, Frank Lampard, the Derby County manager, got off the team coach outside the stadium and stopped to sign autographs for a clutch of fans. ‘Welcome to Accrington,’ Sue, one of the stewards, said to him as he walked towards the changing rooms. Lampard grinned and shook her hand. He played at Scarborough in the Cup for Chelsea. He knew what to expect.
This was about muck and brass. It was Stanley’s big day. They are, after all, just about the ultimate cup underdog. The slogan on their website calls them ‘the club that wouldn’t die’, a reference to the fact they went out of business in 1966 before reforming and climbing their way slowly back up through the leagues.
‘ Accrington Stanley: who are they?’ the kid says in the Eighties milk advert. Their annual wage bill is £1.3 million, the lowest in League One. In the stand, Holt, a popular l o c a l b u s i n e s s man wh o h a s transformed the club, was in his element. He wandered around the l o u n g e , wat c h i n g supporters tucking into a pre-match lunch.
He went out into the marquee at the back of the stand, chatting with fans. He brought the League Two trophy out with him so supporters could have their picture taken with it. ‘Derby might not see one of them again for a while,’ he said.
Holt wanted to beat Derby. But he had no desire for his team to become them. He does not want to emulate them. He does not want to c o mp e t e w i t h them in the Championship. He looks at the upper echelons of the English pyramid and it fills him with a mixture of contempt and dismay.
‘My rationale is not to get to the Premier League,’ he said. ‘ My rationale is to protect a community asset and make it grow and continue and still be there in 50 years. Everybody else will blow millions chasing the dream and I won’t.
‘If we got to the Championship, I have said to John Coleman, our manager, that we would leave the budget at £1.3m, I’ll give him £1m and we’ll get a deckchair apiece and sit on the side and lose 35-0 every week and then, when we go down, we have £ 6m to do the stadium up and have another go.’
Holt loves the fact that the limited facilities might ask questions of modern players used to more luxurious surroundings but he is a moderniser, too, a man who has established Accrington as the model of a forward-thinking club.
The old changing rooms will be gone soon, just like the old club shop, one of the old stands and the old seats behind the goal. Holt asked the fans whether they wanted the seats to remain but they asked if t hey could be replaced by terracing, so Holt agreed. The supporters take responsibility for the maintenance of that end of the ground. They clubbed together for two large-screen televisions on the concourse.
Nestled amid the terraced houses of the town, the stadium is tight and compact and the atmosphere is loud. ‘When you take a throw-in you’re more or less sat on the knee of the spectator,’ said Holt. ‘Away fans sing we have a crap ground but to us it’s not crap. It has a charm and part of my job is to keep that.
‘The community has created it, lost it, created it, lost it and rebuilt it. Every brick that has been laid, they might be a bit chipped and cracked but people have gone and dug them from all over the place to make the ground what it is.
‘There have been thousands of people’s efforts over the years in
Accrington to get them where they are. It’s a shame people don’t see what others have gone through to see what little Accrington have.’
The game turned i n Derby’s favour just before the hour when Dan Barlaser was sent off for a second late tackle and a second bookable offence.
Accrington reacted superbly. They were the better team for the rest of the match but, 12 minutes from t i me, Martyn Waghorn reacted quickest during a goalmouth scramble and rifled the ball past Maxted from close range. Jayden Bogle was sent off in the last minute for pulling back Paul Smyth when he was clean through and when Kelle Roos saved the resulting free-kick from Billy Kee, the game was over.
Coleman complained bitterly a bout s o me o f t he r e f e r e e ’s decisions and was particularly incensed that Jonathan Moss had refused to discuss them with him after the match when he confronted him in the lounge. Lampard did his press conference in the gym, which was housed in a small prefab at the back of a stand. He smiled when he was reminded about Hodgson’s decision to take his team to the hotel rather than change at the ground.
‘I was never going to do that,’ he said. ‘ I heard some teams laid carpet down in the changing room, too, to give it a nice comfortable feeling, but I didn’t want that, either. I gave them all the facts about what it was going to be like. If you want to be a top player, you need to show you can deal with this side of the game both on the pitch and mentally. I wouldn’t say we came through with flying colours but we came through.’
Beating Ipswich in the last round earned the club £135,000 and the fact that this fourth-round tie was televised by BT meant another windfall of £150,000. Much of the money will be dedicated to more ground improvements.
‘Owning this famous old club, I feel it is a massive weight on my shoulders,’ said Holt. ‘I don’t want to be the one that killed the club. That’s what’s going to happen if we allow the gap between the leagues to continue to widen.
‘It’s not my club. I can’t pick it up and take it home. I can’t go and live in it. I can’t drive it home. There’s 20 or 30 people before me, it was their club as well and they still haven’t got it. They were just custodians. I’ l l do a good j ob because I have to — I live in the community. If I don’t, if I go to a restaurant, people will be throwing pasta down my back.’
The party at the stadium was still in full swing as darkness fell. ‘We put on a great show,’ wrote Holt on Twitter. ‘Done our club no harm at all. Referees’ Hour £1 a pint. Come on you Reds.’