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Tom Serry, Ashley Bowles and Jack Camm are amongst a trio of ex professionals who will take part in the launch match of the UK Elite Squad. Ex Jamaican Youth International, Omar Thomas will also appear.

The match vs a Leatherhead Club X1 will take place at their Fetcham Stadium on 15th September and has been arranged by UKFF Executive Chairman, Adam Parry.

The end of season play-offs are both exhilarating and exhausting. For the clubs that finish in places just below the automatic promotion places, everything comes down those two or three matches at the end of the season and they come so quickly after the end of the normal league season that the work that has gone into securing a place just above that dotted line can feel as if it has come and gone all too quickly.

As this season winds towards its end, one small town in Suffolk's football club is continuing its upward trajectory. Needham Market FC are in the play-off places in the Ryman League Division One North, only sixteen years after they were still competing in the amateur Suffolk & Ipswich League. Andy Ollerenshaw went to see what they're getting so right there at the moment.

For our very last Non-League Day related story, David Bauckham travelled up to Middlesex for the Ryman League Premier Division match between Wealdstone and Bury Town.

I was once asked by someone to explain this "football pyramid thing" that I kept banging on about and it was only then, as a follower of non-League football for many years, that it dawned on me that there are many football fans out there who have little or no idea that the Pyramid even exists, let alone what it is all about.

It's Non-League Day tomorrow, but you already knew that, didn't you? The brain-child of Mike Bayly occasionally of this parish and James Doe is celebrating its second annual event this weekend, and the extent to which non-league football has embraced the idea has been refreshing, to say the least.

Well, all of the leagues have finally started. The Isthmian League caught up with the rest and started its competitive season this weekend, meaning that everyone has now started for the new season, and this evening two of our four matches come from this league. First up, though, we're off to Surrey for Chertsey Town's first match in Division One Central of the Southern League.

The story of how this evening's match between Ascot United and Wembley FC has come to be shown live via the medium of Facebook thanks to the tournament's sponsors, Budweiser, has, it could well be argued, had a positive effect for all concerned. The Extra Preliminary Round of the FA Cup and, in turn, the tournament itself has received a shot of publicity for a stage of the competition that usually receives next to none.

The non-league season the Isthmian League aside started yesterday, and we're delighted to be able to bring you highlights of four matches this evening, one from the Blue Square Premier, two from the Blue Square South and one from the Premier Division of the Southern League. The first match is between Hayes & Yeading United and Alfreton Town.

As some of the regulars on this site will have been aware for some time now, we have been writing up the pre-season on this site for several weeks now, with the intention of putting the whole thing together as one downloadable PDF file. I'm delighted to be able to confirm that, with a couple of hours left before the start of the Premier League and non-league seasons, it's finished.

With the future of Supporters Direct still under threat, it is worth taking a moment to reflect upon an anniversary that will most likely go unremarked upon elsewhere, but is still an anniversary that has changed our perception of how football clubs can be run. Long before Chester FC or FC United of Manchester, before even AFC Wimbledon were formed, the first club set up in protest at the ownership of one individual took their first steps.

After a depressing few days, let's try and lighten the mood a little as Mark Murphy brings us his memories of the former home of Kingstonian FC at Richmond Road.

I only saw the death throes of Isthmian League Kingstonian's Richmond Road ground. But it still had ‘something.' And (sorry if this is "too much information") most of my dreams involving Kingstonian games are still at Richmond Road, despite it hosting its last fixtures in January 1988.

It has been a wretched season for St Albans City. Twenty-five years at the sixth level of the English pyramid -one of which, the 2006/07 season had been spent a division higher in the Blue Square Premier came to a crashing halt this season in a fog of humiliation, as they were docked ten points for financial irregularities and finished well adrift at the foot of the Blue Square South.

For men of a certain age, the name of Leatherhead FC makes the eyes mist over and the memories come flooding back. The Tanners were in Division One of the Isthmian League (which was renamed the Premier Division in 1977, following reorganisation) when they beat Colchester United and Brighton & Hove Albion on the way to the Fourth Round of the FA Cup in 1975, where the BBC's Match Of The Day cameras saw them steal a two goal lead against First Division Leicester City before losing by three goals to two.

It's Northern League Day today, a chance to celebrate the second oldest football league in the world. With this in mind, we have reached back into the archives for the story of a Northern League club that came within a whisker of making the quarter-finals of the FA Cup, all the way back in 1978 Blyth Spartans.

With barely a whimper, as quietly as a mouse, a football club died today at the High Court in London. It might not matter that much to many people that Windsor & Eton Football Club should have slipped from consciousness today, but it matters to some the couple of hundred or so people that supported them, those that played for them, were amongst the backroom staff and the volunteers that ran the club through well over a century of history, for example.

Hove, Aldrington, Portslade, Fishersgate, Southwick, Shoreham-by-Sea, Lancing. The train rumbles westward allong the coast from Brighton for an unexpected treat, an FA Vase Third Round match between Lancing, of the Sussex County League Division Two and Witham Town, of the Essex Senior League. The FA Vase, as many of you will be aware, was first competed for in 1975, following the FA's abolition of the formal distinction between professional amateur players.

"Rites of passage" tend to involve teenagers and revolve around love and/or sex, certainly in the Hollywood films that I know about. Being a non-league football fan, I missed that particular rite of passage completely, along with pretty much every other interesting rite of passage you could think of.

There was always something inherently contradictory about Stan Flashman. He is, perhaps, best remembered as the "King Of The Touts" (often with the prefix "Self-Styled" attached to it), but when he craved respectability he would rebrand himself as a "Ticket Broker." Ultimately, though, he himself stated that he didn't care what he was called as long as the money was right.

As the Twohundredpercent summer interval continues, we take a look back at Wycombe Wanderers' run to the semi-finals of the competition in 2001.

The FA Cup is a competition that throws up surprise results every season, but some records remain and one that may never be broken is that no-one from the bottom two divisions of the Football League has made The FA Cup final.

I'm a fan of international football tournaments on the whole, regardless of quality (regular readers may have spotted this long ago). And the 2012 "edition" of the African Cup of Nations certainly put that philosophy to the test. Take out an extraordinary second round of group games and the uplifting climax and you were left with a series of not very good football matches, spoiled by wild shooting, woeful set-pieces, shocking referee's assistants, poor sportsmanship and crowds which gave all the grounds the look of an Isthmian League matchday.