In sport, as in so many other aspects of life, timing can be everything. It was, perhaps, somewhat unfortunate that Aldershot Town went into a final League Two match of the season that they needed to win against a Rotherham United side that needed a win to clinch an automatic promotion place themselves.
It was in March 1992 that Aldershot Football Club became the first Football League club since Accrington Stanley in 1962 to close its doors in the middle of a season, and now the man that was responsible for that is involved at another club that is set to enter into administration. He was known as Spencer Trethewy at the time and made enough headlines when, in 1990, he took control of the Shots at just nineteen years of age on the back of a £200,000 signed affidavit.
The Essex Senior League is eight divisions from the Premier League, but the world of its clubs is so far removed from the glamour and glitter of the elite that they may as well inhabit different universes. This is football as a hand to mouth existence, where players are seldom paid much more than expenses and clubs subsist on crowds that often fail to even reach three figures.
Just a week shy of Gloucester City AFC's 130th anniversary the club's future has been thrown into doubt with the news that plans for a return to Gloucester are emphatically on hold until further notice.
Safe in the anonymous mid-table of the Conference North the club take on Altrincham tonight at their current adopted home, 11 miles down the road in Cheltenham and while a decent battle is expected on the pitch the thoughts of those in the stands are likely to be elsewhere.
"It's a Mickey Mouse competition with Mickey Mouse officials. Next season I'm fielding a reserve team." They were words of an embittered loser. And when Isthmian League Kingstonian's then-manager Chris Kelly said them, he probably never imagined he was foreseeing future attitudes towards "senior" cup competitions.
This Saturday, Wembley plays host to its third cup final of the year so far when Spennymoor Town of the Northern League travel down to play Tunbridge Wells of the Kent League. Here's Paul Caulfield with a little bit of background on the teams and the competition itself.
Saturday sees the Wembley final of the FA Vase, the national competition open to England's lowest ranked senior clubs.
The problem with an open-top bus parade is that it really does rely on people turning up to come and watch. Whilst that is never really a problem for clubs such as Chelsea and a Manchester City, for Blue Square Premier champions Mansfield Town endured a slightly more low-key affair. This image did the rounds [.
Mansfield Town fans would have been rather pleased with their side's 8-1 home win over Barrow, but one suspects that manager Paul Cox was the happiest man at the club after owner John Radford gave him an £85,000 Aston Martin. After Mansfield beat the same side 7-0 last season, the owner told Cox that if [.
Both Wrexham and Newport County went into their play-off semi-final second leg matches in the Blue Square Bet Premier this season with leads that could perhaps be best described as "precarious." Newport County entertained Grimsby Town at Rodney Parade with a one goal lead from their first leg trip to Blundell Park, but a first half goal from Christian Jolley was enough to settle most nerves and they held on with some comfort to book a trip to Wembley for a second successive season after losing in the FA Trophy final there to York City last season.
Yesterday afternoon in London was one for extra layers. As the Metropolitan Line train rolled out of Baker Street underground station and north towards Wembley Stadium, the slate grey sky darkened, the temperature dropped, occasional flurries of snow lacerated the roof tops and the feeling grew that perhaps we were here on the wrong day of the year.
Yesterday afternoon in London was one for extra layers. As the Metropolitan Line train rolled out of Baker Street underground station and north towards Wembley Stadium, the slate grey sky darkened, the temperature dropped, occasional flurries of snow lacerated the roof tops and the feeling grew that perhaps we were here on the wrong day of the year.
This weekend, Wrexham play Grimsby Town at Wembley in the final of the 2013 FA Trophy. Both of these two clubs are former stalwarts of the Football League for whom promotion back from the Blue Square Bet Premier remains a still attainable target for the end of this season, but both are also clubs that have had difficulties in recent years and for whom this weekend's match is a cause for celebration in itself.
Non-league side Rimington FC have been bestowed with ahumongousticket allocation of 19,000 for their upcomingWest Riding County FA Challenge Cup Final against Bay Athletic at Elland Road ground, despite the tiny village in Lancashire only having a population of around 400 people.
With just two points separating Mansfield Town and Kidderminster Harriers at the top of the Blue Square Bet Conference Premier table going into their final round of games this weekend, hi-tech measures have been taken to ensure that the trophy will be delivered on time to whichever side snags the title.
Bands/musicians sponsoring football teams is nothing new. In fact we've seen Goldie Lookin' Chain, Wet Wet Wet and even Stone Roses frontman Ian Brown plastering their names across the front of football strips in the past, but perhaps the most unlikely confluence betwixt music and football was between hardcore 90s ravemongers The Prodigy and Eastleigh Reds, an U13s side from Hampshire.
For those who may have missed it over the weekend, Matt Le Tissier is set to come out of retirement after signing with Guernsey FC in a bid to assist the Channel Island side as they muddle through their mind-boggling fixture pile-up.
After a slew of cancellations and postponementsearlierin the season, Guernsey now need to play 17 games in the space of a month so 44-year-old Le Tissier, who was born on the island and is an honorary president of the club, has agreed to help out by pulling on his boots for the first time competitively since retiring from the professional game in 2002.
It's not every day we get t0 feature news from the Berks & Bucks Cup here on Pies, so we're going to grab this opportunity with both of our greasy, claw-like hands.
The big story coming out of the regional competition is that bothWindsor FC and Flackwell Heath have both been expelled from the tournament after it came to light that both sides attempted to playineligible players against each otherin their semi-final on March 6th.
They usually play in the shadow of The Angel of the North but non-league Gateshead FC are now facing a punishing 360-mile round trip tofulfill one of their home fixtures after theBlue Square Conference decreed that the club are to play their rearranged home game against Newport County at Boston United's ground, some 180 miles away.
We're pretty late on the uptake here, but that's just the way it goes sometimes. Anyway, Lewes FC are an East Sussex-based club currently playing in theIsthmian League Premier Division which is, by our count, the seventh tier of English football.
Known as "The Rooks", Lewes have played at The Dripping Pan a 3,000-capacity (though only 600 seater) former cricket ground since their inception in 1885 and, since 2010, have been a member-owned football club, with comedian Patrick Marber (of "Alan Partridge" and "The Day Today" fame) one of the six founder members of the Rooks' community ownership board as such, the club count the likes of Charles Saatchi, Nigella Lawson and Steve Coogan as shareholders.
Who said there's no money in non-league football, eh? Mansfield Town owner John Radford obviously has a few bob to spare between keeping his trophy loving, doting wife in collagen trout pouts and creosote tans, offering free honeymoons to his staff and flitting away £80,000 Aston Martins whenever the mood takes him.
With just a handful of matches left at the end of this season, there is something of a bottleneck starting to form between the bottom of the Football League and what we call, increasingly euphemistically, the top end of the non-league game. At the foot of League Two, just four points separate bottom of the table at the time of writing Aldershot Town from Dagenham & Redbridge, while at the top of the Blue Square Bet Premier Wrexham's two-one win against Mansfield Town on Thursday evening meant that a little uncertainty was thrown back upon the expected outcome of the league title in that division, with Mansfield staying a point behind the league leaders, Kidderminster Harriers, in second place in the table, albeit with two games still in hand.
This year is supposed to be a special one for Gainsborough Trinity Football Club, marking, as it does, the one hundred and fortieth anniversary of a club which spent sixteen years in the Football League between 1896 and 1912 but now resides in the Blue Square Bet North, two divisions below League Two but a comfortable distance from the one man and a dog territory that marks out the flotsam and jetsam of non-league football.
It's not quite as simple as to say that the Premier League championship is headed back to Old Trafford this season, but it's starting to look that way. Manchester City have now dropped four points from their last two matches against Queens Park Rangers and Liverpool, while Manchester United just keep winning.
We're approaching the end of the domestic season, and attention will inevitably turn to who will win which trophy and who will earn themselves promotion. Football, however, isn't always about winning and there will be considerably more clubs left with nothing to celebrate at the end of this season than there will be shaking up bottles of champagne and then opening them, grabbing managers and slinging them into the team bath or running around a pitch dressed with sponsors logo-adorned flags wrapped around their neck.
We're approaching the end of the domestic season, and attention will inevitably turn to who will win which trophy and who will earn themselves promotion. Football, however, isn't always about winning and there will be considerably more clubs left with nothing to celebrate at the end of this season than there will be shaking up bottles of champagne and then opening them, grabbing managers and slinging them into the team bath or running around a pitch dressed with sponsors logo-adorned flags wrapped around their neck.
Playing in theCombined Counties League Premier Division, which is the fifth-tier of non-league football in England, Guernsey FC have quite a month ahead of them.
With the weather buggering up a lot of their fixtures this season, the Channel Islanders will be forced to play a total of 17 games in April, which is, er, quite a lot.
Liverpool might want to move fast if they want to sign their non-league trialist Daniel Carr. Reports suggest that Premier League rivals Chelsea are ready to hijack the Reds' move for Carr. If Arsenal join the race too that could put Brendan Rodgers' side out of the running completely. That's because Dulwich Hamlet striker Carr [.
This week's Non-League Videos of the Week will be the last to be posted up here on a Sunday night. We're moving them to a midweek spot from next week on. This weekend's batch of matches come from the Northern League, the Blue Square Bet South, the Southern League Premier Division and the Combined Counties Football League.
The weather is almost starting to get back to normal, so this weekend sees the return of out non-league videos of the week, and six matches from the Blue Square Bet North, the Blue Square Bet South, the Ryman League Premier Division and the Premier Divisions of the Evostick Southern and Northern Premier Leagues.
You get four hundred words in to a match report of FC United of Manchester v Witton Albion and then all hell breaks loose regarding the scheduling and ticketing of the NPL playoff final plus Alex Ferguson retires as manager of Manchester United. If ever there was cause to CTRL-A > DEL an entire document, that was it.
In the entire history of football it will be but the briefest of footnotes, but this afternoon at The Enclosed Ground Whitehawk Football Club will play it last match, a home match in the Ryman League Premier Division against East Thurrock United. This, however, is only the end of a name. Having won by two goals to nil at Leiston last weekend, the club has now been crowned as the champions of the division and will start next season in the Conference South under a new name: Brighton City.
Blackburn. Wolves. Manchester City. Colwyn Bay. Frickley Athletic. Brackley Town. It doesn't take long for things to change in football – a few right decisions and you can be transformed from nowhere to become a star pupil, held up as an example to follow. Swansea are the most obvious example, and in previous years Cardiff and Blackpool have enjoyed similar meteoric rises from bottom to top.
One feels a great deal of sympathy for fans of Stockport County. Just three years ago they were playing Leeds in the league, but defeat to Kidderminster yesterday condemned them to Conference North football. However, that gave no excuse whatsoever for the behaviour of a number of fans who stormed onto the pitch after their [.
With everyone now a European football hipster, choosing to watch Stade Reims vs Pro Vercelli over Manchester United v Chelsea because of the artistry linking back to the 1920s and 1950s and (rightly) fawning over the glorious beauty of Lionel Messi's dribbling prowess, OTP thought it only right that we bring you back to basics [.
It was a close run thing, but at least by the end of last night's fixtures Stockport County remained a Blue Square Bet Premier club, for the time being, at least. County have slipped into the relegation places in the fifth division in recent weeks, and for a short period of time yesterday evening it seemed as if the club was about to be relegated for the second time in three years.
This is something that you certainly don't see very often, if ever. Newport County's Blue Square Premier match against Alfreton Town was delayed after the officials at the ground refused to start the match as they believed that one of the goals was higher than the other. It seems rather bizarre, particularly as presumably these [.
In this country we have a great affection for the one-club man, a demonstration of loyalty in an industry in which that quality is rarely displayed. Even better when that club is not one of the largest in the league. Well, ladies and gentleman, sometimes even your heroes let you down, because we can now [.
You hear Premier League managers moan often enough because their team is being forced to play three games in eight days as the 'business end' of the season hits home, but spare a thought for poor Guernsey FC of the Combined Counties League Premier Division, who have a mammoth schedule on their plate.
It was, according to its website, the first time that this had happened in the one hundred eight years of the history of the Isthmian League. This afternoon at The Harry Abrahams Stadium in Finchley, North London, a match in its Premier Division between Wingate & Finchley and Thurrock was abandoned with five minutes to play, after the home side had five players sent off.
The Kingstonian press-box is no place for the hard-of-statistic. Even before the end of their remarkable Ryman Premier Division victory over Cray Wanderers, we'd established that Ks scored 10 and 11 in the same Amateur Cup run in the mid-1960s. Indeed, one press-box habitué was at the 10-0 victory over Callenders Athletic: "a works team.
