Smith: I fell in love with Alvechurch
Arsenal legend reveals how he met his wife playing for Worcestershire Cup minnows
When Alan Smith stepped back into the Alvechurch clubhouse at Lye Meadow he gave in to the nostalgia. ‘exactly the same, like time forgot the place,’ he tells Sportsmail of his return to the Worcestershire village club where he took the first steps in a senior career that would lead him to the very top of the game with Arsenal and england.
As a patron of the club, Smith had been back there before. This time, he took his wife, Penny, to the place where they first met in 1981, when he was a teenage centre forward, scoring goals while studying modern languages at Coventry Polytechnic and she was daughter of the Alvechurch vice-chairman, Allan Schofield.
‘She walked into the clubhouse and couldn’t believe it,’ says Smith. ‘She felt a bit emotional. There were people there who knew her Dad, who has since passed away, and drank in his pubs in Great Barr in northern Birmingham.
‘The little bench where we first met and sat with a drink as we got to know each other was still there. It hasn’t been re-covered after all these years.
‘nothing had changed because they haven’t had a lot of money and sailed close to the wind once or twice over the years.’
Smith pauses, then adds in his familiar dry Brummie tones: ‘It’s tturningi iintot a bit off a llove story, t isn’t it?’
nothing in football serves up romance quite like the FA Cup and he was back in the old clubhouse to make the first-round draw for the BBC.
Alvechurch, of the Southern League Premier Division Central, are the lowest-ranked team left in the competition.
‘It rekindled all those memories of cutting my teeth in senior football,’ says Smith. ‘We had some great characters in that team, a few Black Country lads. Chrissy Birch was our centre half, who was always singing in the dressing room. Reg edwards was our goalkeeper, nicknamed Randy Reg from Rugeley.
‘ Football wasn’t their main source of income so there was an element of enjoyment but when they went out they were serious. They wanted their win bonus.
‘Some of the away trips were good fun. My wife’s dad was a publican and he would sort out the pubs on the way back. We had all sorts of long trips. Coming home we’d stop at three or four pubs and he’d be sorting out with the publicans to give us afters.’
Smith was there for one season. he scored 21 goals as they finished runners- up iin ththe Southern League Midland Division and he soon had the scouts flocking to Lye Meadow.
Smith recalls: ‘Ron Atkinson was the Manchester United manager and turned up in his Rolls-Royce and an expensive sheepskin coat one night we played. It caused quite a stir. he left before the end. he always said he planned to come back but snow postponed the game he was coming back to, and Leicester were always the keenest and most ardent admirers.’
Leicester paid £22,000 for Smith, who they sold to Arsenal five years later for £850,000. he was one of George Graham’s first signings and a great success at highbury, winning the Golden Boot twice and completing a full set of domestic trophies with the FA Cup in 1993.
‘Whatever people say, the FA Cup still retains a bit of magic,’ he says. ‘It’s lovely to pick up the medal and read the engraving “FA Cup winners” but I don’t look back on that final with hugely fond memories.
‘It wasn’t how you imagined winning the Cup, in a replay on a wet Thursday night. Kick-off was delayed because an accident on the M1 caused problems for the Sheffield Wednesday fans. I didn’t play in the first game but I was picked for the replay, should have scored and didn’t play particularly well but I’ve got the medal.’
One year on, Smith was scoring the only goal of the european Cup Winners’ Cup final against Parma, and his status as an Arsenal legend was enhanced. ever-modest, he shifts the spotlight on to Ian Wright and the defensive unit.
‘Our defence was magnificent,’ he says. ‘One-nil to the Arsenal came in during the 93-94 season in the Cup Winners’ Cup. Wrighty would stick one in at one end and the back four would keep a clean sheet at the other.’
Smith also tasted the other side of the FA Cup, scoring Arsenal’s goal in the 2-1 defeat at Wrexham in the third round in 1992.
‘We were champions and they were bottom of the pyramid,’ he says. ‘I scored in the first half and we were cruising, then it was wham-bam at the end and they nicked it.
‘The gaffer just told us to get showered and get on the coach in 10 minutes and let’s get out of here. Then the coach broke down on the way home. It wasn’t ideal.’
Alvechurch have their own piece of FA Cup history, having taken part in the longest tie, six games against Oxford City in 1971. Four of them went to extra time, before Alvechurch emerged as winners from the fifth replay, at Villa Park.
‘We were sick of the of the Sheffield Wednesday players in 93,’ says Smith. ‘God knows what the Alvechurch and Oxford City lads thought as it went on and on and on, but that’s something that will never be taken away from them.’
FA Cup fever is officially back at Lye Meadow. This run to the firstround proper has earned them £20,000 in prize money, a handy windfall when they are looking to relocate to a new ground, three miles away, and there was genuine excitement when Smith and Dion Dublin descended with the BBC cameras to make the draw live from the packed old clubhouse.
They were the last ball out, drawn at Cheltenham today. They will take 1,500 fans, six times their normal home crowd, and the fixture served up one final flicker of nostalgia for Smith, a classic nonLeague tale, featuring Randy Reg.
‘It was quite an aggressive audience at Cheltenham on the one and only time we played there,’ he says. ‘Reg was getting stick all match from somebody behind his goal. It went on and on, and eventually he lost his temper. When the final whistle went, he climbed over the barrier, chased him through the crowd and clomped him.’