CHEERS!-!AND!TEARS
Former Non-League Paper editor Stuart Hammonds, now the press and communications manager at Luton with Ware a decade ago. Here, he tells John Lyons what it meant to him...
Reaching the FA Cup first round
For me, it was brilliant because I had always written about the players getting to the first round, or the third round, and playing against professional clubs that you read about in the papers or watched on Match of the Day.
As a part-time Non-League player, to actually get there was unbelievable because you are testing yourself against full-time players, you’re in that role that you’ve been writing all the fairytale stories about over the years.
I remember the fourth qualifying round win over Tonbridge. The last few minutes when we went 3-1 up, I literally had teams in my eyes on the pitch because I’d tried for 12 years to get through to the first round proper. The chance of being on Match of the Day was unbelievable.
One of my earliest FA Cup memories was playing for Arnold Town when I was 18. I scored against Ryhope, near Sunderland, and I remember thinking at the time that I’d just scored in the same competition as Eric Cantona, above! He’d scored the winner in the previous season’s competition and my goal was probably one of the first in the following season.
That’s what the FA Cup does. It puts ordinary people in the same competition as people like Eric Cantona.
I always remember after that Tonbridge game being in the clubhouse at Ware with all of us, the supporters crowded around the TV. When the draw came out I was desperate for Forest or County away. It came out as Kidderminster at home. I knew they were full-time, everybody else just cheered because we’d got whoever we’d got. They would have cheered anything!
I knew all the Kidderminster players from working on the paper and I remember Setanta giving me a video camera to do a diary piece – my week building up to the game, because they were doing Kidderminster live the following week.
For us, it was the chance to play against full-time pros and some of their players were going off to play for England C straight after the game, players like James Constable and Russell Penn.
They had others like Mark Creighton, Stuart Whitehead, who got sent off actually (as Kidderminster won 2-0). They were lads who had either had really good league or Non-League careers or would go on to have them, so it was a chance for us to test ourselves against them.
I will never forget that I crept into the shot on Match of the Day, diving in on Russell Penn to give away the free-kick they scored their first goal from, and the second one went past me stood with my hands on my hips, so I achieved that ambition of appearing on Match of the Day in some way! Mark Yates, their manager, got them to give us a guard of honour as they came off the pitch. You normally get a guard of honour when you’ve won a league, coming on to the pitch. There were 3,000 people at Ware that day. The official crowd (2,123) might not say that. We went out and normally everywhere you looked you could see concrete. Everywhere you looked that day there were people, seven, eight nine, ten deep. We did a bit of a lap of honour and Mark made his players wait by the tunnel either side and they gave us a guard of honour going in which was unbelievable. I’d never known anybody do that. It was a special time. We had a special kit, training tops. The kit man had been in Tesco on the morning of the game and they just gave him two crates of water for the dressing room, not that he’d asked but he was just wearing his Ware tracksuit. People were just getting behind the local team. Before the game there was a burger van in the car park and it wouldn’t happen normally and it wouldn’t be advisable, but all the players were offered a free bacon buttie or burger and we all had ‘em because we were hungry. Then we went out and played – that was probably why we lost! For a week or so, the whole place went crazy. Soccer AM came and did the crossbar challenge with us, it was just great. I retired at the end of that season because it couldn’t get any better. It really was… I’m getting choked up now just talking about it… unbelievable. It was a career’s ambition fulfilled.