IT’S A RAMMY RAID IN THE FA TROPHY
“I CAN’T PRAISE THE PLAYERS ENOUGH FOR THE DOING JOB THEY ARE TIME” IN SUCH A SHORT SPACE OF Chris Willcock – Manager
HARRY WILLIAMS has cleared a few Ramsbottom boozers in his time. “I go out selling tickets,” says the Ramsbottom United chairman.
“I can walk into a pub and empty it because they know I’m coming out with my tickets!
“A landlord said to me once, ‘Bloody hell Harry! Do you have to come in here? They’re all going out because you’re coming in!’
“I have these little tickets that started off at 2½p and now they’re 25p – you can win 75 quid, like. Say over a weekend I might sell £50 or £60 worth and that pays for different things. Then you have your sportsman dinners, raffles, people sponsoring you – some people do it differently but I’m pretty set in my ways.”
Proposal
Those ways – which include making the players buy some tickets before they get their wages – stretch back to 1966 when he was a founder of the club that started in the Bury Amateur League before moving into the Manchester League.
“When we started we were on a park pitch – from 66 up to 1980,” Williams says. “Then there was a piece of land adjacent to the cricket club. We started training there just to bring some revenue over the bar and then I just put a proposal to the cricket club to form a football field. We got seats from Maine Road and Blackburn Rovers, floodlights from Oldham rugby league and it’s gone on and on.”
That journey has taken Rammy, tucked alongside the East Lancashire Railway line, into the North West Counties League and onto the Northern Premier League where they reached Step 3 – then managed by two young’uns Williams dubbed Morecambe & Wise but better known as Chester management duo Anthony Johnson and Bernard Morley.
Back at Step 4 now, their cup runs have gone from the Lancashire Junior Shield to the FA Vase and, now, the FA Trophy, a competition Chris Willcock’s side have just reached the last 16 of with a home date with AFC Fylde the reward.
It has, quite literally, been a marathon run. Tuesday night’s replay win – their tenth game of the competition – came from a 550-mile round trip to Weymouth.
A handful of fans – now known as the Rammy 17 – were on the south coast to witness an impressive 3-1 win. Goals from Eddie Moran and Nic Evangelinos sealing the win after a Sam Sherring own goal had been cancelled out by the hosts.
A couple of players, who had to persuade their bosses to give them time off, even travelled under their own steam to be there.
It was nearly 5am by the time boss Willcock and his players got into their beds. Jamie Rother was soon out the door again to fly out to South Africa on his honeymoon. “I’ve been in the game 37 years as a player and manager and it’s the longest journey I’ve ever had to make in midweek,” said Willcock, who took Glossop North End to the 2015 FA Vase final and promotion from the North West Counties. League.
“But at the end of the ame it’s worth every moment of it. I’d certainly do it again if I was going to get a result and performance out of the players like that considering the amount of time they'd spent on the coach.”
Willcock has made quite a splash since taking over three months ago. The Rams lost just two of his first 24 games in charge as they also chase promotion from Evo-Stik West.
“I can’t praise the players enough for the job they’re doing in such a short space of time,” Willcock says.
Obsessive
“The cup run itself, I look back to 2015 in the Vase and the amount of replays we went through. When we were driving back from Yaxley, Lee (assistant Lee Donafee) said, ‘There’s some travelling isn’t there?’ I said, ‘Yeah I know – it’s got similarities to the Vase run’. He said, ‘Nah, gaffer, it can’t happen like that again’.
“It’s just a feeling I get. We drew at Yaxley and brought them back to beat them in a replay, we did the same with Workington. If you win ten matches in any competition you expect to be in the final!
“Long may it continue, we don’t want it to stop. We know it’s extremely difficult to get to the final of this competition with the amount of quality still left in it, but we’ll see.”
Williams wasn’t in Dorset on Tuesday night, staying at home to look after wife Carol who has dementia. It was only the third game he’s missed in 53 years of service at a club he has poured his soul into.
Willcock says he’s never come across anyone like the man they call ‘Mr Ramsbottom United’. He cuts the grass, washes the kit and is obsessive about keeping tidy the ground which now bears his name.
“I was a manager for 19 years so I know that side of it,” Williams says. “We were in the Bolton Combination and Bury Amateur League then, but when it got serious and we started getting promotions, the ground had to be developed. So that’s when I packed in and put all my efforts into the ground.
“If it brings people out of their armchairs we’re keeping sport going. We’ve got 39 junior teams, three or four pitches for them and new dressing rooms.
“The local council haven’t got the money to throw into it so you’ve got to do a lot selffinanced, haven’t you?”