Take Me To Church, Ep 14: Our Cup Runneth
Right then Ultras. We’re round the bend, over the hump, and the home straight is upon us. Eight points clear at the top of the Conference South and having played all the teams around us, there are just 13 games between ourselves and promotion. Like a badly-served ice cream cone, everything is in our hands.
As such, the fourth round of the FA Trophy against Scarborough of the Conference National takes on slightly more importance. Previously I was focusing on the league and putting out second teams in the cup, but with this lead in the division and an opportunity to lance a side most likely replacing us down here next term, my objectives have changed. This competition is winnable. Just look at the teams left in:
By now you’d think most of the non-Conference teams would have been knocked out, but not so! Loads of teams from the division above got KO’d in the last round, nine by my count and most as upsets. Also, in round four, two of the league’s top sides— Aldershot (2nd) and Morecambe (3rd) — play one another, meaning one of the best teams left in the tournament will be heading out one way or another. It really is wide open for a plucky underdog with an up-and-coming squad — average age 27.7 — to make some waves.
We first have a great big goodbye party at the Windmill for Simieon Howell and Nathan D’Laryea, who respectively return to Reading and Man City in the morning. Nathan was a good boy, wasn’t he? A very solid option, he started nine games and appeared in seven more, averaging 7.06 and even sneaking an assist somewhere along the way. At a time when we were genuinely struggling for depth after I’d switched to three CBs and sent Watt back to Chelsea from his loan, D’Laryea provided a fantastic alternative.
However, the real loss here is Howell. When I arranged his loan I really didn’t think he’d play much. I knew he could pass but that was about it, and with Sarge, Pegger, Booth, Sharpe and Fox at the club, I figured he’d amount to my sixth-choice CM. Little did I know the difference he’d make.
For a man whose attributes are mostly 6s or 7s, would you just marvel at those stats. 18 games, two goals, seven assists, three MOTMs, more tackles per game than most of my defenders and a stonking average rating of 7.78. As he reluctantly takes the third shot of tequila I’ve bought him this evening, Simieon Howell will depart as our second best performer after Mark Booth (7.90). His driving runs and pre-assist passes, which aren’t reflected in the stats, have been crucial to our forward play. It’s been an amazing time with Howell, and you’d better believe that I’ll be taking in an afternoon in Reading this summer, hopefully with Steve Coppell in close quarters, so I can try to coax him back over here for a bit longer.
After we say our tearful goodbyes and I help Big Sooz stack the chairs up on the tables, I turn in for the night, considering my starting lineup for tomorrow’s game against Scarborough. Jaroslav Timko has been banned for two more matches after his… enthusiastic midfield display against Havant, and I know a couple of the other lads are a little tired, so there are decisions to make. I drift to sleep dreaming of Jorge Cadete stabbing a winner into the far corner with the outside of his foot, then coming over to tell me that I’m the best manager he’s ever had, his knees are made of KY jelly, and his pet lemur needs a blood transfusion.
I awoke several hours later in a daze. Sooz is banging on my door, shouting at me that there’s a game today — it’s already 2pm. I hastily pull on a mustard-coloured shirt I didn’t realise I owned and head towards the training ground, still tucking it in as I cross Upminster Road.
The players are already gathered in the dressing room, awaiting my instructions. I ask Jorge to explain to Cabrera that he’s got to play again, and while our 20-time Guatemalan international looks like he’s crying, I’m sure that’s just pre-sweat in anticipation of the rousing effort he’s going to put in for the 38th time this season. Simek needs time off and is replaced by Gaughan, but as I scan the rest of the players, I realise I really shouldn’t change a winning team. We’ve been phenomenal in our last four games, and although Cadete could do with a day off, he can have one next time around. Today, I want to put a hurting on Scarborough.
This shirt isn’t mustard coloured, it’s just covered in mustard. I really need a PA.
We make the best possible start. Cabrera throws to Cadete in the very first minute, our Portuguese megastar turns his man, bears down on goal, and from the tightest of angles, fires past visiting keeper Leigh Walker for 1–0 to the good guys. And the limbs keep on coming, because just a few minutes later, a Nix free kick smashes off the wall, and just like he did a few games ago, Maciej Pastuszka is alert to the loose ball, gets there well ahead of the static defenders, and slides his first ever finish past Walker for 2–0 to the mighty Urchins with just six minutes gone!
After eight minutes, it’s three. “Kyle Nix, he’s taking the pix” chant the home fans, not quite understanding basic rhyme structure, but the lad deserves a song as he skips past three Scarborough challenges and buries a shot across Walker and into the top far corner, marking his first goal in a Hornchurch shirt. I can see why these guys are in the relegation zone. They are terrible.
Let’s just be clear: this isn’t an injury-hit Scarborough, or even a weakened one. All their players are their regular players, their first-choicers, and we are simply rending them in twain. They get a sarcastic “weeeeyyyyy” from the home fans as they balloon their first effort on goal into the stands on half an hour, but shortly after that, Corderoy’s ever-vulnerable near post comes into play yet again. A speculative 25-yard effort from Robert Gill flies in to reduce our lead to 3–1 at the break. It’s their first shot on target, you’ll be floored to learn. Drink!
Then again all three of our shots on target have gone in too, and the second half starts with Jerome Vareille bursting clear and wonking one against the crossbar, before Kyle Nix beats another couple of training cones — sorry, Scarborough defenders — before finding Cabrera, who lays off for Pegger to arrive and crash home our fourth goal from the edge of the box. Two assists and a booking for Cabrera today, see? He was pre-sweating.
In the 70th minute I make my three subs, and by 77, two of them have combined for our fifth. Mark Booth’s trademark burst through midfield ends up with the ball at the feet of Windross, who’s most dangerous when there’s nothing to lose, so he hits an effort from the edge of the box that the keeper should save, but doesn’t — and it’s 5–1. Corderoy then has a free kick that he should save, straight at him, and he does! He also launches the clearance long, it lands at the feet of Windross, clean through on goal with the defender all over the place, and he pulls out a marvellous Timko lob to make it six!
The pisstakery is already reaching cataclysmic proportions at The Stadium, but what happens next takes it beyond parody. Cabrera, yet again, has the ball on the left in an advanced position, and Elcock — who I’ve brought on in CM for Pegger as our main tackling midfielder — takes the ball from him, reaches the edge of the Scarborough D, and smashes a ridiculous seventh into the top corner to finally end the visitors’ suffering. It’s easily the best win Urchins fans have witnessed at our place, and although we’ve got a while to go until the semis, from the look of my chinos, it’s already semis all round.
The aftermath provides great news too. Five other Conference National sides also get torpedoed out of the competition, with the most incredible result being non-league Marine beating 16th-placed Leigh RMI 5–0. While top teams like Aldershot, Stevenage and Barnet are still in, more than half the teams remaining are either North/South sides, or non-league ones.
It’s time for the fifth round draw. We all gather around the wall-mounted telly in the Windmill. I hold Elcock tightly.
It’s a fantastic draw. There’s always a small part of you that wants to test yourself against the top teams in the competition, but there’s also a much bigger part that just wants an easy home draw that’ll keep you in the hat. Non-league Cheshunt or 18th-placed Weston-super-Mare at The Stadium is just about the best ball-pull we could have hoped for. Elcock is excited. We all are.
Well, not all of us. Lee Sharpe and Ruel Fox, the two players I signed earlier in the season to much fanfare (all generated by me, I now realise), are both unhappy and want out. I don’t really blame them. I signed both thinking that they’d take the mick at this level, but the combo of my immediate move away from using wingers and then not realising that both of them more or less insist on playing there means they can’t find places in my team. Fox could have stayed as a squad player, no problem — he can occasionally do a job in CM — but not really Sharpe, who doesn’t fancy doing anything except play as an AML and has been moaning since the first second I even suggested he have a go somewhere else. Even though he tends to play well wherever I put him. Huge sighs.
I transfer list them both and offer them out to clubs, and to my surprise, there’s interest almost straight away. Crawley offer £3k for Sharpe, which I can scarcely say yes to quickly enough, while Hereford offer me £2k plus a young goalkeeper, Ben Scott, in exchange for my wantaway winger. Scott isn’t up to much in a goalkeeping sense, but he does look like he was in a mid-90s boyband, so I dispatch a contract that I’m well aware is far too expensive and await the results.
Before I get them, there’s the small matter of our next Conference South game — a home tie against 17th-placed Lewes. Timko and Cabrera are suspended and Gaughan needs more time on the physio’s table, one of which I assume we have somewhere. In comes Sam Tillen at left-back for a rare appearance, plus Simek at centre-half. I also decide to rotate a little bit, with Elcock starting at right back, Sarge returning to patrol DMC, and Taira in for Tolley, who’s a little weary. What the hell? We’ve got a great squad now, superb depth, and with Cadete up top, I kinda feel like we’ve got the advantage going into almost every game. I give him a warm hug as we leave the dressing room, which he returns before galloping out onto the pitch. He might be the man of my dreams.
We’ve been starting games so well recently, and it’s no different here. “He’s taking the piss, he’s taking the piiiiiissssss” sing the home fans, “Kyle Niss, he’s taking the piss!” Bless their hearts for trying, as their hero twinkles past defender after defender before he’s felled inside the box, and Jerome Vareille makes no mistake from the spot, putting us 1–0 up in just the sixth minute.
That’s more or less the only decent action of the first half; we end with just the penalty on target, with seven other chances wasted, whereas Lewes — like so many teams before them — can only spectate, not managing a single effort in anger. The second half begins with Cadete forcing a fingertip save from the visiting keeper, and after N’Timbanzeh heads three successive Lewes corners out for further corners — he might not know which way we’re shooting — I put Lee Paul and Mark Booth on for Vareille and Taira. Vareille tries so hard, bless him, but he is really bloody limited.
Naturally the moment I sub my best penalty taker, we get another one. Paul is felled in the box with his first run of the game, and since our French fancy has his feet up in el banco, Sarge reintroduces himself to the Ultras by battering his penalty straight down the middle, daring the keeper to even try to save it. He can’t, of course, and that’s 2–0 with 17 mins to go.
Towards the end, a marvellous Cadete-Paul give-and-go should result in a third, but it’s pushed away again by visiting stopper James Hasell, and despite our overall dominance in the game, those two pens settle the tie. Kyle Nix is man of the match again. He’s definitely going to need a better song.
Grays draw away at St Albans, and for the first time this season, we’ve pulled ahead by double figures. Ten points the gap to second now, and the league is surely ours for the taking.
Ben Scott rejects my contract offer, which isn’t a surprise. He wanted the same wages and status as Cadete despite not having a single 10 in any of his goalkeeping attributes, so you’ll have to forgive me for not giving in to that nonsense. I now hang on the hope that Crawley can offer Lee Sharpe the warmth, love, and guaranteed starts in AML he so desperately needs.
We’re pretty much straight on the road to Basingstoke Town next, 14th in the league and without a single player registering double figures for goals. It’s fair to say I’m not concerned about Luis and Harry’s ability to shackle their forwards, but with only two days between this and our last game, all my previous starters are shattered. Enter Cabrera, Browne, Pastuszka, Tolley, Booth, Windross and Paul — do we still have the quality to continue our mammoth run towards the title?
We’re definitely more disjointed, but we’re also most certainly the better side. Throughout the game, though, it just doesn’t quite feel like it’s going to go our way. At half time, I’ve got three players with the little green “nagging injury” symbol next to their name; Pastuszka and Cabrera being two of them, in the one game I haven’t put any full-backs on the bench, and Paul the other.
The rest of the game is frustrating because we’ve found ‘Stoke keeper Scott Tarr in the kind of form you can only find from opposition keepers in the lower leagues, and he’s more or less a wall — no matter the efforts of mainly Windross to beat him, it’s just not quite happening. He’s flying around his goal like a man possessed. Tarr-ZAN, more like! Yeah?
The good news is that our hosts are offering little but wild slashes into the crowd at the other end, thanks to the efforts of my defenders to push them into wide areas, but as we tick into the 88th minute, it just kinda feels like a draw is most likely.
What happens in the 88th minute, you ask? Why, a mishit cross from Neville Roach flies in at Corderoy’s near post, of course, and with their only “shot” on target in the whole game, we’ve lost. It’s a champing of the highest order, and even though we don’t have many of these nowadays, I still utterly, utterly detest them.
Horrendous stuff. Grays beat our opponents in the next round of the FA Trophy, Weston-super-Mare, and cut our lead at the top to seven points. And, speaking of cuts, the board have been in touch.
Phew. I thought this was going to be far more serious financial news, like “you can’t sign any more players” or “we won’t sign off these bar tabs”. Chucking some cash in to keep us afloat is a marvellous thing to do when you consider my constant, extravagant spending. What a bunch of proper gentlemen. How does that help to plug the considerable hole I’ve made in the side of the good ship Hornchurch, I hear you ask?
It doesn’t. Wages cost three times the income we get from gate receipts, and that very generous £35k will pay the players for a grand total of… two weeks. So while I haven’t strictly been told to cut back on spending, I think I might have to, otherwise there might not be a club to get promoted with.
As such, I swiftly conclude some transfer business.
Yes, Lee Sharpe is finally gone. He played one game out of position and has been moaning at me ever since, but I have to accept some responsibility. It turns out that, in 2004/05, you pretty much have to put players in their marked positions, and any deviance from it will result in horrible match ratings and even horribler attitudes. After finding Sharpey loitering on the Upminster Road after training neck-deep in a battered sausage one time too many, he’s moved onward — and upward, bizarrely — to Crawley Town in the Conference National. They do, at least, play with wingers, so maybe he’ll get the help he needs.
The financial realisations also lead me to an assessment of my current playing squad, since I know (read: think?) most of them have only got contracts until the end of this season…
They do. I let out a small pitying laugh at Cabrera’s decision to sign on for me until 2008 on just £220 per week, I assume his agent is still missing, but actually there’s good news elsewhere. Of the players whose contracts only run until the end of June, I think I’d keep Sarge and Tolley, and probably Cords, although I’ve been aware for some time that we’re in dire need of an upgrade between the sticks. Darryl Flavahan’s arrival in the summer will definitely put our tall drink of bleach onto the bench at best, but if he’ll re-up his cheap contract, I might keep him around the place for another year. I’m not sure what else he’ll do if we let him go. Scarecrow?
Cold-hearted as it may seem, I wouldn’t really mind losing Neill, Elcock, Browne, Moss, or Windross. Big Windy has been admirable for us as our only target man back when that was the case, but he really is so limited, and with Cadete at my side, I reckon I could upgrade him in the summer. His valuation of £30k, however, makes me wonder whether keeping him could be prudent in order to try to get some cash from flogging him to the highest bidder, but I put that thought aside for the time being.
I also don’t really mind losing Vareille or Paul, even though we just signed them both. They were slight desperation moves as I hunted for someone, anyone, who could get a shot on target, but again — now I’ve got Cadete and Timko firing, I reckon I could let those lads leave and upgrade them with younger, cheaper options in July. We’ll see, though. If someone swoops with a pre-contract offer I’ll have a decision to make.
All my reserves’ contracts, total value £1,790 per week, also expire in the summer, so that’ll save us a bit of dosh. I guess going up a league will also help us make more money from gate receipts; we’ve got a 3,000 capacity at The Stadium but we barely fill a third of that on a good week. We’ve got the second highest average attendance in the league but it’s only 828; if we were selling out each week, we’d break even. I reckon we can squeeze a few more Ultras out of the people in this town; I’ll need at least a couple of thousand more if I ever hope to achieve my ambition of them carrying me through the streets, hopefully as my celebrants rather than my pall bearers.
Anyway. I can tell your juices are well and truly flowing from all this balance sheet chat, so let’s get back to some FOOTBALL!
JARO. JARO NO. NO JARO. JA-NO. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO-
Well this is a flippin disaster. How can you not settle in Hornchurch? Have you even been to Harrow Lodge Park? Have you even walked along the River Ingrebourne and seen the old World War II pillbox, and the sculpture to commemorate RAF Hornchurch? Have you even tried the Special Fish Bhuna at The Raj of India?!
The only way I can think of to regain his happiness is to keep him in the team, which is convenient, since that’s exactly what I was planning to do anyway — starting with the visit of barmy Bishop’s Stortford, who are in fact so barmy that they’ve conceded 68 goals in 31 games and are, to put it bluntly, bottom of the table and absolute rubbish. I say this well aware that they could champ us without a moment’s hesitation, but as a team who’ve only won four games this season and have a single player with an average rating over seven (7.03), I feel like this could be a comprehensive result and a pretty easy match report. So let’s play it before we sign off for today.
It’s all change for us. Paul and Pastuszka are injured anyway, but pretty much all my big hitters come back into the side. Midfield is actually a tough call — all six of my midfielders are easily starting players for a side at this level, so leaving anyone out is a rough call. However, with their recent form fresh in my mind, I decide Pegger, Tolley and Nix are my preferred three right now — so they are all rested for the far-bigger game away at 7th-placed Newport County in three days’ time. Sarge, Booth and Taira will patrol the centre.
I mean, yeah, it’s exactly what it should be. Taira plays a pass through to Cadete in the sixth minute that he tucks into the far bottom corner, with both of the Bishops’ centre-halves marking Timko, neither within ten yards of the action at any point in the move. Timko then repeatedly beats their back four for pace, somehow, before having a close-range finish disallowed for offside. It doesn’t look good for our visitors, but it looks even worse when Victor Boyle-Renner, my former protégé, gets his marching orders just before half-time for a second pointless booking.
Stortford go one up front for ten minutes of the second half, then four up front for the rest of the game with just three at the back, so I waste no time in bringing off Gaughan and chucking Vareille up top alongside Cadete and Timko just to rub it in. All three shoot wide from great positions before Booth bundles home from a goalmouth scramble to probably make the game safe, and with his instructions to rub it in still fresh in his mind, Vareille wraps up the scoring in the 74th minute with a jink, touch, and smash low through Kevin Montgomery in the away nets. Simple, professional, decisive. Two of those words are not often used to describe me, but today, I think I get all three.
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