My earliest memory of the FA Cup is from the 1980 final when West Ham played Arsenal. The excitement of the day was largely because it was a rare live game on TV. Today we have ubiquitous live games beamed from every corner of the globe, so few things mark my age more starkly to my kids than the idea that one game a year was live on TV, apart perhaps from the concept of writing actual letters, which makes me sound like a character from a Brontë novel.
Those technicoloured Saturdays are so vividly remembered because the normal TV schedule was replaced by a full-day football extravaganza, roving reporters outside team hotels, a celebrity edition of a Question of Sport, the growled rendition of each team’s FA Cup song, all before the whistle to start the game had been blown.
I don’t remember much about the game itself or even the score but I do remember vividly the sense of injustice when 17-year-old Paul Allen, the then youngest player to appear in a final, was clear through and cynically brought down by Arsenal’s Willie Young. The foul was punished by a booking and a free-kick and Young stayed on. I remember my disbelief and the sense of unfairness to this day. A sense shared by the authorities apparently, because it was a tackle that changed the rules on ‘professional fouls’, with similar tackles now commanding a red card.
Today there is a quiet revolution occurring on and off the field in our unfashionable corner of north-east Lincolnshire in Grimsby. Our town is starting to reinvent itself as the home of the renewables industry and tilting its narrative away from a story of industrial decline to a low-carbon future and a community full of nascent solidarity and hope. On the football pitch, while the Hollywood owners of Wrexham continued to take the limelight (and TV money) in this season’s FA Cup, Grimsby Town have slipped almost unnoticed by the national media into the fifth round as the lowest-ranked team remaining.
We have beaten three League One teams, including the then league leaders, Plymouth Argyle, 5-1. More dramatically, we beat Premier League hopefuls Luton Town 3-0 in a hard-earned replay under the floodlights at Blundell Park. The romance of the FA Cup has never felt more munificent and magical as the evening’s events unfolded. Whether it was the unlikely three-goal lead at half-time, seeing an academy graduate, Edwin Essel, come on for his first taste of these big nights in the 88th minute or the majority of the 7,106 singing “he’s one of our own” to local hero Harry Clifton as he scored, it was one for the ages.
This season’s run stands in stark contrast to last season. In our first year of club ownership we were knocked out in the early qualifying rounds by Kidderminster Harriers, who play in National League North, the sixth tier. When Grimsby play away at Premier League Southampton on Wednesday it will be only the 11th time we have reached this stage of the competition we first entered in 1882. Financially it is massive for a lower-division club because a win would be the equivalent of between 10% and 20% of the annual player budget and the next round could be as much as 50%.
Irrespective of the money this is a vintage year in the Cup, sitting alongside the day our inflatable mascot, Harry Haddock, made his first appearance at Wimbledon in the fifth round of 1989 or when we last reached the semi final, in 1939, playing Wolverhampton Wanderers. That is the closest we have come to the final and the 76,962 crowd at Old Trafford remains a record for that ground.
The Cup offers a chance to revisit the interconnectedness of clubs up and down the football pyramid. Lawrie McMenemy is one of the most famous managers associated with Grimsby since the second world war. Some would say Bill Shankly went on to greater things and those in the know would say Alan Buckley had a more enduring impact on our history. McMenemy was the Grimsby manager in 1971-73 and after winning the fourth division title he left for Southampton, where he won the FA Cup in 1976, and went on to become the assistant manager in the England set up alongside a former Grimsby Town player, Graham Taylor.
I imagine nothing he achieved will be more important than having the bar in our largest stand named after him. For the past 20 years it has been where I usually have fish and chips before a home game. McMenemy’s Bar has been a venue for weddings, funerals and all manner of celebrations for the people of Grimsby and demonstrates how a character from 50 years ago is still lodged in our hearts.
More than 4,000 Grimbarians (now with Harry Haddocks in tow) will make their way, like Viking raiders, to the south coast for one of the furthest away days in our calendar. Somewhere between our recent league performances – the away win at Northampton, the recent losses to Gillingham and Colchester and the incredible achievement of the win against Luton – is the truth about who we are as a club right now. It is a reminder that the purpose of a professional football club is to create memories and unite communities.
Football has the power to punctuate our lives with a type of communion that is so often absent elsewhere. When we trawl through the archives of our days, the act of supporting and following our teams creates lifelong memories on a par with those of those ritual celebrations seen in McMenemy’s. This is especially true when it comes to the FA Cup, where the competition is fierce and the financial reward can be transformative if we dare to dream that another round is possible.
Jason Stockwood is the chair of Grimsby Town
