Luke Garrard is running through some of the players that Boreham Wood’s BW PASE academy has produced. “We’ve got some unbelievable success stories,” the club’s first-team manager says. “There is Iliman Ndiaye at Sheffield United, Pelly Ruddock at Luton, Sorba Thomas at Huddersfield, who has played for Wales. Ben Goodliffe went into Wolves and is now at Sutton.”
There have been others and the headline statistic for the National League high-fliers, who travel to Bournemouth on Sunday for the first FA Cup fourth-round tie of their 74-year history, is that 12 of their youth products have earned contracts at professional clubs. Five of them have become full internationals. Garrard pauses. “It goes beyond all this for me,” he says.
