Forget Munich, Harry. You should have come to Ashton (salary £125 a week – plus a £5 goal
NOWHERE TO RUN
by Jonathan Sayer (Bantam £16.99, 256pp)
If you sometimes feel a little wearied by endless newspaper reports of barely-known football players picking up gazillions as they move from club to elite club, then this heart-warming, genuinely funny little book is just the thing to lift the spirits.
This is the beautiful game unseen by TV cameras, Gary Lineker or Sky Sports, down there in the seventh tier of English football.
This is the world of meat and potato pies and hot Bovril on chilly winter nights, rather than the roar of a private jet as it lands with a new player; it’s the world where your coveted striker turns up on crutches; or where you’re running out of match balls because one furious neighbour who supports a rival football team refuses to return them when they’re kicked into her back yard.
Jonathan Sayer (pictured) is an actor and award-winning comedy playwright, and one of the team behind the hilarious series of long-running shows such as The Play That Goes Wrong
Welcome to Ashton United, one of our oldest clubs, founded in 1878. This is the world of semi-pro, non-League football, a world of losing and occasionally winning, but it’s also the world of mud and nettles beloved by vast numbers of football fans all over the country.
Jonathan Sayer is an actor and award-winning comedy playwright, and one of the team behind the hilarious series of long-running shows such as The Play That Goes Wrong. So he knows how to tell a joke.
His family has had a long connection with Ashton: his grandfather played more than 400 games for the club, more than anyone else, and his father holds the record for most bookings and sendings off in a season, including thumping one half-back who asked mid-match if he could date Sayer’s mother.
He fell in love with the game at the age of eight, and eventually decided to buy the club with his father. Nowhere To Run is an account of their first year in charge.
Money, of course, is always a problem. A gate of a few hundred is a result, and season ticket sales are peaking at 32. Harry Kane might be on £400,000 a week at his new club Bayern Munich; for Sayer’s Ashton, one hyped new recruit starts by demanding Premier League wages, but settles for £125 a week and a £5 goal bonus.
The record club signing is £2,000 for ‘Bruno’ Billings from bitter local rivals Curzon Ashton.
He fell in love with the game at the age of eight, and eventually decided to buy the club with his father. Nowhere To Run is an account of their first year in charge
Sayer and his father have to plough in large amounts of their own money, including for salaries, a batch of new home and away kits, and, due to an ordering cock-up, more than 600 pairs of socks. At one nearby club, where the chairman was a butcher, players were often paid in meat.
He also has to get the supporters onside. Forget about football he is told, take up a hobby like birdwatching or pottery. A rumour goes round that he wants to drop John Smith’s beer from the taps in the club bar. A rebel group of furious octogenarian supporters launch a militant campaign ‘Save Our Smiths’. But how to get the fans in?
Record attendance was back in 1880, and Ashton is in an area of Greater Manchester that has more non-League football clubs per square kilometre than GP surgeries, fire stations and mega supermarkets combined.
It’s also just a few miles from one of the world’s wealthiest and most successful clubs, Manchester City. But, on the bright side, as Sayer points out, the highlights of the area include an Asda, a Texaco garage and a banging tandoori.
He starts to pull in favours to generate sponsorship and pitchside advertising, including one from old performing friends, Las Vegas magicians Penn & Teller, despite them performing more than 5,000 miles away from Ashton-under-Lyne.
Like all semi-pro clubs, Ashton is dependent on countless volunteers working themselves to the bone for their club, and fuelling non-League clubs up and down the country. Here is Dale, a lorry driver who chain smokes roll-ups, who is also the club secretary, groundskeeper, deputy kitman, reserve team manager and assistant spongeman (whatever that is: Sayer still doesn’t know). His wife, Sue, runs the tea hut and his son, Simon, organises traffic control on match day.
The ground can only be watered with a garden hose run from the bar, which doesn’t stretch past the halfway line, so after a dry summer, one half of the pitch is a lush green, the other is burnt brown and dry. But when it’s frozen in winter they have to melt the ice using hairdryers. Though not the Alex Ferguson kind.
Still, it is all about the players, and the one thing the owners can’t control: what happens on the pitch.
For one game, in Chester, the team convinced a credulous young newcomer that he couldn’t get into Wales without a passport, so he should hide in the car boot to cross the border. But when they get there they can’t open the boot and he has to spend the match locked inside a Nissan Micra.
Meanwhile, Sayer’s club briefly hit world headlines with a tweet saying they were trying to sign Norwegian super-striker Erling Haaland. The tweet was eventually seen by 40 million people — but Haaland didn’t come. He went to Manchester City instead!
This being a true account of a year in charge, there is no helpful Hollywood story arc: Ashton don’t make it into an FA Cup semi-final against Liverpool, for example. Nor do they gain promotion.
Some they win, some they lose. But as Sayer says, non-League football is good for the soul. It is full of remarkable people doing remarkable things for the love of the game.
And for Sayer, he has found a sense of belonging that is hard to come by. And who wouldn’t raise a glass of John Smith’s to that?