<\/noscript> <\/div>\nHe 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<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s beer from the taps in the club bar. A rebel group of furious octogenarian supporters launch a militant campaign \u2018Save Our Smiths\u2019. But how to get the fans in?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s also just a few miles from one of the world\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t know). His wife, Sue, runs the tea hut and his son, Simon, organises traffic control on match day.<\/p>\n
The ground can only be watered with a garden hose run from the bar, which doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s frozen in winter they have to melt the ice using hairdryers. Though not the Alex Ferguson kind.<\/p>\n
Still, it is all about the players, and the one thing the owners can\u2019t control: what happens on the pitch.<\/p>\n
For one game, in Chester, the team convinced a credulous young newcomer that he couldn\u2019t 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\u2019t open the boot and he has to spend the match locked inside a Nissan Micra.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Sayer\u2019s 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 \u2014 but Haaland didn\u2019t come. He went to Manchester City instead!<\/p>\n
This being a true account of a year in charge, there is no helpful Hollywood story arc: Ashton don\u2019t make it into an FA Cup semi-final against Liverpool, for example. Nor do they gain promotion.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
And for Sayer, he has found a sense of belonging that is hard to come by. And who wouldn\u2019t raise a glass of John Smith\u2019s to that?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nRead More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NOWHERE TO RUN by Jonathan Sayer (Bantam \u00a316.99, 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6390,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1677],"tags":[4729,1678,23,4099,9182,294,741,486,9723,10234,919],"acf":{"source_article":"","image_credit":""},"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latestnews.top\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6389"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latestnews.top\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latestnews.top\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latestnews.top\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latestnews.top\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/latestnews.top\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6389\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latestnews.top\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latestnews.top\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latestnews.top\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latestnews.top\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}