“I expect you’re going to ask me about Jamie Vardy,” says Nathan Pond. “The whole day has been Vardy, Vardy, Vardy.”
Not that Fleetwood Town’s captain and centre-half is really complaining. Indeed Pond seems slightly amused by the media circus surrounding the League One side’s FA Cup third-round meeting at home against Leicester City at Highbury, Lancashire, on Saturday.
After a day spent regaling assorted reporters with his memories of playing alongside Vardy at Fleetwood he greets the news the England striker is struggling to overcome a groin injury in time for the game with an air of slight disbelief. Whether or not Vardy plays – and that seems unlikely – it will be a major surprise if he does not watch from the stands at the club he helped into the Football League before joining Leicester for £1m in 2012.
“I hope so because Danny, our kitman, and Ted, who makes our brews, are really looking forward to seeing Jamie again,” says Pond. “Training and playing with him you could always see Jamie had a lot of quality. He had great speed – we played lots of long balls to maximise it – and he was also very aggressive. He was always a very good player and the money our chairman got for him has helped get us where we are today.”
Pond, Uwe Rösler’s key defender, has also played a significant part in Fleetwood’s rise. A one-club man, the 32-year-old has entered the Guinness World Records after playing in seven divisions, winning six promotions as the team ascended football’s pyramid.
After being deemed not good enough to play for Preston North End, his hometown club, and having abandoned hope of signing for Manchester City, his boyhood heroes, Pond arrived at Fleetwood, then in the North West Counties League, as a 17-year-old midfielder.
“I didn’t turn professional until I was 26,” he says. Before that he worked full time as a driver’s mate for a delivery company, supplying bakeries with 25kg bags of flour and sugar. Night matches at away grounds sometimes meant returning home as late as 2am but the day job dictated he had to be up at 4.30am. “It’s the non-league mentality,” says Pond. “It’s not pleasant, it’s hard when you’ve got back from games in the early hours and when you’ve got to train in the evenings after work, but it’s just what you do to keep playing.”
Happily he benefited from an equally dedicated chairman and owner, in the local businessman Andrew Pilley. Aided by the Vardy transfer fee, Pilley transformed Fleetwood from non-league also-rans to a team that came within touching distance of promotion to the Championship last spring. After finishing fourth, Rösler’s side lost a play-off semi-final to Bradford City and, although they are mid-table, promotion remains this season’s principal aim.
“When the chairman took over, I remember him sitting all the players down and telling us about his plans,” says Pond. “At the time we didn’t really believe he’d be able to do it. But Andy put his money in and everything he predicted has happened.”
Back in the early North West Counties days, let alone the interludes when he was loaned out to Kendal and Grimsby, Pond would hardly have dared believe he would be captaining Fleetwood against the 2016 Premier League champions.
“This club has never reached the fourth round of the FA Cup so beating Leicester would be a great achievement,” he says.
As part of the preamble to a tie selected for live BBC television, the trophy has arrived at Fleetwood’s Poolfoot Farm training ground on the Fylde coast and Pond joins Rösler in holding it aloft for countless photographs. By now, the captain has answered so many questions about a certain former team-mate that the name Vardy is echoing in his ears.
“My journey’s been very different to Jamie’s but we both appreciate where we’ve come from,” says Pond. “It’s a dream for me to be a full-time professional so I don’t take it for granted; I want to make sure I make the most of it because I’ve seen the other side.”
