Anyone unfamiliar with the Potteries would probably struggle to place Smallthorne on a blank map of Great Britain but for one day only, it will seem to be at the epicentre of English football.
To many people Smallthorne (population around 4,200) was a speck in a road atlas until its semi-professional football team, Norton United, progressed beyond the FA Cup’s first qualifying round for the first time in their 25-year history.
Suddenly all eyes are on Norton as they make their bow in the first round proper on Sunday when the Conference side Gateshead are in town. Finally, the team from a former coal-mining bastion near Burslem to the north-east of Stoke-on-Trent have emerged from the shadow cast by their near neighbour Port Vale, just 1.3 miles down the road.
Tenth in the Northern Premier League Division One South – the eighth tier of English football – Norton are one of the lowest-ranked challengers left in this season’s competition. As the FA Cup circus prepares to pitch up, Scott Dundas, their manager, is finding things slightly surreal.
“For Norton to be in the first round is something you’d never even have dreamed of,” he says. “I can’t put into words the commitment the lads put in to get here. Now we’ve just got to keep this fairytale going against Gateshead.”
Norton’s road to Wembley began in late August with a 4-1 win at Stafford Town and has subsequently swept them past Corby Town, Spalding, Runcorn and Shildon. Their reward is Gateshead’s visit and a full house at their 2,500-capacity Community Drive home but the journey to this point has already proved a lot of fun.
Not only was the long trip up to County Durham for a replay with Shildon made comfortable by the loan of Port Vale’s team bus but Steve Beaumont, Norton’s chairman, has given each player £2,000 from the club’s FA Cup prize money. These windfalls will finance a squad holiday in Magaluf at the end of the season, with Beaumont conceding that the £30,000-plus earned from the Football Association for progressing to this point represents “a massive amount of money for a club of our size”.
Beaumont, involved with Norton since the club’s foundation in 1989 when they began life in the Staffordshire Senior League, says he feels as if he is inhabiting a parallel universe. “A few weeks ago thousands of people up and down the country had never heard of Norton United or where we came from but I think they do now,” he says. “It’s been amazing, my phone’s never stopped ringing. It’s quite incredible really. When I heard our name in the draw I had to pinch myself.”
He is not exaggerating. After all Dundas’s squad contains only one player with experience of playing in a first-round tie. Step forward the star striker Micky Lennon. A full-time PE teacher, the Middlesbrough academy graduate played for Hednesford United at this stage last season.
As a teacher Lennon – whose arrival at Norton in June was regarded as something of a coup – enjoys more flexibility than many team-mates when it comes to juggling work and training. “That’s the drawback at this level,” says Dundas. “Players have jobs and jobs always have to come first. Jobs pay the mortgages – which is something playing for Norton certainly doesn’t do. Just lately, I’ve had one or two players call me to say they’re struggling with work commitments but the beauty of this particular squad is that wherever possible, they give everything for the club.”
Such collective dedication explains why a slight sense of anticlimax greeted the first-round draw. “We were all a little deflated,” Dundas adds. “No disrespect to Gateshead but having come this far, it would have been nice to play a league club – Port Vale perhaps.” There is always the second round.
“In Gateshead we’ve got a tough tie, no doubt about it,” Dundas continues. “But we’re having a great time and we don’t want the run to end.”
Gary Mills, Gateshead’s manager and a European Cup winner with Nottingham Forest in 1980, is suitably wary. Three divisions separate the teams but he knows better than to take anything for granted. “If we’re not switched on we could get turned over,” he says. “Our cup final would be reaching the third round and we’ve got a great opportunity to progress but Norton United will have other ideas.”
