Pennine derby in miniature!

Guiseley 2 FC United of Manchester 1 (Northern Premier League, Tuesday 18th October 2022)

To be honest, I was in two minds about whether to go to this one - the match at the weekend had left me a bit down to put it mildly. But sod it, sometimes you pick yourself up the floor and try and restore your faith in football. Which, happily, tonight's match very much did.

As I mentioned earlier in the season, the original plan was to go and see Guiseley play Marine for their first home game of the season before a heatwave (and, if I'm honest, a reluctance to leave the nice air-conditioned pub we were having a pre-game pint in!) intervened. However, the visit of FC United of Manchester intrigued me sufficiently that I decided to forego watching this week's Bake-Off to head to the game.

FC United are a bit of a funny one - they were formed as a breakaway club from Man United about twenty years ago following the Glazers' takeover at Old Trafford. So in a way the blueprint was for them to be kind of a northern version of AFC Wimbledon but they never quite reached the same heights. The team started out in the North West Counties League and after a few rapid promotions ended up reaching the Conference North (two divisions below the league) but then kind of ran out of steam and found themselves relegated back to the Northern Premier League a couple of years ago.

I kind of feel a bit sorry for FC United really as the emergence of Salford City in the last few years has kind of overshadowed them a bit - while there's plenty of goodwill and an impressive support behind FC (they must have brought a good 200-300 fans with them this evening swelling the attendance at Nethermoor to over 1000, almost double what Guiseley normally get), they don't have the likes of Scholes, Giggs, Beckham, Neville et al putting money into the club hence why they hit the glass ceiling while Salford have gone on to get promoted all the way up to League Two. I'll be honest, as a Pools fan I've always had a bit of a bee in my bonnet about clubs coming into the league in the last 10-15 years who would be several divisions down the pyramid if it wasn't for some sugar daddy investing in them as a plaything to swiftly be discarded when the novelty wears off. Ah sod it, let's name names - Crawley, Forest Green, Harrogate, Salford...sure they might have the money but when you've got a club who've only come good in the last couple of decades and are still struggling to attract 1500 most weeks despite their lofty league position taking the place of the established likes of Chesterfield, Notts County, Oldham et al in the league...well maybe it's just me but it doesn't feel right somehow.

Of course, this whole thing is nothing new - arguably the first club to fit this description to break into the league were Rushden and Diamonds back in the early noughties, formed when Dr Martens took over two local Southern League clubs, merged them and invested frankly stupid amounts of money to get them into the league. Rushden were promoted with Hartlepool in 2002 but while Pools would consolidate, the Diamonds were rapidly found out as the money dried up when the boot company ran into financial difficulties and were relegated straight back down to the fourth tier before bombing out of the league altogether two years later and into oblivion soon afterwards. You'd think it would be a lesson from history but I guess as long as there are people like Ryan Reynolds et al willing to plough stupid money and push clubs beyond their means only to abandon them as soon as they want to go and find a new toy to play with, the cycle is doomed to repeat eternally.

Anyway, rant over. The first thing we noticed upon getting to Nethermoor was a police presence, almost unheard of at Guiseley. I s'pose when you've got Man United fans travelling to a suburb of Leeds, you can't help but be careful. To be fair, both sets of fans were in good voice for the game and it made for a cracking atmosphere (although the holding up of play due to one of the players having racist abuse shouted at them was a disappointment - no need for that sort of thing in the game nowadays) and it made for a cracking game.

Guiseley seemed to have put their disappointment against Marine behind them, going into this game unbeaten in six, and although FC United were clearly no slouches as their position at the top of the league testified, apart from a few dangerous red attacks in the opening minutes, Guiseley pretty much grabbed this one by the scruff of the neck right from the word go, using their pace to torture the United defence. They took the lead on 25 minutes from a well worked goal which saw centre half Ellis lash a loose ball into the net. They held on to the advantage for the rest of the half and were good value for their lead at the break.

I think some words must have been had in the United dressing room as they came out for the second half with an added urgency to them, taking on the demeanour of an Alsatian that's just had its bone nicked.  The attacks started getting more and more dangerous and it wasn't a surprise when their substitute Rodwell-Grant, a youngster on loan from Wigan, equalised midway through the second half.

"Bugger," said my mate, "they're gonna lose this, aren't they?" As it turned out, quite the opposite happened - United's parity only lasted seven minutes before Guiseley got what turned out to be the winner as a quick break upfield saw their giant number nine and captain Jake Cassidy slot home.

I remembered Cassidy from his days at Hartlepool a few years earlier - it's safe to say he wasn't exactly a success there. One of a number of "guaranteed twenty goal a season strikers" signed by the various managers we had in charge during our National League years (Craig Harrison, Richard Money, Matt Bates etc), he never looked like getting anywhere near that during his sole season at the Vic, mostly just coming across as big and slow. Here though, he looked genuinely dangerous, using his size well to dominate the United defence and proving a thorn in their side all game.

The final whistle was greeted with a huge ovation from the home support. United remain top of the table but with just six points separating the top fifteen sides in the division (!), it really does look like this could be anybody's season at this point. Hopefully it'll be Guiseley's but we'll wait and see. Either way though, after the disappointment of the weekend, this was a good reminder of just how much fun a night out at the football can be sometimes. Much needed.

A trip to Guiseley goes astray…

Guiseley 0 Marine 3 (Northern Premier League, Saturday 13th August 2022)

It's a bit of a running joke with me and my mate that on the occasions we attempt to go to a non league game, there is a good chance we won't actually make it if there's a decent pub nearby. I s'pose it doesn't help that non-league football and pubs pretty much go hand in hand - our local, the Great Northern, is about five minutes' walk from Thackley's ground and more than once last season we ended up meeting there for a pre-match pint before going on to watching the Dennyboys play only for us to end up staying in the pub because it was tanking it down outside or someone we hadn't seen for ages turned up or...well, you kind of get the picture.

I thought that by changing our destination to Guiseley that I'd manage to avert this. I was wrong. We somehow picked an absolutely scorching hot day to go to Nethermoor and after a pre-match pint at the Potting Shed pub nearby, set off for the ground. We got about halfway across the car park of the Station pub over the road, realised that there was no way we were standing in the open air in these conditions for two hours especially as both of us tend to burn to a crisp after five minutes of midsummer sun (my mate’s a redhead and I’m a middle aged goth, go figure) so we decided to call this one off and headed for the coolness of the pub.

It's a shame and I fully intend to make a proper trip back to Guiseley some time later in the autumn. Not least because in my teenage years, it was the nearest ground to where I grew up in Otley and on the occasions when Pools were playing at the other end of the country and a trip to Bramall Lane wasn't on the cards, I frequently ended up there. At the time, Guiseley were having one of their intermittent successful spells and were challenging for promotion from the Northern Premier League to the Conference (this was in the days before the Conference North).

Nethermoor’s a tidy compact little ground under the shadow of the nearby Chevin hill and me and my dad spent many an afternoon there in the mid-'90s. That Guiseley team was an enjoyable one to watch playing fast-paced attacking football. Indeed, two of them would go on to play in the football league - Lutel James, a tricky winger who would frequently leave opposition fullbacks floundering in his wake with his runs downfield would go on to play for Bury under Neil Warnock in the late '90s and was subsequently a part of the Accrington Stanley side that enjoyed that meteoric rise up to the league in the early noughties. He even represented St Kitts and Nevis at international level.

However, it's the other player that you might have heard of - Geoff Horsfield. A proper old school English centre forward, Horsfield was a big burly striker who was also deceptively skillful for his size. Picked up by the Lions after failing to make the grade at Scarborough, he and his strike partner Bob Colville, a thirtysomething Yorkshire non-league veteran, were borderline unplayable that season with the strike partnership yielding close to forty goals, twenty plus of which came from Horsfield. Soon afterwards, Horsfield would be snapped up by local Conference neighbours Halifax and bang in 30 goals as the Shaymen romped home with the Conference title. He would continue his goalscoring exploits in League Two and after netting seven in his first ten games, newly minted Fulham would spend £350,000 on his services. Horsfield would be a key part of the Cottagers' rise up to the Championship under Kevin Keegan before going on to taste Premiership football with Birmingham and West Brom.

Guiseley would end up finishing the first season I saw them in 3rd place in the NPL, even surviving the loss of manager Ray McHale to Scarborough (then still a league side) with hulking centre half and captain Steve Richards taking over as player-manager after his departure. The season saw a three way battle for the title between the Lions, Leek Town and Marine, the latter of whom just happened to be the Lions' opponents today hence my interest in attending the game. Ironically, the whole thing turned out to be a moot point as both Guiseley and Marine's grounds failed to meet the Conference standards hence Leek, who finished 2nd, were promoted by default.

It's safe to say that Guiseley and Marine's relevant paths have diverged a bit since those days - that season was pretty much as good as it got for Marine who missed the boat when it came to joining the Conference North a decade or so later and would spend most of the next two decades floundering around the Northern Premier League. However, a good Cup run in the Covid season a couple of years ago saw the group reach Round 3 and get the plum tie of Spurs at home. It's the sort of tie that in the old days would have seen the club play the fixture at a local lower league ground (probably Tranmere in Marine's case) and draw in the extra supporters for the big day. However, with supporters not allowed in the ground, BBC viewers were treated to the somewhat surreal sight of Kane, Son et al plying their trade on Marine's tiny astroturf pitch. Spurs would win the tie comfortably in the end but the television money had helped Marine return to the NPL Premier after being stuck in Division 1 West for the previous few years.

Guiseley, on the other hand, had achieved the near unthinkable and, after relegation in the early noughties, had bounced back impressively culminating in the club reaching the National League for the first time in its history in 2015. They would then go on to confound everybody by staying there for three years, avoiding relegation on the last day in 2016 and 2017 (with larger neighbours Halifax and York being the respective fall guys for the Lions' great escapes) before finally succumbing to the drop in 2018 (though the buggers would still beat Pools at Nethermoor that season).

Unfortunately since then, the club had been on a downward spiral culminating in another relegation in the season just gone. The Lions had been hovering around the drop zone all season but a terrible run-in saw Telford and Farsley Celtic overhaul them in the last few games to send them back down to the NPL with even the return of Steve Kittrick, the manager who'd got them promoted a few years before, failing to fire the team to safety. I remember checking the results on the last day of the campaign - with ten minutes to go, Guiseley were 1-0 up against Alfreton and looked to be heading for safety at Farsley's expense only for two injury time goals to sink them and send them down.

As it turned out, we didn't miss much by staying in the pub - Guiseley's hopes of a flying start to the season were comprehensively derailed as Marine won 3-0. By all accounts it was a much closer game than the scoreline suggests - Marine took the lead in the first 20 minutes, Guiseley spent much of the next hour or so pressing hard for an equaliser only to be hit with two late suckerpunches. Sitting in the Hawkhill Tavern, at least we were gifted some light relief by watching Brentford dismantle Man Utd 4-0. There's always someone worse off than yourself etc. Hopefully when I make it back to Nethermoor in the coming weeks, the performance'll be a bit better.

I'm away in Norfolk for the next couple of weeks but should hopefully be back in business with a trip to Thackley at the start of September...if we ever make it out of the Northern that is...