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derekacorah said:
The bit about speed is very valid and it will get a kid into an ETC/development team, because the pro clubs (rightly or wrongly) assume that if a kid has physical attributes then they can coach the football into them. I have a kid in my team who is apparently in the top 5 sprinters in the country at his age and has just been given a scholarship for private school on this basis, but it's like watching Ollie Burke when it comes to playing football. His athletics also clashes with training so he (quite rightly) prioritises that and I'll never teach him how to be a footballer by him just turning up the odd session and then to matches, he just doesn't get it.

There's another lad who's not quite as fast but he's left footed and a bit better at football, he's been in the pig development squad all season, but he's not good enough to make the step up as he doesn't have the football intelligence that is necessary and he's another one who only turns up for training every other week due to other commitments.

Of the lads who've gone to EFL academies and are playing for them week in, week out, there's one kid who I had that I think has the potential to be a footballer when he's older. He signed for the pork as soon as he could at U9 and he's had a few years there now and is playing an age group above his natural age despite being a midget. His dad still says that when they go to Leicester, Man U, Liverpool, Newcastle etc. he is bang average compared to what they've got. If I put him in my team he could probably carry the other 8 lads through most games. There are levels all the way through football and kids just need to play at the level that they enjoy it. I'd never push my lad past what he enjoys, he plays in the top league both Saturdays and Sundays, with his mates and is a decent player, that's what he enjoys so it's what we'll keep doing with him.
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How funny! You've just described me! At U15 I was ranked 2nd in the UK for 100m and Man City took me into their Academy for that reason alone. Two years later they gave me up as a lost cause so I did what I did best and enjoyed the most and chased the summer round the world running in straight lines!!

I've tried saying to my lad, from all my experience it has to come from your soul. You need to love it. We've got two kids playing for us (one with blades academy one with pigs) and they love football. Every night they're either playing for someone or in the garden. No good parents forcing you. It has to come from them.
 

Balham Blade said:
Ex-EFL fallen on hard times: Wrexham, Notts County, Chesterfield, Barnet, Oldham, Scunthorpe (R), York C, Yeovil, Torquay, Southend, Dagenham & Redbridge
Well-run smaller teams: Woking, Wealdstone, Bromley, Boreham Wood, Eastleigh, Solihull, Halifax, Aldershot, Maidenhead, Maidstone (R), Gateshead, Altrincham, Dorking
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I would add to those Bradford Park Avenue, Workington, Southport, Darlington and Halifax.
 
IdLiketoRogerMoore said:
I hear you, and I'll say straight from the outset that my boys primary sport is Track so football is just for 'fun'! Although, on that subject, it's interesting that I'm expected to pay £150 to be a UK Athletics licenced coach so I can officially coach him - so it's not just football where there's a culture of trying to grab money!! And based on my experience of track coaches, I've got exponentially more knowledge than they'll get from paying £150 to watch 10 hours of videos twice a year, so think I'll keep my money in my pocket!

You're right though. My boys team played the top Evo team for his age group and we drew 3-3 despite our GK not being there and only having 10 available players. The parents from the Evo side were quite upset as they're paying £50+ a month and being told that the top Evo team is the highest standard around...

Moral of the story is keep your wits about you, as its like the wild west out there and there's a whole culture out there of 'coaches' trying to take your money!!

Anyhow, if anyone's interested, I run a hills session in Ecclesall Woods every Wednesday night? £10 a session...
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Track eh? What's his specific event(s), purely out of curiousity as I love track and field athletics.

Shane that track and field has fallen so far down other sports, Michael Johnson has made some great comments on this recently.
 
oldblade said:
I would add to those Bradford Park Avenue, Workington, Southport, Darlington and Halifax.
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Halifax is the only one of those in the National League but it's a phoenix club formed after the original club folded in 2008.

BPA and Southport are in the National League North, as is the reformed Darlington (started 2012 as Darlington 1883). BPA look like they'll drop to the Northern Premier (tier 7) this season.

Workington are miles down in the Northern Division One West (tier 8), the same level as Sheffield.
 
Balham Blade said:
Halifax is the only one of those in the National League but it's a phoenix club formed after the original club folded in 2008.

BPA and Southport are in the National League North, as is the reformed Darlington (started 2012 as Darlington 1883). BPA look like they'll drop to the Northern Premier (tier 7) this season.

Workington are miles down in the Northern Division One West (tier 8), the same level as Sheffield.
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Remember going to the Shay in 1985, what a shithole that was. The away end was a pile of mud and rocks, sure it was £1 to get in.
 
Sportbilly said:
Track eh? What's his specific event(s), purely out of curiousity as I love track and field athletics.

Shane that track and field has fallen so far down other sports, Michael Johnson has made some great comments on this recently.
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100m mate...

Yep, MJ has come up with some decent ideas, but people have been coming up with ideas for decades, but there's always administrators somewhere poo-poo'ing them.. The concept of getting an event into an hour so it can be packaged up for TV is the one that always seems to stump people.

I've always like the idea of giving jumpers/throwers one or at most two goes (sprinters only get one go at getting the start right), and then anything longer than 800m the person(s) in last place at the end of each lap has to drop out(a la cycling)
 
i find it mad. for most of the last decade we've played these alot & were always tough games & alot of the time they were massive rivals of ours in championship & League 1. i cant believe how far theyve fallen & the speed of it. how have they gone from finished 3rd in League 1 when we got 100pts to 6 years later playing chorley

theyve just got to take heart from how stockport have come back from the abyss
 
IdLiketoRogerMoore said:
100m mate...

Yep, MJ has come up with some decent ideas, but people have been coming up with ideas for decades, but there's always administrators somewhere poo-poo'ing them.. The concept of getting an event into an hour so it can be packaged up for TV is the one that always seems to stump people.

I've always like the idea of giving jumpers/throwers one or at most two goes (sprinters only get one go at getting the start right), and then anything longer than 800m the person(s) in last place at the end of each lap has to drop out(a la cycling)
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Track and field is great, went to the World Championships when it was in Russia, brilliant it was.

It's a great sport but don't know ho you modernise it, without losing its base content
 
sheff_blade90 said:
i find it mad. for most of the last decade we've played these alot & were always tough games & alot of the time they were massive rivals of ours in championship & League 1. i cant believe how far theyve fallen & the speed of it. how have they gone from finished 3rd in League 1 when we got 100pts to 6 years later playing chorley

theyve just got to take heart from how stockport have come back from the abyss
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My brother is a big Scunny fan and he said hard to summarise in a few sentences what's gone wrong.

When Scunny were in the Championship they were arguably one of the best run EFL clubs, had a plan which was buy young hungry players. Eg, Hooper (5th choice forward at Southend), develop them for couple of seasons where hopefully they'd do well for then then sell them on for 1m+ then repeat.

The previous chairman, Steve Wharton, had ill health which meant he had to sell and without hindsight Peter Swann looked decent enough without any real footy background.

Swann wanted to throw money at it and attracted loan and permanent signings by offering for Scunny big wages. In their League 1 play off seasons (2 on trot) they had probably 4th highest wages in the division but it was 150% of our income. No real plan B other than spend big on wages which was not sustainable.

After the 2nd play off SF defeat Swann realised he couldn't keep spending like he had but went the opposite way. Interfering with managers team selection, had more input into signings (his money of course) but no expertise in the matter. The club became toxic and although unknown at the time Swann had gambled away £20m.on horses, betting, etc. So much so that this season the wage to income was just 30%.
 
jt64 said:
It's a huge bottleneck right now, agreed. I would kind of like the idea of going back to the old days of the bottom tier being north/south - expand from the current 24 in one division to 18/20 or so in each of two, three down from each of those to NLN/NLS, and then two up plus a north/south playoff winner to L1. That ought to help a lot of expenses for lower league clubs at the same time
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Tonight Eastleigh are playing Gateshead in the national League. Bit of a treck that for part time football in some cases! The thing with regional leagues is clubs on the border can get shifted around and one league is totally unsuitable. Round here lower level non league clubs could be London based leagues or the whole of the south west of the country. I went to an away game in Truro on a Tuesday night once. This is with crowds of about 200 people. Crazy!
 
Berkshire Blade said:
Tonight Eastleigh are playing Gateshead in the national League. Bit of a treck that for part time football in some cases! The thing with regional leagues is clubs on the border can get shifted around and one league is totally unsuitable. Round here lower level non league clubs could be London based leagues or the whole of the south west of the country. I went to an away game in Truro on a Tuesday night once. This is with crowds of about 200 people. Crazy!
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Never mind that, the amount of London based clubs (amongst others) sees the likes of Gloucester, Brackley, Banbury etc in the same league as Blyth Spartans despite it being regional
 

I remember one of United's highest scoring games I've seen was against Scunthorpe, a 5-3 win in the mid 1980s. We were losing 3-2 goals and got three quick goals if I remember correctly.
 
Balham Blade said:
Halifax is the only one of those in the National League but it's a phoenix club formed after the original club folded in 2008.

BPA and Southport are in the National League North, as is the reformed Darlington (started 2012 as Darlington 1883). BPA look like they'll drop to the Northern Premier (tier 7) this season.

Workington are miles down in the Northern Division One West (tier 8), the same level as Sheffield.
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In other words, all but one of the clubs I have mentioned have fallen on even harder times than those in your list!😊

Wrexham (in your list) have never been in the EFL. It wasn't branded as that until 2016. Wrexham left the football league in 2008.

Halifax are still Halifax to their supporters, just as Wednesday are still Wednesday to the poor unfortunates that support them.

BPA folded in the early (or mid) 1970s, but their supporters still consider them to be BPA.

If we fail to go up, fold and then reform under the same name I think most of our supporters will still see us as SUFC.
 
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Silent Blade said:
Saw Bradford Park Avenue in the league. At Saltergate in April 1970
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I used to have an almost morbid curiosity about Bradford Park Avenue.

I think it was because they became such a permanent fixture at the bottom of the football league.

During their last two seasons in the league they failed to win a single away league fixture. I believe their last ever away league win was at Bradford City. At least that gave them some cause for a smile.😊

I still look out for their results now. And things aren''t going too well. Although they are on an unbeaten two game run!
 
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Berkshire Blade said:
Tonight Eastleigh are playing Gateshead in the national League. Bit of a treck that for part time football in some cases! The thing with regional leagues is clubs on the border can get shifted around and one league is totally unsuitable. Round here lower level non league clubs could be London based leagues or the whole of the south west of the country. I went to an away game in Truro on a Tuesday night once. This is with crowds of about 200 people. Crazy!
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My team have just been promoted to Step 3, and we don’t yet know whether we’ll be in the Premier South or the Premier Central. If it’s the former, we’d have a four and a half hour away trip to Plymouth Parkway to face, and if it’s the latter we’ll be driving two hours up the M1 to Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire most weekends. And this is a club run totally by volunteers - no-one at the club gets a penny, apart from the players, and even there no-one‘s getting rich and they all have day jobs. It’s tough at non league, even down at our relatively lowly level.
 
Hague Blade said:
My team have just been promoted to Step 3, and we don’t yet know whether we’ll be in the Premier South or the Premier Central. If it’s the former, we’d have a four and a half hour away trip to Plymouth Parkway to face, and if it’s the latter we’ll be driving two hours up the M1 to Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire most weekends. And this is a club run totally by volunteers - no-one at the club gets a penny, apart from the players, and even there no-one‘s getting rich and they all have day jobs. It’s tough at non league, even down at our relatively lowly level.
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Travel is a killer in non league, I played for one of the most southern teams in north east counties 1 (step6) live north sheffield

45mins to home games, played an away game Hall Road Rangers last season top end of Hull. Had to leave work at 4pm to get for a 6:45 meet and didn’t get home until 1/1:30 as the motorway was shut - I love playing footie but having to take an afternoon from work and roll back into office at 9am all for £65 a game. Makes you wonder why you do it!

Still love playing though!
 
oldblade said:
I used to have an almost morbid curiosity about Bradford Park Avenue.

I think it was because they became such a permanent fixture at the bottom of the football league.

During their last two seasons in the league they failed to win a single away league fixture. I believe their last ever away league win was at Bradford City. At least that gave them some cause for a smile.😊

I still look out for their results now. And things aren''t going too well. Although they are on an unbeaten two game run!
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I developed a morbid curiosity for that other Harrogate club - Harrogate Railway. Think I remember them getting drawn together in the fa cup. I'd never heard of em before.

I've got an irrational dislike of Harrogate Town though as I worked for the company who owned em. Didn't even get a keyring from club shop. Tell ya more, one of the bigwigs was in one afternoon, we were in office same time I says to him "ay up, my mate collects football club badges but he's missing a Harrogate one. Could you fetch one in by any chance? For the money mind I'm not on the beg"
' Consider it done'

Never got one. And that's why I don't like em.
 
Ainsley Harriott said:
I developed a morbid curiosity for that other Harrogate club - Harrogate Railway. Think I remember them getting drawn together in the fa cup. I'd never heard of em before.

I've got an irrational dislike of Harrogate Town though as I worked for the company who owned em. Didn't even get a keyring from club shop. Tell ya more, one of the bigwigs was in one afternoon, we were in office same time I says to him "ay up, my mate collects football club badges but he's missing a Harrogate one. Could you fetch one in by any chance? For the money mind I'm not on the beg"
' Consider it done'

Never got one. And that's why I don't like em.
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In which case, come on Hartlepool, Crawley and Rochdale!
 
I've got a few mates who are Hednesford fans. One of their 'favourite' away days was Barrow on a Tuesday night a few years ago!

They are now in the Southern League Central, which includes Mickleover. Yes, Mickleover play in the 'Southern' league...
 
Just be glad your child’s passion is not
Motorsport. My lad was offered a test (I.e trial) in formula 4. Did well. Was offered a drive. £82,000 for the season.

That’s normal, by the way. And the £ can come in the form of sponsorship if you don’t have the cash yourself. When you see cars in junior formulas with sponsors, those sponsors are usually brought by the driver in order to be sat in the seat.

Anyways…

(Edit: no, it didn’t happen)
 

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