Among many doomsday scenarios facing Manchester City is plunging down the football pyramid. Instead of yawning at the prospect of yet another meeting with Real Madrid or repeated Aviva train-hampered journeys to Wembley, how about the exoticism of away travel to Wealdstone? In the National League, City’s ownership may wish to know, there are no formal financial fair play or strict salary cap regulations.
Wrexham, Notts County and Chesterfield have taken advantage of such lax constraints to regenerate. For City fans, Ruislip’s buzzy high street, full of nail bars, estate agents and a couple of homely pubs, would represent a welcome world away from Milan’s Via Monte Napoleone, as would the suburbia of Grosvenor Vale, Wealdstone’s home in the middle of a housing estate, which may jog memories of late-90s visits to Macclesfield and Lincoln. Simpler, happier times, perhaps.
On the fringes of west London, with rich, non-league history, last season’s FA Trophy finalists, managed by the 1980s QPR hero Gary Waddock, Wealdstone is the club from where Stuart Pearce, Vinny Jones and Jermaine Beckford began their journey. In the digital age, the club became famous for the meme pioneer Gordon Parmar Hill, AKA the Wealdstone Raider, whose “you’ve got no fans” war cry went viral on a pandemic scale in 2014, the same year his assault on the UK Christmas No 1 with, naturally, “Got No Fans”, reached No 5. The Raider even made himself available for hire on stag weekends, though despite a recent social media comeback that revenue stream has been shuttered, a quieter life now observed.
Kicking off fifth from bottom in the National League, if this season’s outlook could be brighter for the Stones, then Saturday confirmed there is always someone worse off. Gateshead hosted a Football League club on the southern bank of the Tyne from 1930 to 1960, the last team the legendary Hughie Gallacher turned out for, though extinction came in 1973. The re-founded Gateshead that has been knocking around the non-league pyramid since 1977 has little hope of reaching the Football League anytime soon.
Before kick-off, the Vale club bar outside the stadium was doing brisk business. At a fifth-tier club, drinking in view of the pitch is verboten. A revocation of the 1985 alcohol statute the prime minister this week floated would prove a significant revenue driver for clubs of Wealdstone’s size; clubs in the divisions below make considerable cash from in-game hospitality.
In the Gateshead dugout, the familiar face of Lee Cattermole. For the time being, at least – his first senior management role is not going at all well. The former hard-tackling Middlesbrough, Wigan and Sunderland midfielder, collector of 88 yellow cards and seven reds in 271 Premier League games, has approached management in a characteristically uncompromising fashion.
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