Few non-league clubs can name a National League-winning captain, four ex-youth internationals and a former Premier League centre-half in their squad. Fewer still can add a 35-time-capped senior international to that list.
It is such a squad that lies at the heart of seventh tier Buxton’s thrilling journey to the second round of the FA Cup. They host League One Morecambe, a side who play their football four divisions above, live on BBC One on Saturday for the chance to potentially play Premier League opposition in the third round.
It is a mouthwatering prospect.
“Saturday could be the biggest game of some of our careers,” Jamie Ward, the former Derby County winger and Northern Ireland international, tells i. “To then get to the third round would be even bigger and to get a big team and a great day out would be unbelievable for everyone involved in the club.”
Ward is currently coaching at Aston Villa and Burton Albion’s academies, and playing for an ambitious and attack-minded Buxton side largely for the thrill of it.
“It’s strange because we train on evenings and all through my career I’ve trained in the morning,” he explains. “You just have to get used to it, but we’re very fortunate that we have a group of lads that really care about playing football and how we do rather than just topping up their day-to-day wage.”
Buxton, of the Northern Premier League Premier Division, entered this year’s FA Cup at the start of September, beating ninth tier Sherwood Colliery in the first qualifying round after a replay. Four rounds later, they were drawn away at York City of the National League North in the second round.
In a tight game, it took until the 85th minute for the deadlock to be broken. Buxton striker Diego De Girolamo, playing against a club he spent three loan spells with after coming through Sheffield United’s academy, picked up the ball on the edge of the box and curled it into the right-hand corner of the net, sending the 1,000 travelling supporters into ecstasy.
“It was magic, really,” says De Girolamo, a self-employed tiler who was with Sheffield from the age of six to 20. “It was a feeling I can’t really explain. To do it in front of the fans, my family and my friends – it was brilliant.”
De Girolamo is a former Italy under-18, under-19 and under-20 international, one of a plethora of former Football League players signed since the arrival of chairman Dave Hopkins, who runs a local builders’ merchants. Even though the cup run has brought a welcome windfall, Hopkins is keen to put things in perspective: for him it is the memories, not money, that matter most.
“I do squirm when I sometimes see other clubs and they say, ‘it’s the difference between survival and extinction’,” he says when asked what the run has meant for Buxton’s finances. “No it’s not. It says 1877 above the door: you know, we’ve come through the recent pandemic and two world wars.
“The thing for me is that it’s shone a light on the club and the good things we’re trying to do, and it has shone a light on the town and given the town something in what has been a pretty rubbish time for everything.”
Quite. A win on Saturday would see the Derbyshire part-timers through to the third round for only the second time, the first coming 69 years ago in 1952. But for now, the focus is on victory against a Morecambe side unused to the hosts’ 3G pitch and penned in by a capacity 4,000+ home crowd.
“We will respect them obviously,” De Girolamo says. “There’s no doubt they are where they are because of the players they have: they’re professional footballers at the end of the day.
“But it’s definitely a game we think we can win.”
Buxton v Morecambe is live on BBC One on Saturday 4 Dec (12.45pm KO)
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/2ZU67is
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