Back Row: Jago, Dickson (Second Team captain), Prince, McNally, Lamb B, Fairclough, Jelen
Front Row: O'Brien R, Done, Schofield K, Purcell, Schofield R, Lamb C, Willis
(at Winsford United F.C.)
Bobby Mimms reports
How can so many wrongs make such a right, and so many bad omens conspire to bring about the greatest day in Convocation’s history?
With hindsight, there were so many reasons why this game could have ended in drowned sorrows, if not tears. But at full time, in spite of a concatenation of rum and dour circumstances that could so easily have bedevilled the players had they paid any attention to their seemingly pessimistic presage, there were only celebration and bacchanalia – disbelieving hugs and cheap plonk on the pitch; exuberant hullabaloo, triumphant crooning, and a hip-flask full of malt whiskey in the post-match showers; and rumbling on long into the evening back at the Gardeners, victory songs and hooch-a-plenty, with ‘insightful’ match-analysis to whet the whistle. It was all no more than the victorious combatants deserved: their revelling was a rightful reward for the part they had all played in a truly wonderful performance and an historic occasion for the club.
Had the chaps failed in their mission and made it a hat trick of cup-final defeats then, such is their ethos, it’s unlikely that anyone would have batted an eyelid for more than a couple of seconds, before putting the loss down to experience and treating it like all the other glorious failures in Convocation lore – as a yarn to relate to its future generations. But when Paul Dickson strode up to receive the victory shield in the Winsford United clubhouse on Sunday evening, his head held high and his chest puffed out proudly, he did so knowing that his charges had gone where no others ever had in the thirty-six year history of the club. And in doing so, they had earned their places in the pantheon of Convo greats.
They could now rub shoulders with revered luminaries of the past, such as Brian Holder, Terry Caslin, and Ian McDermott; their names could now be whispered in the same hushed tones as that used when speaking of Houston, Skilbeck and Stalker. They had taken up the mantle of those early pioneers, and they themselves were now the trailblazers, taking Convocation to new heights and greater glories. For while the club has almost certainly had better teams over the years, it has never had cup winners before, and the fourteen players in Cheshire on Sunday have become the benchmark by which future Convo teams will be measured. They are now the legends to be looked up to and emulated.
It could all have been so different though, as earlier in the day the signs hadn’t seemed so conducive to a memorable afternoon and a happy ever after. The whole occasion seemed to be tinged with foreboding undercurrents and uncomfortable portents: petty, trivial occurrences that would normally be casually ignored and pooh-poohed, but when taken altogether – and on such a momentous occasion at that, when even the most cynical seek prophetic pointers – they gave the affair an ominous, disagreeable mood that threatened to turn it into a bit of a downer.
The fiasco of trying to hire a bus to transport everyone to Winsford was the first clue that the gods weren’t smiling on Convo, as once again the club showed that if they can organise a piss-up in a brewery, then that’s about the limit to their capabilities (how ever do they get abroad?). And there was nothing about the swastikas and fascist-orientated graffiti that were daubed all over the walls of the Winsford club’s ground – which hadn’t been cleaned off with too much success, meaning that nobody would miss them if they took up the option of a stadium tour, even if by some chance they had upon arrival – that could be construed as a promising augury (even though it was possible that the KKK could have been relating to everybody’s favourite swingers’ haunt – The Kit Kat Klub).
Then there was the rain. The conditions might not have seemed so depressing if the precipitation had been a heavy downpour or a biblical deluge – something fierce and stinging to inspire a rallying reaction – but instead it was a constant, steady, drizzle; a soul-sapping dampness that started just before kick-off and continued, unremittingly, until well after the end of the game. From out of a dull, leaden, anaemic sky, full of antipathy and gloom, a never ending fine rain showered all and sundry, totally soaking the players even before they’d started to play and dousing any high spirits to the point of morbidity.
And of course there was Waterside: if ever there has been a more odious, contemptible shower of bastards to take to a football field, then they must have been the legions of Satan himself. Convocation knew what they were up against – they’ve had run-ins with the Barnham Drive animals before, so were well aware of their deplorable shenanigans. But whilst there is probably no better team to get one over, and win a cup final against, the possibility of losing to such loathsome lice hung heavily over the Convo chaps’ heads beforehand.
Throw into the mixer the added maledictions of two players both missing veritable open goals in the first sixty seconds, and a pair of team mates having a cathartic moment and almost squaring up to each other moments later, and you could well have got the impression that the Wyncote side were doomed to defeat and had wasted their time making the journey to Winsford. All did not seem well in the Convocation garden; the settings just didn’t feel right. Far too many ill omens surely meant nothing but failure, as it was surely inconceivable that Convocation could possibly win unless world peace had been achieved, a cure for cancer found, and global warming halted. This certainly didn’t look likely to be any glorious coronation; no third time lucky.
But nobody had said that Convocation winning their first ever trophy had to be perfect. That Elysian victory on a sun-kissed, ocean-side carpet-of-a-pitch, against thoroughly decent opponents existed nowhere but in dreams. Reality bites, and it’s possible that the gritty, grubbiness of the moment gave a much-needed sense of tangibility to Convo’s finest hour.
However, while perfection hadn’t been promised, for forty-five minutes Convocation very nearly delivered it nonetheless. In the first half, a handful of Waterside half-chances aside, the team from Mather Avenue were nigh on untouchable, playing orgasmic football that made the heart race and the senses scream. It only took half a dozen passes after the first whistle for Ben Prince to find himself bearing down on the Waterside ‘keeper, but well inside the penalty area and with the hard work done the forward somehow contrived to blast his shot across the face of the target, pretty much parallel to the goal line. Fortunately for him, his miskick was directed straight at Richy Schofield, who had run in at the back post concomitantly, but from an identical, but mirrored angle he repeated his colleague’s gaffe and sent the ball whizzing harmlessly across the six-yard box again.
It was an early shot across the bows for the team in light blue, and one which they would come to regret not heeding. But before the yellow-shirted Convo really put the pedal to the floor, an altercation between those two old protagonists – Andy Willis and Keith Purcell – was only calmed by the intervention of the match referee (to warn them about the use of foul language in front of the watching children – kids from Liverpool for Christ’s sake). Battling it out with an opposition forward on the edge of his own penalty area, the defender played a blind back-pass to his ‘keeper, just as he had started to move off his line in anticipation of a shot (little realising that it would come from his own player). Purcell did well to block the ball with an outstretched leg, before it was hoofed to safety by a team mate, yet such was Willis’ relief that a daft own goal had been prevented he proceeded to ‘explain’ to his #1 where he could have done better, through the much-underappreciated medium of rant. It’s probably fair to say that there were one or two points that the goalkeeper didn’t agree with.
The mix up would prove to be the only genuine threat to the Convocation goal throughout the first period, as the defence looked unassailable and the midfield in front of it, unstoppable. Paul Fairclough and Joel Jelen were peerless for the duration of the half, distributing the ball with the wisdom of Solomon, and the Waterside thugs – who had begun whinging almost at the first whistle – were quickly reduced to trying to kick them off the park. But they couldn’t even do that. Even physically it was no contest, as the team from Barnham Drive found that their Plan B was just as ineffective against their highly motivated opponents as the hurriedly abandoned Plan A. With the two Richys, O’Brien and Schofield, manning the left and right wings respectively, both imbued with seemingly boundless energy and drive, an unshakable confidence in their own abilities, and a willingness to toil that would put Sherpas to shame, the battle of the midfields was far too much like men against boys for there to be anything level about this playing field.
A large part of the Waterside problem was that they had turned up with an arrogance that was made to look quite hollow the moment they failed to back it up with a performance of any substance. Whereas Convocation had begun the game believing they could win, their opponents had expected to do so, and all of their bluster, posturing, and self-deluding ideas that they could merely stroll around the pitch and pick up the cup, were just nails in their coffin. The Convo players were playing for each other, not for personal glory, and with the humility of knowing that defeat wouldn’t be the end of the world, they had carte blanche to play football like Liberace would have played piano, or Fred Astaire tap dance.
The back line was a fortress wall of experience, with even the youngest of its occupants, Kevin Schofield, having been a stalwart of Convocation defences for over ten years. And how it showed. The erstwhile vice-captain was playing the games of four men at times, as he pulled the strings of his fellow defenders like an accomplished marionette worker, making sure that everyone was where they should be. But the occasional positional tweaking aside, the back four didn’t need much adjustment. Willis alongside him had to be constantly reminded to watch the (offside) line, but otherwise was as valiant as could be wished for, and on a number of occasions threw his head in to clear dangerous balls where the Waterside players were only too willing to put their foot in.
The two full backs were equally as determined that nothing should pass. On the left, Billy Lamb – who had played in Convocation’s first cup final, twenty-one years ago – displayed the level-headed assurance of someone who knew what it was like to fall at the final hurdle, and would regularly bring sanity to proceedings and calm the game down if team mates seemed to be getting carried away. He proved time and again that you can clear your lines by belting the ball up field, and keep possession, but on other occasions he showed that it can be just as effective to play simple short passes.
His opposite on the right, Tim Jago, also put in a thoroughly pragmatic performance, dutifully getting stuck in to opponents who, nine times out of ten, towered over him. Twice the Scotsman cleared almost off the goal line during the game, including emptying one dangerous cross by belting the ball just wide for a corner – although, given his track record it’s possible that he was aiming a little nearer than he got, for that extra special cup-final own goal.
Indeed, Purcell’s nigh-on redundancy in the Convo goal was proof of what a good job his back four were doing, and what a shining example they were of how to defend competently. The same couldn’t be said of their counterparts, although to be fair to the Waterside defence, they really did have their work cut out. Prince on his own would have been hard enough to cope with, as the lanky forward had one of those itinerant games when he is almost impossible to defend against without a man-to-man marker. But with Chris Lamb also thrown into the equation the opposition rearguard suffered a torrid afternoon.
Due to the strengths of his game the young forward was always a threat over the top, especially against naďve opponents that had never seen him play before, and like the rest of his Convocation team mates he constantly moved around off the ball as well, offering a variety of options to whoever was in possession. But whilst the torpid Waterside players struggled to cope with the movement and remarkable work rate of all of their opponents during the first half, it was the pace of Lamb that they had absolutely no answer to. He led them a merry dance and tore their defence to shreds like a footballing Sonic the Hedgehog, and by the time he returned to the Convo changing room at the interval, barely out of breath but soaked to the skin nonetheless, he had three very similar goals in the bag.
Ten minutes had barely elapsed when he’d been sent through on goal by Prince, who had dropped deep and played a perfectly weighted pass through the Waterside back line, and although the ‘keeper saved Lamb’s initial shot with his knee, the ball rebounded kindly for the forward and he only had to roll it into an empty net.
Learning nothing from the mistakes made at that one, the blue-shirted defence continued to hold a suicidal high-line on the edge of the centre circle, so when, a quarter of an hour before the break, Jelen curled a pass over them from just inside the Convo half, they were once again caught in no man’s land. This time the #1 tried to outpace the forward to the ball, but never looked likely to get there first, and once Lamb had tapped it past his stranded opponent with his head, he jogged into the Waterside penalty area with nothing between him and a yawning, unmissable goal.
A collective sense of déjŕ vu was felt by everyone watching the game, five minutes after that, when the two players again went head-to-head for the ball, only this time with the goalkeeper expected to reach it first. But then, just outside of his area, in a moment that will probably give him many sleepless nights over the summer months, the #1 executed a perfect air-kick and ran right past the long punt, meaning that Lamb, who was already pulling up as he passed his adversary, had nothing more difficult to do than make sure that he placed the ball between the posts.
There was something incongruously ordinary about his hat trick though, considering how sumptuously the whole team played throughout those forty-five minutes. Richy Schofield had scored the other goal of the half, the second, from the penalty spot when Lamb – who else – had received a throw-in from Lamb pčre, turned, and been tripped just inside the corner of the Waterside eighteen-yard box. But despite the four-goal lead you almost felt short changed, as though the way that Convocation had completely dominated their opponents with a swashbuckling panache, at times passing them into oblivion, deserved something better, or rather, more befitting, than three open-goal tap-ins and a spot kick.
For one magical half the Wyncote side had played brave, breath-taking, beautiful football that nobody in their circles could have lived with. Everything just seemed to click into place at the right time, and everyone moved around the slippery pitch in perfect, almost telepathic, unison with each other, like some sort of footballing orrery. It was mesmerising to watch the ball ping between the players, their yellow shirts conjuring up comparisons with Jairzinho, Tostao and Pele, and to see play move almost effortlessly from the edge of the Convo penalty area to Waterside’s in three or four perfectly placed passes. At times you could be forgiven for thinking that there was only one side out there, and to paraphrase that banner that used to be unfurled at Anfield in the sixties: for those that were watching in black and white, Convocation were the ones with the ball.
On the few occasions that possession was lost, the player who had given it up would move heaven and earth to try and regain it, and when Waterside had the ball every Convo player would close their opponents down as though their lives depended on it, suffocating them of time and space. Every player knew what he had to do, and did it – nobody left anything for someone else to sort out. The work rate was phenomenal, and unrelenting for the duration of the half.
Which was why, from the point of view of the team from Mather Avenue, the second period was always going to be an anti-climax. If they’d have been given the option to play on for ninety minutes without a break then they would surely have taken it, because there was no way they could reproduce the heroics of before the break, after it; no way that they could sit through a ten-minute interval, four-nil to the good – a score line that had been beyond their wildest dreams at kick off – and then go back out and play such chimerical football again. Not having had time to contemplate what they had just done, and what they were so close to achieving.
And despite all of the platitudes (that it was “only half time”, “still 0-0”, that they “needed more goals”) and all of the warnings (including the curious threat that if anyone was seen laughing or taking the game less than one-hundred percent seriously then they would be “instantly pulled off”) it was surely unreasonable to expect the players to return to the pitch and not have half an eye on the final whistle. Only the most churlish could complain if they came back out looking a little bit like their usual selves, and perhaps a tad nervous – the victory was, after all, theirs to throw away.
Which goes a long way to explaining why, with all of the Convo players agreed that they mustn’t concede an early goal, Waterside pulled one back within two minutes of the restart. The Barnham Drive outfit won a throw-in near the left-hand corner flag and the recipient drifted into the penalty area past Billy Lamb, who seemed reluctant to make a challenge for fear of ‘bringing him down’. The further he came with the ball the more the angle to goal widened, and as Purcell moved across to compensate, the room he left at the near post became too much to resist for the blue-shirted player, who found it with a shot that was as low as it was decisive.
It was over the following five or ten minutes that the much-improved mental strength of the Convocation players shone through. A second concession could have triggered the mother of all collapses, at the worst possible time, and maybe six months ago that’s what would have happened. But the Seconds are of different stock these days, and with constant encouragement for each other and a sheer obdurate determination that they wouldn’t be breached again, they rode out their most difficult period of the game.
Everybody on the pitch seemed to realise that the battle that would win the war was the one immediately following that goal. The Waterside players, temporarily flushed with hope, tried to take the game to their opponents, throwing everything they could at them, but the Convocation defence had once again recovered its resoluteness and impregnability. They may have accidentally let their guard down for a split second and been hit with a sucker punch, but it had served as a warning: they had regrouped, reformed and were holding their foes at bay. If the Convo from before the break had been bewitching to watch with their attacking fancy-free style, then they would have to do the spade work after it, and show that they could be just as effective in defence.
There was a Blitz spirit in the yellow-shirted rearguard, with everybody helping everyone else out. Fairclough dropped from midfield, as did O’Brien and Richy Schofield, and for a little while they created a two-tiered back line, defending ahead of the original back four (that included Mark Done when he replaced Jago), for twice the impenetrability. If ever a Waterside player managed to pass one opponent, they would find another behind him, and whenever the ball looked as if it had finally been smuggled through the whole imbroglio, there was always one final leg ready to make a last-ditch challenge or clearance. And just in case the ball was lumped over the top of the deep-lying defence, Purcell was sweeping up inside the penalty area like a man possessed.
With an undercurrent of desperation creeping in due to the constant pressure, it was no longer as necessary to try and play the ball out of the back, and some times it was very much the right thing to just hoof it up the pitch. The two forwards, and Jelen – who hadn’t dropped as deep to help out the defence – had to hold the ball up when they got it, and give the rest of the team a chance to take a breather, and for once, the oft-maligned One-Trick Pony played his cards superbly. Whenever he gained possession Jelen would frustrate the already hostile opposition by shielding the ball well, laying it off for the quick breaks of O’Brien and Schofield on the wings, and generally preventing play from heading back towards his own goal too soon. When in the past he would have added needless flourish to a movement, on Sunday he played it safe; where he would once have complicated matters unnecessarily, he opted for common sense instead.
As each further minute passed without a second breakthrough, Waterside’s short-lived belief waned and they became even more argumentative and belligerent. The linesman at the Convocation end came in for increasing abuse as he (correctly) flagged their mistimed runs offside, and both Prince and Fairclough were on the receiving end of the attempted intimidation of one of their most moronic midfielders.
But any hope that they had of turning the deficit around was finally scuttled when Kevin Schofield found himself wandering at the other end of the pitch, charged down a defender’s attempted clearance inside the penalty area, and coolly as anything slotted across the new, less disastrous Waterside ‘keeper with his left foot.
It was probably at that point that everyone knew that the game was up. The palsied bout of nerves that had afflicted the Convocation players since the interval evaporated and they began to stroke the ball around again, free from any fears of implosion. At the other end of the pitch the promise that had seen the Waterside players attempt something resembling football for a brief period also vanished, and as the realisation sank in that defeat was no longer just likely but almost certain, their wanton aggression was replaced by borderline assault.
They began to take their frustrations out on the Convo players, and on no one more so than the chief architect of their downfall, Chris Lamb. Having already netted three goals before the break, the forward was denied a further two in the second half by the uprights, and won a second penalty when he was tripped, far-from-innocently, just inside the area. Richy Schofield’s lamentable spot kick was saved by the ‘keeper, but even so, one psychotic midfielder had had enough of Lamb’s tormenting and chose to scythe his nippy opponent down on the halfway line, as he threatened to break free of the back line again. A red card inevitably followed.
Ten minutes from the end, with Waterside having scored a second consolation goal through a back-post blast from a deep right-wing cross, another of the scoundrels was given his marching orders. A Convo man, possibly Chris McNally (who had replaced Jelen with a quarter of the game remaining – and looks more and more like Richard Coles from The Communards with every game), was crunched in the centre circle and the referee tried to play an advantage, but when it didn’t come off he pulled play back for a free kick. This was too much for the perpetrator of the initial foul who, not overly blessed with common sense, directed a stream of invective at the man in black that would make a sailor blush, thus ensuring that the yellow card that he would have got for the foul was accompanied by a second for his abusive language.
There was a slight worry that the malcontents might take note of the chants of the local scallywags, go “fucking mental”, and get enough players sent off to force the abandonment of the game. But even they lost the will to maim when Convocation netted a sixth, five minutes from the end, when Chris Lamb managed to square the ball through a penalty-area melee for Richy Schofield to exorcise the demons of his earlier spot-kick miss.
A last-minute lob from just outside the Convocation penalty area, which Jago suggested had a “hint of toe-pokery” about it, gave the final score-line a more evenly balanced lustre that it probably didn’t deserve. But otherwise the last word went to the introduction of Convo’s third and final substitution, who had been prowling the touchline throughout the game and barking out instructions, a luminous orange raincoat protecting him from the dreary elements. And it was Prince who made way, so that Paul Dickson could have a run out for the final couple of minutes – although maybe that should be ‘Sir Paul’, after the shrilling of the full-time whistle made him Convocation’s most successful captain ever.
And so after thirty-six years of pain, they’ve finally done it – a remarkable season has had a remarkable finale. Back in September, when the Seconds lost their first game eight-one, and at Christmas when they were caned ten-two in Chester, only the most romantic of dreamers could have foretold the campaign ending as it has. Convocation just don’t win cups and trophies, and even now you still have to pinch yourself to make sure it’s for real. But the triumph is all the sweeter for knowing of all the hardships, sleights, beatings and ignominies that they’ve had to overcome over the years, and all of the bad omens that they defied on the day. They may well have been "dancing in the streets of Convocation" on Sunday night, as at last adversity had been banished, but was it all worth it in the end?
You bet your life it was.
Man Of The Match: Although you can’t deny that without the contribution of Chris Lamb it would have been a lot closer, it would be unfair to single out any one player after such a fantastic all-round team performance. So instead the MOTM goes to Convocation’s ‘Twelfth Man’ – all of the WAGS, relatives, friends and non-playing players (the Convo Darren Fletchers) who made the journey to Winsford to cheer on their heroes.
Convocation (4-4-2): Purcell; Lamb B, Willis, Schofield K, Jago (Done); O'Brien R, Jelen (McNally), Fairclough, Schofield R; Lamb C, Prince (Dickson)
