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arthur-salisbury
26th October 2017

Is there life on Vase?

Heavy rain, heavy eyelids and with heavy heart I hereby report West Didsbury & Chorlton’s run in the FA Vase is at an end
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By the time I’d got home I was knackered. Heavy rain, heavy eyelids, and with heavy heart I hereby report West Didsbury & Chorlton’s run in the FA Vase is at an end. Out in the first round proper for the fourth time in five years, but who can blame them? After all, they were playing the world champions.

Supporters of West Auckland Town will be sighing in dreary recognition at that sentence. He couldn’t even go a paragraph without mentioning it. I’d enthusiastically told the famous West Auckland story to my girlfriend on the way to the match. It lost its sheen, for us both, the third time we overheard our fellow attendees regale each other with the ripping yarn they already knew. Well, I’m back in the league world now. So here it is:

Sir Thomas Lipton, of Lipton tea fame, was a jolly old Scottish Victorian entrepreneur, a sports enthusiast, and philanthropist who, in 1909, established the Sir Thomas Lipton Trophy. Representatives of Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and England were invited to take part. It’s unclear why West Auckland, then as now a small village team in County Durham, were invited to represent English football. A very tenuous legend has it that the club benefited from an initials-based mix-up and that Woolwich Arsenal were meant to have been sent. This is very probably not true but I’ll be damned if I’m leaving it out.

West Auckland went on to win the 1909 trophy, and two years later were invited back. In 1911 they beat Zürich in the semi-finals and in the final met Juventus. They took them to the cleaners, and, as 6-1 winners and two-time champions were allowed to keep the trophy, which they subsequently pawned. The trophy was returned to the club in 1960 after the village raised the funds, but it was nicked in 1994 and never recovered. In 2009, Juventus sent their under-20s to West Auckland and won 7-1, meaning that, in terms of head-to-head, Juventus are now as good as West Auckland.

To the present day and more pressing concerns with the FA Vase. What tremendous fun the FA Vase is. It’s my one opportunity to patronise clubs even smaller than mine. The Vase is better loved than the Trophy but it has a serious design flaw, and that is the dominance of Northern League clubs. Eight of the last nine finals have been won by a team from the Northern League, which is the strongest league at Step 5 (consensus is that the Essex Senior League is the weakest).

Still, West Didsbury would’ve fancied themselves in with a chance to reach the second round proper for the first time in their history. They beat AFC Blackpool and Stockport Town to get here and have had a very decent start to the season in the North West Counties Premier. But, I have to say, what a terrible game of football that was. Our brothers over the Atlantic might have mocked heartily our small-fry storm but it certainly made watching a bad football match more tedious than usual.

In fact, I remember nothing of the first half, nothing beyond the guilt and shame familiar to all supporters when they’ve brought someone along with them. It was not end-to-end stuff, nor was it fought in midfield. It wasn’t really fought anywhere. The ball was here and then there and then there, seemingly random movement with no pattern like the quantum movements of an electron. Nathan Fisher put West Auckland in front on 49 minutes, offside contentious but played to the whistle. Didsbury were a bit tireder and a bit smaller, and perhaps on a sunny day they could’ve made a match of it. But football is much harder in such conditions. The Vase is a great leveller; the rain is not.

Two goals in three minutes prematurely swelled the bar. A defeat to West Auckland Town, finalists at Wembley in 2012 and 2014, is nothing to be too disheartened about. Seasons come, seasons go, but the Northern League conundrum lives eternal.


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