Today I'm going back 14 years to 2008 and the FA Trophy Final between Ebbsfleet United and Torquay United at Wembley played in front of 40,186 spectators. 258 teams set out on the road to Wembley that season but it came down to these two as to who would go on to lift the FA Trophy. If you remember, the FA Trophy is a national competition for the bigger Non-League clubs situated at levels five, six, seven and eight in the English football pyramid.
In these articles I have often maligned the programme production team for their efforts in games such as this. Not today however. The cover has it all in my opinion. Winning the Final is what this game is all about and the photograph of a mean, moody and magnificent Trophy says it all. The Final. Wonderful!
Torquay United were most people's favourites to land the Trophy. The Gulls had history in that they were a Football League side from 1927 until 2007 and then again from 2009 to 2014 when they were relegated into Non-League football for a second time. Ebbsfleet United on the other hand had an entirely Non-League track record along with an unusual ownership model and a recent rebranding. Gravesend & Northfleet were formed in 1946 following the merger, as the name suggests, of Gravesend United and Northfleet United but, in 2007 the decision was taken to rename the club as Ebbsfleet United following considerable regeneration in the area and the building of Ebbsfleet rail station on the route of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. Later the same year the club was taken over by the 27,000 owners of myfootballclub.com. It must have been a tight squeeze at Wembley that day if all the owners had wanted to avail themselves of some pre-match hospitality! Fans of York City may be interested to know that Fleet's Neil Barrett was in their line-up that day and he would transfer to York the following year.
Torquay came into the game off the back of a Play-Off Semi-Final defeat against local rivals Exeter City (who would go on to win the Play-Off Final and be promoted back into the Football League). They were about to suffer heartbreak again. Zero to hero of the featured match was Ebbsfleet's Chris McPhee. McPhee had been with Torquay the previous season and indeed had been part of their side which had been relegated out of the Football League. Now he was playing for Ebbsfleet and he proceeded to miss a first half penalty before tapping home just before the break for the crucial goal which won the FA Trophy against his former employers. The ball had rolled harmlessly into the corner but Torquay's normally reliable defender Chris Todd allowed John Akinde to muscle him off the ball and he crossed for McPhee to slide home. It was a terrible goal to give away and Torquay paid the price in full. Ebbsfleet manager Liam Daish surely set a world record that day in terms of satisfying the greatest number of owners at a single game!
The postscript to the myfootballclub story was that, at the end of one year of ownership, the majority of the owners failed to renew their annual subscriptions and the club failed in it's target of having a minimum of 15,000 owners. In 2013, the remaining owners took the decision to hand 2/3rds of their shareholding over to the Fleet Supporters Trust with the remaining 1/3rd going to the majority shareholder. The internet ownership model was dead although watch out for Hashtag United of the Isthmian League North (the eighth level of the English football pyramid) who are trying a different approach via the internet by using Youtube and Twitter to promote themselves and are having some success with that model. Chelsea's Cesar Azpilicueta is one of their owners.
CRB Match No. 1630
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