Today I'm going back seven years to 2015 and the FA Vase Final at Wembley played in front of 9,674 people, most of whom had had to travel quite a long way to get there. In recent years, the Football Association have adopted the habit of pairing the FA Vase and Trophy Finals on the same day and holding them together at Wembley in "Non-League Finals Day" with a single ticket gaining you access to both. The first time that that happened was in 2016 so Glossop North End versus North Shields can lay claim to have been the last standalone FA Vase Final.
I mentioned the travelling in my introduction. Glossop (near Manchester) is a 189 mile three and a half hour drive to Wembley whereas North Shields is even further away from the National Stadium at 281 miles or almost five hours in the car. In these days of environmental consciousness you do wonder as to the sense of dragging nearly 10,000 people to the suburbs of London when such a game could have perhaps been played at somewhere like Elland Road, Leeds or the Riverside Stadium, Middlesbrough which would at least have been somewhere between the two participating clubs. I can accept the argument that many of the players would want to play at Wembley, possibly for the only time in their lives, but I wonder if they would have traded that for a much larger attendance and a much shorter journey? Anyway it was at Wembley in 2015 and, for me at least, that was fairly convenient.
For those that missed one of my previous articles on the FA Vase it's perhaps worth recapping that the FA Vase is a national competition for the smaller non-league clubs (below the level of the National Leagues and the Trident Leagues (Southern, Northern Premier and Isthmian Leagues) at the ninth level of the English football pyramid and below. At the time, Glossop played in the North West Counties League Premier Division and North Shields were to be found plying their trade in the Northern League Division 1.
In the featured game first blood went to Glossop in the 55th minute with Tom Bailey sliding in to poke the ball home from a corner. With just ten minutes remaining and Glossop surely beginning to dream of climbing the steps to lift the Vase, North Shields struck an equaliser. It was another goal scored from a corner kick, nodded home by Gareth Bainbridge for his 48th goal of the season. I doubt that he will have scored a more important one than that. With no further scoring in regulation time, the game went into 30 minutes of extra time. Six minutes into the added period, North Shields scored what proved to be the winner via substitute Adam Forster. Shields manager Graham Fenton, the former Aston Villa and Leicester City player (amongst others) was clearly delighted at the final whistle albeit that, little over a year later, he moved south of the river, exchanging the manager's job at North Shields for that of South Shields instead. I wonder how many people have made that move? Fenton was eventually sacked by South Shields earlier this year when Kevin Phillips was appointed into the South Shields hot seat. But on this particular sunny Saturday in May, North Shields had won a national Final at Wembley for only the second time in their history (they also won the FA Amateur Cup in 1969) and it doesn't get much better than that!
CRB Match No. 2037
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