​Addlestone & Weybridge Town
1885 - 1985
The club originally just used the name Addlestone FC, adopting the name Addlestone & Weybridge Town in 1980 just five years before their demise. However, the high point in the club's history probably came in the first season after they adopted their lengthier name when they reached the First Round of the FA Cup. They were drawn against Division Three side Brentford and, although drawn at home, chose to play the game at Griffin Park. They came away with a very creditable 2-2 draw before going down 2-0 in the replay. One other claim to fame that the club would have not wanted was that they were suspended by the Surrey FA in 1872 for supporter hooliganism.

London Caledonians F.C.
1886 - 1939
Although a London club, Caledonians had a Scottish player base. In the 1905-06 season they were one of the founder members of the Isthmian League, playing in the league until it was halted by the outbreak of war in 1939. They won the Isthmian League in that inaugural season, following that success up with five further league titles, the last coming in 1925. They made their second FA Cup Third Round appearance in the 1927-28 season, going out 3-2 at home to Crewe Alexandra. The club never re-appeared when football restarted after the war.

Leicester United
1900 - 1996
Known as Enderby Town until 1984, Leicester United were the county's second biggest team until their demise in 1996. Arguably the club was more successful under their original name than after they adopted the city's moniker. As Enderby Town they reached the 1st Round of the FA Cup as well as the 3rd Round of the FA Trophy, going out to AP Leamington and Bishop Auckland respectively. The club can boast a number of famous former players. Amongst the list is Chris Balderstone one of the last of the breed to play both professional football and cricket. Some of the older readers (like myself) may remember Chris as a member of the Carlisle United side that briefly led the First Division in 1974 (he actually scored the penalty against Spurs that sent them to the top).

Pegasus AFC
1948 - 1963
Pegasus AFC was formed shortly after the Second World War. It was a joint venture between Oxford University and Cambridge University. The club only existed for 15 short years but in that time won three Amateur Cups and the Oxfordshire Senior Cup. Possibly one of the greatest legacies of the club is the list of famous names who coached Pegasus, including three soon to be FA Cup winning coaches in Vic Buckingham (West Bromwich Albion 1954), Joe Mercer and Malcolm Allison (Manchester City 1969). Arthur Rowe, widely credited as being the inventor of the give-and-go style of play, also coached Pegasus for a while.

Wanderers FC
1859 - 1887 (2009 - )
When you look at the record of Wanderers FC and compare it to the length of time that the club was active, it can be argued that they are, pound for pound, the most successful FA Cup side ever. In the 28 years that Wanderers graced football pitches they won the Cup on no fewer than 5 occasions, including the inaugural competition in 1872. Of course, the football world was entirely different in those days and, in actuality, it is impossible to compare Wanderers with modern day clubs However, what they achieved as pioneers of the modern game is without question. In 2009 the club was reborn and now has a thriving men's and women's team playing in local London football.

The first letter of each of the answers spell out the name of a man who cut his playing and managerial teeth in non-league football at Dunstable Town, Bedford Town and Barnet. Now a Director of Football for a Football League team, he once featured in a documentary named after him, 'There's Only One.......'. (5,3).

1. North-East town that has two Northern league clubs, Town and Synthonia.
2. Former Leicester City, Arsenal and England striker Alan Smith started his career with this Worcestershire club.
3. Haverhill, Barton, Godmanchester, Willand, Atherton Laburnum, Baffin Milton.
4. Nickname of East Thurrock United and Bognor Regis Town
5. Cambridgeshire club, known as the Cuckoos, who were briefly managed by journeyman Ian Benjamin.

6. It's not easy to name a club that Steve Claridge has not played for over his long career, but which South coast non-league side did he start out at in 1983?
7. Football club based in Birmingham who sound more like one of the founders of the city of Rome.
8.One of the original non-league FA Cup giant-killers. This team made a name for themselves in the 1948-49 season when they defeated Sunderland 2-1 on their famous sloping pitch.



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Answers : 1. Billingham, 2. Alvechurch, 3. Rovers, 4. Rocks, 5. Yaxley, 6. Fareham Town,7.  Romulus, 8. Yeovil Town
Barry Fry

Can you work out which club is being described in the clues? All answers relate to current Step 5 teams (2019-20 season).

1. Originally, we were known as Axwell Park Colliery Welfare and played in the Derwent Valley League. Our golden era was in the late 70s and early 80s when we won the Wearside League and won the FA Vase in 1981. We now back in the Northern League Division One after two decades in Step 6.
2. Founded by the Sikh community in 1991, we began life as a Sunday league team in the Walsall and District League. Our first team now play in the Midland Premier League and we also have a thriving women’s and junior set-up as well as being known for the quality of our Punjabi cuisine.
3. We were founded in 1946, formed from the merger of Sudbury Rangers and the interestingly named Sudbury Ratepayers. David Seaman was once hired as our goalkeeping coach. Our ground was used as a training base by England during the 1966 World Cup.
4. Formed in 1872, we were founder members of the Bristol & District League (now known as the Western League). Although we have played in several local leagues, we are back in the Western League these days. In the 2005-06 season we had former Bristol Rovers and Liverpool defender Nick Tanner as our manager.
5. Founder members of the Bedfordshire FA, we can name all manner of famous players amongst our ranks including Jeff Astle, Kerry Dixon, and George Best (on loan). We were also the first club to be managed by Barry Fry, who also played for us in the early 1970’s. After seven seasons at Step 4 we are now back in the Spartan South Midlands League.
6. Formed three years before the end of the 19th Century, we were founder member so the Norfolk & Suffolk Senior League, which we went on to win three times. We currently play in the Eastern Counties League Premier Division. Known as The Bloaters we play our games in front of a superb Victorian grandstand that attracts groundhoppers from all over the country.
7. Not many teams can claim a future Prime Minister amongst their list of former players. However, this club, currently in the Wessex Premier League, can boast Clement Atlee as a former player, albeit well before he became leader of the country.
8. Another Midland Premier League side. This team’s former player and manager list is almost a who’s who of football. On the player side there is David Nish, Ernie Moss, Terry Hennessey, Julian Joachim and Jeff Blockley amongst others. Martin O’Neill was manager of the side in 1989.
9. This club has two nicknames, the lesser known of the two being The Trickies. Although they now play in the North West Counties Premier League, they can boast that they were founder members of the English Second Division in 1892. They can also lay claim to a European Cup winner in their ranks when Bruce Grobbelaar played one game for the club in 1999
10. This Northamptonshire club, although originally formed in 1867 resigned from the league in 2002 but were resurrected when a group of friends decided to get the club going again. They put together a team of people, including Snooker World Champion Peter Ebdon (who now has a stand named after him) and started again in local football, regaining their Step 5 status in 2006.

​As the 2017-18 Reading Sunday League season entered the final run-in early in 2018 one club, Caversham United, looked to be in dire straits. Winless, bottom of Division Four, struggling to raise a team some weeks, and on the verge of folding. Things were not looking good at all.
However, a group of friends decided that they should attempt to breathe some life back into the cub and give one last shot. So began a quite remarkable turnaround. The club managed to avoid a completely winless season, and, during the Summer break, rebuilt their depleted squad. With the new season just underway, work started on building the ‘new’ Caversham United. Led by player and Chairman Paul Gutteridge, they embarked on a social media campaign, centred on the Twitter platform, creating online polls to give the club a nickname and suggest the design of a new badge. The focus of this early venture into social media was around the location of the club, the locally famous bridge into Caversham and the goats on the Reading coat of arms. This helped to give the club an identity and raise some local awareness. The Billy Goats, as the new nickname determined, together with their Caversham Bridge badge, gained a ripple of attention locally, including local media, and a renewed vigour which began to show through results on the pitch.
The next move came when the club teamed up with Ireland-based, online football kit and memorabilia entrepreneurs fooballkitbox.com, to begin a competition to design a new kit for the club. This was an incredibly successful move with hundreds of kit designs being submitted, gaining more followers and recognition for both the club and for footballkitbox.com.
The club continued to improve on the pitch, reaching a cup semi-final and, adorned in their wonderful new kit, attaining promotion by means of a second-place finish. The Twitter following of the club was now well over 3,000 and included a host of professional clubs from around the world, such as AS Roma and 1FC Koln (who also have a goat on their badge).
During the Summer, shortly after the announcement that the club had been promoted two divisions and would play in Division Two the following season, they also ran a hugely successful charity cup competition, The Caversham Cup, featuring teams from across the country. The event raised over £2,000 for cancer charity Balls To Cancer.
Their Twitter following is now way above 5,000. They have just completed a second kit design competition with footballkitbox.com for a change strip, have a new ground with better facilities and are most definitely a club on the up. What a turnaround! From almost going out of existence to a double promotion,  thousands of followers from over 100 countries across the globe and two superb new kits all in the space of 18 months. That is the power of social media when used in the right way.
Caversham United FC - @CaverhsamUnited
Footballkitbox.com - @footballkitbox

The first in what may well become a series of articles looking at teams that are no longer with us:
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Brierley Hill Alliance
I've started this article with this team, defunct since 1981, because they were the first team that I ever saw live.My memory of the match is extremely hazy - I was 3 or maybe 4 at the time - but I do remember that the occasion was Brierley Hill Alliance v Kidderminster Harriers, it was around 1968 or 1969, Kidderminster played in all red, Brierley Hill in all green (I think). The ground at Cottage Street is now a supermarket, but to a small boy like me it was huge and, from memory, almost entirely consisting of rusting corrugated iron sheets.
The club was formed in 1887 after two local sides, Brockmoor Harriers and Brockmoor Pickwicks, merged and apparently, the ground at which I remember seeing them play had been home to the team since 1888-89, which may explain the vast expanses of rusty ironwork. The spent the last 4 years of their existence playing at the Dell Stadium, a short distance from Brierley Hill town centre and, actually, much closer to their original base in Brockmoor.
The clubs' heyday was probably in the 1950's and early 60's when they were recognised as one of the strongest non-league sides in the region, won the Birmingham Senior Cup twice and progressed to the 2nd Round of the 1961-62 FA Cup, eventually going down 3-0 at Shrewsbury Town. During this period the club also made a piece of history when they were involved in the first FA Cup match to be played under floodlights, a 4-2 replay defeat at Kidderminster Harriers.

Northampton Spencer
The demise of Northampton Spencer in 2016 was, personally, a sad occasion. I only visited the Kingsthorpe Mill ground once, but I found it to be a wonderful setting for non-league football and I immediately took a great liking to the club.
Formed in 1936 by former members of the Spencer School football team, they took the name Spencer School Old Boys, they joined the United Counties League in 1968 and immediately gained promotion to the Premier Division and moving into Kingsthorpe Mill in 1971. I think it is fair to say that the club never set the footballing world alight with just a single United Counties Premier League title (1991-92) to their name. Although they did finish as runners-up the following season as well as in the 1997-98 season. The never made it out of FA Cup qualifying but did achieve the Fourth Round of the FA Vase in 1987-88, playing eight games before falling 2-1 at Gresley Rovers.
Unfortunately, when long-time Chairman Graham Wrighting decided to call it a day, there was no-one to fill his shoes and the club folded at the end of the 2015-16 season. I am just glad that I managed to see one of their games before it was too late.

Hayes FC
As a former West Bromwich Albion season ticket holder, Hayes FC is a name that I immediately associate with Cyrille Regis, one of The Baggies all time favourites. For it was the West London club that West Brom purchased the striker from in 1977. Probably the best £10,000 that the club ever spent. Of course, the club was later to sign Cyrille's nephew Jason Roberts, who also started his career at Hayes.The club was formed in then early part of the 20th Century as Bolwell Mission, changing to Hayes 20 years later in 1929 nut retaining the nickname The Missioners for their entire existence. Over the years the club achieved a fair amount of success in the non-league/amateur world, twice reaching the Second Round of the FA Cup, reaching the Quarter-Final of the FA Trophy and being beaten finalists in the 1930-31 FA Amateur Cup (the forerunner of the FA Vase).
After three seasons in the Conference South (now National League South) the club merged with another Conference South side, Yeading FC, to form Hayes & Yeading United, now playing in the Southern League Premier Division after being promoted from Step 4 in 2018-19.

Gothic FC
I have included this club in the article purely because, until a few weeks ago, I had never heard the name before and it intrigued me enough to look into them origins of the club. The club was actually formed in 1898 as, as with a lot of early football teams, were a works team, in this case the works team of a company called Laurence, Scott and Electromotors based in Norwich. The company, which got itself off the ground by installing the lighting for the fledgling Colman's Mustard Carrow Works, soon built a new HQ, close to Colman's and was later to become Norwich City's home in Carrow Road. The new factory was called the Gothic Works, hence the name given to the football team. The team had some success in local football, winning the Norfolk & Suffolk League on seven occasions as well as taking the Norfolk Senior Cup three times. They joined the Eastern Counties League in 1963 but never lost their amateur status, which meant that they found it difficult to retain their better players. They almost went out of business at the end of the 1974-75 season but were saved by some local fund-raising. The stay of execution, however, was quite short-lived and at the end of the 1977-78 season the club withdrew from the Eastern Counties League with the intention of continuing lower down the pyramid in the Anglian Combination. This, due to some player restrictions placed on the club was not possible, and they had to drop even lower down, eventually folding after a few more season.The club's Heartsease Lane ground was adopted by Norwich United in 1985 before the Planters moved into the current Plantation Park home.

Bromsgrove Rovers
From humble beginnings to the fringe of the Football League. Bromsgrove Rovers almost had a Roy of the Rovers outcome before their untimely demise in 2010. The club was formed way back in 1885, playing local football in the Studley & District League. They steadily climbed up the pyramid over the next hundred years, finally making the dizzy heights of the Football Conference (National League) at the end of the 1991-92 season. What followed, in that remarkable year, was almost the greatest story ever told in non-league football. Rovers were one of the smallest teams, with one of the smallest budgets in the league but still managed to finish in second place. In truth they weren't as close to a Football League place as it may seem, trailing Champions Wycombe Wanderers by 15 points, but nevertheless it was a unbelievable achievement for the club. Sadly, that was as good as it got and four season later they finished second from bottom and were relegated back to the Southern League. The decline continued with two more relegation in three years, seeing the cub drop into the Midland Alliance. A brief resurgence, with promotion the following season and then again, to the Southern Premier in 2007-09, was swiftly followed by another drop into Step 4 and then, 2 years and a whole heap of financial problems later, the club were thrown out of the Southern League and wound up. A sad end to a club which almost achieved greatness.
On the plus side a new club, Bromsgrove Sporting, has grown out of the ashes of Rovers, inheriting the magnificent Victoria Ground and sporting Rovers' green as their change kit. Sporting have made their way up the league and, at the time of writing, are holding their own in Step 3, a league higher than Rovers were in when they folded. Hopefully, the current administration has learned from the harsh lesson suffered by Rovers.