Not much glamour but at least Yeovil are on the way up

Yeovil Town, meanwhile, were in the equivalent of what is now Eastleigh’s division, the Blue Square South.

The Somerset side won promotion that month back to the top flight of the non league game, but could never have dreamed that just over a decade later they would be playing Saints in a league match.

They weren’t the only ones.

Twelve years after being five divisions below Saints, the Glovers arrive at St Mary’s next weekend for the two clubs’ first ever league meeting.

Of all the unglamorous sides Saints will play this season – and there are quite a few – none have come as far in such a short space of time.

While Saints, Leeds, Norwich and Charlton have been going down the divisions, there are not so many who have leapt up in the same way.

Thankfully my club, Exeter, are one of them with back-to-back promotions.

Yeovil and Carlisle have also gone up twice this decade.

Doncaster, now in the Championship, have done even better and good luck to them, it’s great to see unfashionable outfits dropping ice cubes down the vests of more high profile clubs*.

Yeovil won promotion to the Football League back in 2003, and within two years were in League One.

The Glovers – Yeovil used to be a centre for the glove making industry, but you probably knew that anyway – almost went up again in 2007 but lost to Blackpool in the League One play-off final.

To see Yeovil in the Championship would have been pushing the boundaries of improbability a bit, especially given their status when I started out my fledgling journalistic career in the Somerset town back in 1988.

Newly promoted to the old Vauxhall Conference, Yeovil were always one of the best supported non league clubs in the country – but their league performances had not really matched their legendary FA Cup displays.

They had only ever won the Southern League a few times, and never the Conference which was formed when the Southern and Northern Leagues amalgamated in the late 1970s.

Until 1987 the Football League was virtually a closed shop. The bottom four teams in the old Fourth Division would apply for re-election and it was a major shock when anyone was voted out.

It happened only a handful of times leading up to 1987 – with Wimbledon’s elevation to the Football League in 1977 the most famous, mainly because within 11 years they had won the FA Cup.

But creating automatic promotion and relegation from the Fourth Division to the non league thankfully changed the outlook entirely.

All of a sudden, there was an annual gateway to the promised land of the Football League.

It was a passageway that a club the size of Yeovil, with a good history and tradition, were always likely to go through at some stage.

If you ask me, the gateway should be larger.

It took until 2003 for the League to agree to two teams being demoted into the non league every season (Exeter were the first club to be automatically relegated after finishing second bottom).

Really, it should be three up and three down. It seems a nonsense that three teams go up from the Championship and League One and four teams go up from League One, but only two from the non league into the Football League.

Why should four teams go down from League One, but only two from the division below?

Surely there should be consistency throughout the divisions?

Surely there should be a much larger carrot for the top non league clubs?

You could argue that some of the clubs which win promotion from the non league add little to the Football League.

Accrington came up in 2007 with a former League pedigree, but their crowds rarely reach 1,500.

Macclesfield, promoted in 1997, are another club who struggle to attract many fans and Barnet aren’t much better.

Those three have found that Football League status does not magically equate to much bigger attendances.

But why should they?

There’s not many clubs in League Two with a large away support.

Yeovil were always going to be different from the clubs I mentioned above.

Back in the mid 1990s they attracted over 8,000 to Huish Park for a game in what is now the Blue Square South.

Though Yeovil isn’t a particularly large town, I know having lived there that there is a good community spirit about the club.

When I was there, albeit two decades ago, even if you didn’t go to games, or if you didn’t even like football, you wanted the team to win because it reflected well on the town.

That’s certainly not a spirit I have encountered in every place I’ve worked, with my home city – Exeter – being particularly guilty in that respect I’m sad to report.

I once tagged along with a group of Yeovil supporting friends I played football with to go to a Conference game at Welling.

The crowd was barely four figures and several hundred of those were Yeovil fans.

It was a glimpse into a side of football that supporters of big clubs will never know, never appreciate.

Those who have experienced the flipside of the big time DO know, and appreciate success better when it comes calling.

Yeovil fans who have been to non league footballing outposts will appreciate St Mary’s far more for the simple fact they have played at places like Croydon with none of the facilities to be found at Southampton.

I mention Croydon for no other reason than I once accompanied a Yeovil supporting friend to south London to watch the Glovers play.

In what seemed a good idea at the time – ie, lots of alcohol had been imbibed – I agreed to make a tortuous trip from our student digs in Cardiff to the capital’s suburbs to watch a Vauxhall Opal League encounter.

I can’t remember a single thing about the occasion other than we had to get a taxi from the train station and the taxi driver had (unsurprisingly) no idea where Croydon played their home games and asked us ‘do you mean Crystal Palace?’ We assured him we didn’t, and eventually we fought our way through a crowd of barely 300 to take our seats in the stand.

To my absolute horror, on returning to the station I found out we had to share a train with two groups of people I would have crossed the road to avoid – Welsh rugby fans and Cardiff City hooligans.

Wales had won a Five Nations match at Twickenham, so needless to say their supporters were in high spirits, while Cardiff fans had rioted at Orient the same afternoon.

The train was delayed for some time just outside Reading after some Cardiff numbskull pulled the emergency cord and it was way beyond last orders when we piled off the train with ‘Land of My Fathers’ ringing in my eardrums.

And all this to watch Croydon v Yeovil in the Vauxhall Opal League.

Students are keen to do ‘ironic’ things in the name of humour, but looking back there was nothing ‘ironic’ about my trip to Croydon.

It was just sheer stupidity.

Another Yeovil away game I went to was a midweek trip to Newport County shortly into the 1988/89 Conference season.

The Welsh club had been relegated from the Football League the previous season and in fact failed to finish their first non league campaign – debts of around £350,000 forced them into oblivion in February 1989.

A new club bearing the same name was formed a few months earlier but bizarrely were forced to play Hellenic League games in England, in Moreton in the Marsh.

Visiting Newport that night with Yeovil was a miserable experience – nothing new there, you might add, and you’d be right – and the locals weren’t happy when the Glovers equalised late on.

As I and my friend beat a hasty retreat in the Gwent rain amid dimly lit streets back to his car, I prayed to God I would never have to go back to Newport again.

Earlier that year, New Year’s Day to be precise, I had seen Exeter draw 1-1 at Somerton Park – a dismal match in front of an equally dismal crowd of about 1,800 – after which the car I was sitting in had the windows kicked in by local loons while we were stuck at traffic lights.

Being showered in glass was not an ideal way to start the year, and unsurprisingly we were freezing by the time we returned to Devon.

I have never been back to Newport since 1988, and you know what? I like it that way.

* I know, I nicked that line from Blackadder ...