Non-league Football

Nigel Adams Excerpts

Thursday 4th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Bingham (High Peak) (Con)]

This is an incredibly important debate, because it is really important that non-league football should survive. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman) on securing the debate. My knowledge of non-league football goes back to about 1973, when I started watching Buxton, and I wear my Buxton football club tie today with pride. I remember when Buxton won the Cheshire league, and I was a member of the committee that ran the club in the early 1990s. I used to travel to home and away matches.

The thing about non-league football is that it binds communities; it binds towns and areas together. When we used to go to watch Buxton, we used to travel up to Morecambe in the north-west. I can see the hon. Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (Jonathan Reynolds) in his place, and I can also remember many a famous victory at Bower Fold. I remember an auspicious 3-2 win in which I still reckon that the guys behind the goal got the penalty that won the match, but that is another story.

It was about the community. We used to go to matches, and we used to go into the bar beforehand and talk to the opposing supporters. We used to sit there and chew the fat about the good of non-league football and about how our team was better and their team was worse. It was a day out and it bound the community together. I remember the non-league football annual guide coming out at the beginning of each year, and I would buy my copy and tick off the grounds that I had been to. And people might think I am sad, but I always used to have season ticket No. 1 at Buxton. That is the kind of thing that non-league football does to people.

I recently went with my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson)—who I believe is wearing his Swindon Supermarine tie today—to watch that team play, and I was very much reminded of Buxton. I shall also talk about Glossop North End in a moment. This is about local people working together for the good of the community and the good of the club. We see people rolling the ground and marking the pitch. Some of the white lines might not be very straight, but the work gets done, and it is done by local volunteers.

I look at non-league football today and I worry. I remember the day when Goole Town came to play Buxton, and they had Tony Currie playing for them. He looked like he had had a few more curries by then, but it was still Tony Currie. Even then, he had fantastic ball control. I think he still has—I do not know if he is watching this.

[Nigel Adams (Selby and Ainsty) (Con)]

I am sure that Tony Currie will be very grateful to my hon. Friend for that. He was an example of a player coming down from the higher leagues to play in non-league football. I remember watching Goole Town, freezing my toes off, as a youngster. We had a player called Tony Galvin—does my hon. Friend remember him?—who was sold to Tottenham Hotspur for £5,000. That was a huge amount of money for Goole Town. On a more serious point, does my hon. Friend feel that the obsession on the part of the larger clubs to import players from abroad denies that revenue to non-league clubs and denies their players the opportunity to get into the professional league?