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The 2015/16 football season in the England was perhaps the perfect year for a reissue of this book. It was the year that, against all odds and logic, unfancied Leicester City went on to win the English Premier League – it was also the season my team, Aston Villa, got relegated but we won’t dwell on that.

Coupled to this, most football supporters love an underdog story and many would confess to having cheered on teams like Bradford in their cup victory over Chelsea in the early rounds of the FA Cup in 2015. Of course, provided it’s not our team on the receiving end of the giant killing, we don’t mind.

How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup, published in 1975, is so much more than just a novella on an underdog team winning; it is also a much more interesting painting of rural society and how England was changing in the 1970s, seen through the eyes of J.L Carr.

The novella is narrated by Joe Gidner, a listless twenty-something who writes messages for the inside of greetings cards,…

I’ve been spending a little bit of time over the last couple of football seasons visiting a few grounds around the southeast of England. After a conversation with an old schoolmate, Bendz, I realised that it was time to go home.

I’d wanted to watch a cup match of some description for a while and identified the Saturday 10th September as the ideal time to visit Townsend Meadow – the home of Racing Club Warwick of the Midland Football League Division 1 (the 10th tier of English football's pyramid). Their match was agains Coventry United in the First Qualifying Round of the FA Vase, the amateur equivalent of the FA Cup.
After some conversation with my parents, who still live in my hometown Warwick, we established that the last time that I’d been to watch The Racers was back in the early nineties. They had been playing against a team in red, the name of which was long lost to both them and me. In fact, I was likely still attending first school at the time and it was probably the first…