Bamber Bridge out to make a stand

Walter Gammie on a club striving to keep pace off the field with progress on it

To reach Bamber Bridge Football Club, Arthur Jackson walks to the end of his garden, opens a gate and steps on to the touchline.

Jackson would have it no other way. Irongate used to be farm pasture. He knew it would make a perfect permanent home for a club outgrowing park football and negotiated its purchase in 1983 from the Lancashire New Town Development Corporation.

"I tell the players that there used to be donkeys out there - and there still are," Jackson said, as Denis Allen winced. The chairman has heard all the old lines too many times.

Allen took over as chairman when Jackson stepped down in 1992 upon reaching the age of 65. As club president, Jackson still keeps a benevolent eye on the ground as well as soothing the complaints of neighbours less enthusiastic than he at having a football stadium over the back fence.

One Sunday morning in April, Jackson could not believe what he saw when he pulled open his curtains. The club's stand lay in ruins, ripped apart by gales. "I slept through it, didn't hear a thing," he said.

The stand, the work of volunteers and extended as Bamber Bridge shot from the Preston and District League in six years to become UniBond League champions in 1996, still lies forlorn - pinned by scaffolding and ribboned in warning tape.

Small wonder, then, at the delight of the two men at Bamber Bridge's date with Cambridge United in the second round of the FA Cup on Saturday. It is a playing highlight that Jackson places alongside reaching the FA Vase semi-finals in 1992 and hosting the Czech Republic to a warm-up match, lost 9-1, before Euro 96.

Allen can be forgiven for making rough calculations as to how much money the first passage of the club beyond the qualifying rounds might make. Although the UniBond League has been patient, although an answer to an application for a grant from the Football Trust is expected at the start of December, the pressure is on to put up a new stand and preferably one that would be acceptable to the Nationwide Conference.

For a ground opened only in 1987 and one that first staged senior football in 1990, it was asking too much for Irongate to be ready for the Conference in 1996. Winning the league also marked the departure of Tony Greenwood, the manager, to Accrington Stanley. "Let's just say, the chairman couldn't fund the requirements of the manager," Allen said.

Two seasons of dicing with relegation followed, with Mick Holgate, Martin Eatough and Wayne Harrison coming and going as managers. Holgate paid the price for a 4-0 defeat at Newcastle Town in the FA Cup three years ago.

The rot was stopped by the return of Greenwood. "It's been up and up ever since," Allen said. "I don't know what his secret is and if you ask him, he'll just say 'I keep plodding along'." Jackson believes that it is no mere coincidence that Greenwood, a plumber, lives in the town and "90 per cent" of the players once more live locally.

The strong sense of community might hark back to when Jackson trundled round Bamber Bridge in his wagon to collect waste paper to be processed in the Burnley paper mill where he worked, to raise funds. It includes the days of the bar-duty roster, a recollection that makes both men shudder, in the clubhouse - the original put up after a bold approach by Jackson to Vaux, the brewer, and now, handsomely extended, under the aegis of Bass.

The civic sense of well-being, fostered by Baxi, the boiler and gas fire manufacturers based 200 yards down the road that supports Bamber Bridge and owns Preston North End, will cover both their interests. As Bamber head for Cambridge, Preston play host to Enfield.