Will Buckley: Cornwall on the march (original) (raw)

The Premiership is becoming grindingly predictable. This year, for the third time in four years, the same four teams will fill the top four positions. It is a corporate game.

Refreshingly different is the FA Vase final, which, a full Premiership programme notwithstanding, will attract one of the largest crowds of the day at Wembley this afternoon. More than 40,000 are expected to watch AFC Totton, from the edge of the New Forest, play Truro City, a number that doubtless will be swollen by those disbelievers who will attend because they still doubt that the stadium has been completed, and an invasions of 15,000 from both Cornwall and Hampshire.

Truro were happy tooling around in their Cornish backwater, until things changed in 2004 when property developer Kevin Heaney, 44, who is ranked 458th in that modern-day Debretts, the Sunday Times Rich List, appeared on the scene.

'I was approached to do some sponsorship for youth development and eight months later I ended up buying the club,' he says. 'They had debts of a third of a million, which is enormous for a step-seven club.' By which he means a club who were then seven levels below the Football League.

Since then they have enjoyed two successive promotions, the latest being from the Toolstation Western League Division One, which they have won at what, if you were understating things, might be described as a canter.

P W D L GD Pts

Truro City 41 36 4 1 155 112

Ilfracombe 41 28 5 8 46 89

Results have included a 15-0 win against Backwell United (Yetton 3, Reski 3, Watkins 3, Coxon 2, Hoyles 2, Pope, Gosling); 12-0 v Minehead (Yetton 3, Hooper 3, Ash 2, Tolley, Reski, Watkins, Smith); and 11-2 against Clyst Rovers (Watkins 3, Reski 3, Hooper 2, Yetton 2, Wills). It has been quite some season. Stewart Yetton, a former Plymouth Argyle reserve, has scored 71 goals with two games still to play.

After they beat Weston St Johns 4-0, the defeated manager consoled his team by saying: 'You've lost to a Conference South team' - which is to say a team who should be several leagues higher up the non-League pyramid. Not only in quality, but in wages. The wage bill for the entire club, picked up by Heaney, may be as high as £300,000 a year. Little wonder they have been installed as 2-7 favourites to win next season's Western Premier League.

That marks just the beginning of Heaney's ambition to make Truro the first professional club in Cornwall and the first to play in the Football League.

'We are already one league away from Southern League football, which no Cornish team has achieved,' he says. 'To get into the Football League will take seven successive promotions, which has never been done and is an almighty ask. If we could do it in 10 years that would be great - the first four one season at a time, the next three two seasons at a time.'

Heaney has been assisted by surely the only director of football in the Toolstation Western League, Chris Webb. 'He's Mr Truro City,' says Heaney. 'He first played when he was 14 and played over a thousand games for the club.'

Heaney decided to move to Cornwall from Wembley seven years ago. 'It's 10 minutes to the beach here. In London you are lucky if you've reached the second set of traffic lights.' His son Shaun, aged five, will be a mascot this afternoon; his daughter, Grace, two, will be sitting beside him in the Royal Box.

'The locals are starting to accept me,' says Heaney. 'Maybe when we've delivered the Champions League in 2026 they will say, "He's all right."' Cornwall and Truro are changing. There is the Eden Project and 'There are now 50 places to eat in Truro instead of six,' says Heaney. There are 600,000 people living in the county, a more than big enough catchment area to provide a large group of players and a decent crowd. Heaney hopes to cater for young footballers at the Truro City Sports Academy at Kenwyn for which he has sought planning permission and where it is intended to have 12 football pitches. 'We have just under 700 players already,' says Heaney.

Not so long ago such an academy would have been grandiose and excessive, for local schools focused on rugby and the county XV was the focus of Cornish pride. Now football is the biggest participatory sport in the county and all the schools are playing football. As rugby has gone professional, the county matches have lost some of their lustre, but professional rugby has also been a success in Cornwall, with Cornish Pirates having won a cup final at Twickenham, where they were backed by 10,000 fans. With Launceston having been promoted to the National League One, there will, at that rarefied level, be two Cornish derbies next season.

Twickenham and Wembley in one season - not bad going for Cornwall.