Alan's legacy to Padiham

There are certain clubs in our league where, if you say the club name, there is one person you automatically think of – and when it comes to talking about Padiham Football Club, it’s fair to say that the first name on most people’s lips would be the club Secretary Alan Smith.

A Padiham man born and bred, Alan has been the driving force behind the club’s rise from the depths of the West Lancashire League in the 1990’s when they were close to folding. From an unpromising start point when the club had huge debts and minimal facilities, they are now established in the Vodkat League and playing at the Arbories Memorial Sports Ground, which is one of the best appointed non-league grounds in the North West.

It’s a fascinating tale of how one man can have a vision for a football club and years later see it turn into reality – although Alan could never have dreamed of how his involvement with the club would turn out when he first set foot in the Arbories as a young player.

“Padiham were one of a number of clubs I played for in local football, although in my playing days I probably played more against them than I did for them”, he explained. “I played for Nelson when they were in the West Lancashire League, before they joined the North West Counties League, and I also played for a team called Padiham Wanderers who were a successful club in the East Lancashire Amateur League”.

It was while at Padiham Wanderers that Alan’s association with Padiham FC began in earnest. In 1990 he was running Padiham Wanderers when Padiham FC dropped out of the North West Counties League, because the Arbories at that point didn’t meet the required ground grading standards. The two clubs had discussions and the upshot was that Padiham Wanderers amalgamated with Padiham FC, with the Arbories remaining as the home ground.

“Padiham were struggling as they had accumulated a number of large debts, and after being thrown out of the North West Counties League, the manager, players and most of the management committee left. After the few remaining members contacted me and asked if I’d like to get involved, we agreed to merge and entered a team in the West Lancashire League and kept the name of Padiham FC. So, although I’d played for Padiham, it was in 1990 that my involvement began in earnest”.

Alan and his committee from Padiham Wanderers duly joined the new club, but they soon began to struggle under the debt burden. “There was a big debt to the bank, Lees brewery and various individual debtors, so we had the problem of keeping the club going and slowly trying to reduce the debt”, he says.

“So I went out and spoke to the people we owed money to, and agreed repayments with them, and after that it was just a case of gradually paying debts off over a period of years. That meant the football side of things had to be run on a shoestring really, as any fund raising went towards paying the debt rather than the team.

"For many years we just had local lads turning to play for enjoyment, and we were never going to be challenging the better sides in the league in the first few years”.

By the mid 1990’s the debts began to reduce and Alan’s thoughts turned to where he and his fellow committee members saw the club going. “We agreed we wanted to get back into the North West Counties League”, said Alan, “but as we had been thrown out years earlier because of the state of the ground, we knew we had a lot of work to do to get near to where we needed to be.

“We had to start looking for funding, and around that time the lottery came along, so everyone was telling us that the lottery would be the place to get money to rebuild a sports facility. I reckon that I must have been one of the first people to ever submit a lottery grant – I had the forms filled out and sent in before the lottery had even started! Even the grant officers at the lottery office weren’t sure how it was going to work at that stage.

“After a long period – about five years – we finally were awarded a grant of around £160,000. That gave us a basic shell of buildings but wasn’t enough, and after more to-ing and fro-ing, the lottery increased their grant to £270,000 which covered the clubhouse and changing rooms, and nothing else”.

The work started in April 1999, was completed in October 1999, and by the following summer Padiham were back in the North West Counties League, joining along with Stone Dominoes for the start of the 2000-01 season.

From then on, it’s been a case of continual improvements at the Arbories, with Alan heavily involved in various grant applications and fund raising activities. “After joining the league, the next big job was to get floodlights in, which we managed within about three years. Since then, we’ve added a car park and got other parts of the ground up to scratch, thanks to various grants from other sources, including over £50,000 from the Football Foundation.

“In total we’ve spent around £400,000 in getting to where we are now, the latest addition to the ground being the new stand that was opened last September. We gave ourselves 10 years to complete the whole job, so we are about 18 months away from the target now, and we are well down the track on getting to where we wanted to be”.

Alan is too modest to mention that the amount raised for the club also included a cheque for £2000 from Thwaites brewers in 2007. That came about as a result of Alan being named ‘Thwaites Lancaster Bomber Grassroots Sports Personality of the Year’, a national sports award open to anyone who has made a major contribution to grass roots sport.

The award was further proof – if any was needed – of the time and effort Alan has put in over the years at the club. But I’m intrigued to know what it is that keeps him going. Why does he spend so time on the club? What is it that gives him a buzz about being involved? Most of all, what does he get out of it?

“I’ve always loved football, ever since I was a little kid”, he explains. “I was fortunate enough to be able play competitive football for a number of years, albeit just at amateur level. I enjoyed my time playing football, and when I came to Padiham in 1990 I was still playing.

“But there is a time when you can’t play any more, and what I’ve done is what a lot of people haven’t done, and that’s put something back into the sport that you’ve enjoyed being involved with. I get very disappointed when I think of all the players that have played for this club over the years and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of players who have come back to help out.

“I don’t think that way, I firmly believe you should give something back. In 1990 I looked at the state the club and the ground were in and felt that the town team and ground were worth saving, so I set about doing that. What keeps me going is that by continuing to work for the club, I’m playing a part in ensuring that the people of Padiham have a place to come and watch a decent standard of football in good surroundings.

“I’m a great believer that the Arbories is one of the town’s main assets and by putting effort in now, I and the other people at the club can secure its future for a long time to come. Not only that, most people will know of the town through sport and because of Padiham Football Club, because they are a well established club, playing in the non-league pyramid and playing in national competitions like the FA Cup and FA Vase.

"It’s beneficial to the town to have a good sports ground with good facilities, and that’s what gives me the drive and enthusiasm to keep working for the club”.

Talking to Alan, the community theme regularly crops up in the conversation, and it’s clear that there is a close affinity between the townspeople and the football club, with the Arbories at the centre of many sporting activities other than just football.

“We affiliate ourselves not just to football but to a lot of other sports in the town as well”, he says. “You end up networking with different groups, we let them use our facilities and then if we are putting an event on that we want supporting we get them involved.

“We recently organised a big sports exhibition in the Town Hall, where we invited all the local sports clubs to be there. We had an exhibition that covered not just the football and cricket clubs, but sports such as martial arts, swimming and bowling. In the summer we have a Padiham Sports Week, and the Arbories is a central part of that too”.

So, with good facilities in place and the people of the town supportive of the club, it’s a great foundation to build a successful football team. But how high can Padiham realistically expect to aim? Alan feels that there is probably a limit to what the club can achieve.

“Padiham is an old mill town, and I don’t want to sound as if I’m running it down, but it isn’t the most affluent town in Lancashire and it’s not the biggest either”, he points out. “We have been badly hit in recent years, particularly in the past couple of years, with factories and other workplaces closing down. That means the remaining local businesses have been affected too, and there’s not as much money around for firms to use for sponsorship, advertising and so on.

“But we are still able to get support from the local business community – not a massive amount maybe, but it is support and we are very grateful for that. Overall, I can’t fault the people of Padiham for the way they support the club.

Sure we’d like two or three hundred turning up every week, but we’re not alone in wanting that at our level of football. We have to take it one step at a time. First we need to get promotion to Division One, consolidate there, see how the town responds and then look at what would be involved in taking the next step up”.

As we begin to wrap up the conversation, I ask Alan if there are any moments that stick in his mind from his years of working at the club.

“One of the more unusual incidents happened at a pre season friendly about three or four years ago”, he says. “We were playing against Bury’s youth team at the Arbories on a hot sunny day in the summer, and this guy who must have been in his 60’s decided to streak across the pitch. It was a really hot day and he was just wearing a pair of shorts anyway so he whipped them off and ran on to the pitch.

“Another incident I remember happened at the area behind the goal at the cricket field end of the ground. Myself and the chairman at the time, Mick Muldoon, were there and it was a windy day. The wind was swirling around under the stand roof and was almost lifting it off, so Mick and me went up on to the roof to see if we could do some repairs.

“Anyway, we were up there, holding the roof down in the face of a gale to try and get some bolts in it to hold it down and then a strong gust of wind lifted the roof completely up. Mick and me were on there, holding on for dear life. If someone had had a video camera there to film it, we’d have been on TV on one of those video shows.

"The other thing I remember about that was that the Lancashire Police were playing cricket on the cricket field at the time, and although we were shouting for help they just carried on playing!”

I finish our discussion by asking Alan about his plans for the future. After all, there is a limit as to how long anyone can spend devoting all of their spare time to one cause. He admits he is looking to scale down his involvement - but that won’t be in the short term.

“I’m sure I’ll remain involved in Padiham Football Club in some capacity for many years yet”, he says. “I just don’t think it will be as intense as it is now. The reason it’s like that is because we are short in numbers, like so many other clubs.

“We do have people working alongside me at the club, but I now need to try and get more people involved to share the workload a bit more. As things stand at the moment, the club takes up all my spare time because we are short of people in certain areas.

“I may have spent nearly ten years helping to get the ground up to scratch, but if I don’t get more people in I worry what will happen in future. If the club did go under through a lack of people to keep it going that would be a disaster for the town. What about the kids in future? They would have nowhere to play and watch sport like they do now at the Arbories.

“We’ve done the work to get facilities sorted, we now need to focus on keeping the club going. When I eventually leave the club, I want to be doing that knowing there are people in charge, with the correct infrastructure in place, to keep the club going for another 50 years. It’s a challenge, but I’m determined to ensure that the hard work we’ve put in over the years will leave a permanent legacy for the town of Padiham”.

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