Cod Almighty | Article

by Richard Lord

17 October 2012

I'm really not trying to impress our visitors this weekend when I say this, but one of my favourite FA Cup memories is from 1994 when Kidderminster Harriers reached the fifth round of the FA Cup. Up until then, it was almost unheard of for a non-League team to reach that stage of the competition. Some mediocre and self-inflated football pundits might tell you that Crawley achieved the same feat in 2011, but they overlook the fact that Crawley, despite also being in the Conference at the time, were full-time professionals. Kidderminster, in 1994, were true part-timers.

I'm not sure how much of this cup run I would remember without an old recording I had of a Match of the Day episode on a VHS tape. When I was much younger, Match of the Day came on too late for my sleepy eyes and so my dad would record it for me to watch on Sunday.

This old tape had a few recordings on it - three episodes of Gladiators, snippets of Noel's House Party and the ending of a particularly haunting episode of Casualty, in which everyone dies. On a lighter note, it had Match of the Day on it, and it just happened to be the show in which they did their feature on Kidderminster Harriers.

If there was a competition to find the oldest-sounding man in the world, Sinstadt would win it

Des Lynam was presenting. Ray Stubbs was reporting. Tony Gubba (before his lame Dancing on Ice days) was commentating. And Gerald Sinstadt did what he did best: narrating the edited highlights while sounding like the oldest man in the world. If there was a competition to find the oldest-sounding man in the world, Gerald Sinstadt would win it. In fact it's a reality TV idea that I'm currently mulling over. The Old Voice Factor - no stealing, now.

For whatever reason, this episode of Match of the Day was never recorded over - or wiped off, as my family used to call it. This one stuck. And when I was bored and I wanted to watch some football, I'd stick this tape in the machine. It was the only one I had (other than the time I recorded a midweek episode and got Sheffield Wednesday drawing 3-3 at Derby in the days when Paul Warhurst was a goal machine).

So it was a tape I became rather familiar with. I learned that Kidderminster had "dispensed with" Kettering and Woking in the early rounds before beating their neighbours Birmingham City 2-1 at St Andrew's. Now, I could be wrong here, but if my memory serves me correctly (which it should, because I have the tape to back me up), Town's commercial manager David Smith came off the bench for the Blues in that match - presumably given the task of turning the game around. He didn't. But, in the interests of being fair, he did go and score a fluky winning goal for the Mariners at St Andrew's in 1998. There - all balanced out.

The highlights on this episode of Match of the Day were of Kidderminster's fourth-round tie against Preston. The delightfully named Delwyn Humphreys scored the crucial goal in a 1-0 win and they went on to play West Ham in the fifth round - losing 1-0 at Aggborough.

I still have the tape, somewhere in the vaults of my parents' home, although I haven't seen it in years. It served as my FA Cup education and marked the very beginning of my fascination with the competition.

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