THERE is currently no hotter striker in the Skrill Premier than Connor Jennings, who scored his seventh and eighth goals of his loan spell with Macclesfield in Thursday’s 2-2 draw with Southport.
Those goals have all come in the last seven matches, during which time John Askey’s Silkmen have pulled off some superb results after a difficult start.
Interviewed straight after the game, 22-year-old Jennings was clearly disappointed to see Alan Wright’s Sandgrounders cancel out both of his predatory finishes with equalisers – especially with Jamie Milligan’s penalty for the second coming late in the day.
I’m pleased Jennings is now getting a run of games, because goals will clearly follow talent at any level. He’s a natural.
I recall speaking to him shortly after completing his move to Scunthorpe from Stalybridge Celtic in January 2011. He’d scored 51 goals in 89 starts for the Bower Fold club, having first been given his chance from the youth team by Steve Burr, aged just 16.
Jennings spoke of how Jim Harvey’s full-time coaching and style of football at Celtic had transformed him as a player, and how determined he was to follow in Gary Hooper’s famous bootsteps from Glanford Park to the Champions League.
Any hopes of an immediate impact were shattered by a broken metatarsal, and after a spell at Stockport last season, is now back on Non-League loan until January.
He is still used as an example by Stalybridge chairman Rob Gorski of how his club’s full-time policy can work, with Jennings held up as the role model for the young lads desperate to make their way into, or back into, the game on a professional level.
With every week that passes, Stalybridge’s star pupil is learning more and more on the job – and helping turn Macc into an emerging force at the same time.
THE OLD FA CUP MAGIC NEVER DIES
I’VE turned into the old man in the corner, I know, but it’s that time of the year when the FA Cup comes to the nation’s attention – and to quote Kevin Keegan, I love it, just love it!
As I work towards gaining my FA Level 2 coaching qualification, I’ve been spending Monday mornings helping the Luton and Hitchin Town youth development coaches with some of the 60 teenagers they work with daily at the old Baldock Town ground, now owned by my old club Hitchin and known as North Herts Arena.
I’m their unofficial BBC man (bibs, balls and cones), and I’m delighted to be so as I learn from top quality guys working Adam Balletta and Scott Smith, while they allow me to take parts of the session with some high quality youngsters.
Last Monday, however, I really did feel like granddad recounting tales of the war. Adam Whybrow, the 17-year-old goalkeeper, has recently joined AFC Rushden & Diamonds on loan to provide cover for the injured Quincy Shorunmu.
Two days previously he’d travelled with the United Counties Premier club to Dover Athletic for their third qualifying round tie.
He didn’t get on as Diamonds were beaten 3-1, but he was still buzzing on Monday morning about his first taste of the FA Cup. The magic it sprinkles on everyone who experiences it hadn’t eluded young Adam.
“The fans were amazing,” he told one of the other boys as they warmed up. “There was at least 300 of them and they had a drum on the bus. The noise they made was unbelievable.”
He went onto describe the ground – Dover’s Crabble home being one of the more scenic and traditional among Non-League stadia – and passed on what he had taken from what was clearly a milestone afternoon in a young man’s fledgling career.
Adam would have seen Joe Hart playing in last year’s final – or even his own club’s evergreen Mark Tyler making history, with the Hatters knocking out Norwich City – and thought ‘Wow, I’m involved in the same competition as them’.
Then the old boy spun his yarn. I told the lads about how I’d scored my first senior goal in an FA Cup preliminary round tie at Ryhope CA as an Arnold Town youngster back in August 1996.
By my maths, Adam would have been just a few months old and having his afternoon nap in his Moses basket when our general manager Ray O’Brien gave me the half-time hairdryer treatment for running around like a headless chicken on the right wing.
‘I’ll show him’, I said to myself as we went back out, and within two minutes I smashed a right-footed half-volley into the top corner to see us through to set up another away tie at Gretna.
As we drank little bottles of French lager on the coach journey home (that we’d all contributed a fiver for when the secretary Steve ‘Train-spotter’ Shout had made his last Booze Cruise to Calais – remember those?), I remember thinking: ‘I’ve just scored in the same competition as Eric Cantona!’
The Luton and Hitchin kids didn’t make me feel really ancient and ask ‘Eric Who?’ They understood the point that the FA Cup is the only competition that can put youngsters like Adam on the same level as heroes like Hart, and we will see plenty more evidence of that in the weeks to come.
We may not yet have reached the competition proper, but already there are stories ready to be written.
Like Rushall Olympic, who after beating Stockport away now travel to Blundell Park next Saturday to take on Grimsby, and will fancy their chances even though it’s another level up from beating the Hatters in their own back yard.
Like Needham Market, on the periphery of the Ryman One North play-off places but now handed the opportunity to become the first side this season to beat Cambridge United, currently Non-League’s No.1 team.
And like Brislington, the Western League side who turned over Skrill South high-flyers Weston-super-Mare and now host Welling United, sixth in the rankings going into this weekend.
“Everyone will be thinking about progressing and our chairman says it’s like living the dream,” said the Bristol club’s manager, Jeff Meacham.
“We know how hard it will be against Welling, but it will be a dream come true if we could play one of the Bristol clubs in the first round.”
The FA Cup – what dreams are made of for chairmen, for managers, for young whipper-snappers and yes, still, for old has-beens like me!
