It was bitterly cold and the snow was driving across the sloping pitch at the Wham Stadium.
The game was two days away, the television trucks were starting to clog up the new car park at one end of the ground and a big tent was being erected to protect the pitch: one of the founder members of the Football League was getting ready for its close-up.
Andy Holt, Accrington Stanley’s owner and chairman, had his flat cap on his head and his phone pressed to his ear as he walks down the touchline.
The view of the Coppice hill in the distance had disappeared in the white-out. Holt was feeling better and better about the weekend. ‘They won’t fancy this much,’ he said into his phone, laughing. ‘Will they b******s.’
He walked to the corner of the ground and edged cautiously up the astroturf ramp that lead to the away changing room. A workman was taking a leak in the metallic urinal. Holt cackled. It completed the picture.
The red floor was cold and hard, the room was small and cramped, the showers looked tired and the tiles were chipped. It was the kind of scene that could give a cosseted new age academy kid nightmares.
‘When Roy Hodgson came here with Fulham a few years back for an FA Cup tie,’ Holt said, ‘he took one look at this and ordered them back to the Dunkenhalgh Hotel up the road, where they had been staying, so they could get changed there. Tony Pulis brought Middlesbrough here more recently and loved it. He said it would do his lads good.’
Just before 11.30am on Saturday, Frank Lampard, the Derby County manager, got off the team coach outside the stadium and stopped to sign autographs for a clutch of fans.
‘Welcome to Accrington,’ Sue, one of the stewards, said to him as he walked towards the changing rooms. Lampard grinned and shook her hand. He played at Scarborough in the Cup for Chelsea. He knew what to expect.
This was about muck and brass. It was Stanley’s big day. They are, after all, just about the ultimate Cup underdog. The slogan on their website calls them ‘the club that wouldn’t die’, a reference to the fact they went out of business in 1966 before reforming and climbing their way slowly back up through the leagues.
‘Accrington Stanley: who are they?’ the kid says in the 1980s milk advert. Their annual wage bill is £1.3m, the lowest in League One.
In the stand, Holt, a popular local businessman who has transformed the club, was in his element. He wandered around the lounge, watching supporters tucking into a pre-match lunch.
He went out into the marquee at the back of the stand, chatting with fans. He brought the League Two trophy out with him so supporters could have their picture taken with it. ‘Derby might not see one of them again for a while,’ he said.
Holt wanted to beat Derby. But he had no desire for his team to become them. He does not want to emulate them. He does not want to compete with them in the Championship. He looks at the upper echelons of the English pyramid and it fills him with a mixture of contempt and dismay.
‘My rationale is not to get to the Premier League,’ he said. ‘My rationale is to protect a community asset and make it grow and continue and still be there in 50 years. Everybody else will blow hundreds of millions chasing the dream and I won’t.
‘If we got to the Championship, I have said to Jon Coleman, our manager, that we would leave the budget at £1.3m, I’ll give him £1m and we’ll get a deckchair apiece and sit on the side and lose 35-0 every week and then when we go down, we have £6m to do the stadium up and have another go.
Derby did not look disconcerted by the culture shock. There were a few raised eyebrows and a few grins among their players when they wandered out on to the pitch before the game but when the match started, there was no sense that they were not up for the fight.
They took the game to their hosts and might have been a goal up inside eight minutes but for a fine save Jonny Maxted from Martin Waghorn’s header. But Accrington were not overwhelmed. Far from it.
Jordan Clark, the best player on the pitch, shot just wide midway through the half and Callum Johnson found space on the right blasted a shot across the face of the goal.
Stanley had already shown they were way too good to be patronised about the state of their facilities. Holt is proud of where Stanley have come from and he is proud of where they are going.
He loves the fact that the limited facilities might ask questions of modern players used to more luxurious surroundings but he is a moderniser, too, a man who has established Accrington as the model of a forward-thinking club.
The old changing rooms will be gone soon, just like the old club shop, one of the old stands and the old seats behind the goal, that were bought second-hand from Motherwell. Holt asked the fans whether they wanted the seats to remain but they asked if they could be replaced by terracing so Holt agreed.
The supporters take responsibility for the maintenance of that end of the ground. They clubbed together for two large-screen televisions on the concourse. Nestled amid the terraced houses of the town, the stadium is tight and compact and the atmosphere is loud.
‘When you take a throw-in,’ Holt said, ‘you’re more or less sat on the knee of the spectator. Away fans sing we have a crap ground but to us, it’s not crap. It has a charm and part of my job is to keep that charm.
‘The community has created it, lost it, created it, lost it, and rebuilt it. Every brick that has been laid there, they might be a bit chipped and cracked, but people have gone and dug them from all over the place, to make the ground what it is.
‘There have been thousands of people’s efforts over the years in Accrington to get them where they are. It’s a shame people don’t see what others have gone through to see what little Accrington have got.
Derby started the second half well and the game turned in their favour just before an hour had elapsed when Dan Barlaser was sent off for a second late tackle and a second bookable offence. It was clumsy, not malicious, but it was a fair decision by referee Jonathan Moss.
Accrington reacted superbly. They were the better team for the rest of the match but 12 minutes from time, Waghorn reacted quickest during a goalmouth scramble and rifled the ball past Maxted from close range.
Jayden Bogle was sent off in the last minute for pulling back Paul Smyth when he was clean through and when Kelle Roos saved the resulting free kick from Billy Kee, the game was over.
Coleman complained bitterly about some of the referee’s decisions and was particularly incensed that Moss had refused to discuss them with him after the match when he confronted him in the lounge. Lampard did his press conference in the gym, which was housed in a small prefab at the back of a stand.
He smiled when he was reminded about Hodgson’s decision to take his team back to the hotel rather than change at the ground. ‘I was never going to do that,’ he said. ‘I heard some teams have laid carpet down in the changing room, too, to give it a nice comfortable feeling but I didn’t want that, either.
‘I gave them all the facts about what it was going to be like. This is the way it is. This is football. If you want to be a top player, you need to show you can deal with this side of the game both on the pitch and mentally. I wouldn’t say we came through with flying colours but we came through.’
Holt was still in the stand. Beating Ipswich in the last round earned the club £135,000 and the fact that this fourth round tie was televised by BT meant another windfall of £150,000. Much of the money will be dedicated to more ground improvements.
‘Owning this famous old club, I feel it is a massive weight on my shoulders,’ Holt said. ‘I don’t want to be the one that killed the club. That’s what’s going to happen if we allow the gap between the leagues to continue to widen.
‘It’s not my club. I can’t pick it up and take it home. I can’t go and live in it. I can’t drive it home. There’s 20 or 30 people before me, it was their club as well and they still haven’t got it. They were just custodians.
‘That’s all I’ll be. I’ll do a good job because I have to. I live in the community. If I don’t, if I go to a restaurant, people will be throwing pasta down my back. It’s like a policeman that you don’t have if you’re a chairman who lives abroad.’
The party at the stadium was still in full swing as darkness began to fall. ‘We put on a great show,’ Holt wrote on Twitter. ‘Done our club no harm at all. Referees’ Hour £1 a pint. Come on you Reds.’