Diamonds aren't forever

This week's Fa Cup 1st round draw brought the Glovers yet another away tie to contend with and if that wasn't bad enough also brought us face-to-face with one of our most difficult opponents of the last decade, that made-up club from the middle of nowhere, Rushden & Diamonds FC.

We couldn't have had much worse a draw to be honest. Rushden (or Ru$hden, as I still prefer to think of them even if, like ourselves, they don't have a pot to piss in these days), like Oxford United last season, are doing well in the Conference, are full-time, and will relish the chance of doing over a struggling League One side. They'll especially relish the chance of doing us over as they've already done it once before, four years ago.

Rushden & Diamonds as a club have only been in existence since 1992 but they've packed a lot of promotions and relegations into that time. They were of course formed on the back of one man's money, that man being Max Griggs, the head of the Dr Martens footwear empire. Fair play to Max, he made a good pair of boots and initially his brand new sparkling football club - the bastard offspring of a merger between Rushden Town and Irthlingborough Diamonds - did well too, eventually rising from the depths of the Southern League Midland Division all the way to the heady heights of League One in the Football League. On the way of course they came up against ourselves, particularly in the 2000-01 season, when they pipped the Glovers to the Conference title and promotion to the Football League. The final table showed a 6 point gap between the Diamonds and the 2nd-placed Glovers that season, but the table didn't tell anything like the full story of that nine months. If you've got a spare hour or so then it's well worth browsing through the Ciderspace news archives for that time, and I'm not saying that just because I helped write them! It was a fascinating season with more twists and turns in the plotlines than your average episode of Eastenders, and was really the start of the beginning of the modern era of Yeovil Town, though at the time it felt more like the beginning of the end, with manager Colin Addison being controversially sacked at the end of the season and some of our best players - Warren Patmore and Tony Pennock in particular - leaving to join Rushden in the Football League, a bitter pill to swallow at the time.

Still, we had the last laugh. Max Griggs continued to throw his money at the club and Rushden eventually made it all the way to League One, but there the bubble burst. The Dr Martens empire hit the financial rocks, and Griggs's money injections, amounting to an average of £2.5 million per season (!) since their Conference days, stopped. Now owned by their Supporters Trust and for the first time not living beyond their means, Rushden, no longer known as Ru$hden, came back down the leagues as fast as they went up them before bottoming out in the Conference, where they've remained since. As they went down we of course went up in a rather more stable and sustainable manner and now the (Doc Martens) boot is on the other foot. Until a week on Saturday anyway! Wouldn't it be nice if, just for once, we had a bit of a cup run? Is it really too much to ask?

There are more pressing concerns before then. This Saturday sees Swindon coming to Huish Park followed by a trip to Franchise FC next Tuesday. We're not quite back in crisis mode yet, but after 2 defeats in a row leaving us a scanty one place above the relegation zone it's important that we get something out of Saturday's game against our Wiltshire near-neighbours. The bookies make the Glovers narrow 8/5 favourites for the win, with the draw priced at 23/10 and a Swindon win at 13/8. My self-imposed unwritten rule of always betting on a home win when the odds are against means that my fiver is in Skivo's mens hands, god help me. No bet last week because my old computer decided to blow up, running total: -£10.25p.

Just read: Gardens of the Sun by Paul McAuley: Excellent sequel to the equally good The Quiet War. Both books are set in the future a century or so from now with mankind colonising the solar system and, being mankind, fighting each other all the way. I'd thoroughly recommend both books to anyone who likes intelligent, hard s-f with a human touch. Read The Quiet War first, the sequel may not make much sense otherwise - but do read them both!