Connor proud as 200th Golcar game nears

Ash Connor is immensely “proud” of Golcar United’s rise from amateur football to Non League football as he and his joint manager brother Gavin close in on 200 games in charge.

Saturday’s North West Counties League Division One North clash with Holker Old Boys is their 199th at the helm, with the 2nd January home game with Cleator Moor Celtic scheduled to be the big day.

That is bound to be an afternoon of reflection as just several years ago Golcar were a West Riding County Amateur League club playing on effectively a park pitch. Now they are a leading Step 6 club with an excellent ground and ambitions to go higher.

The Connor brothers and others have led the previously unimaginable charge up the football pyramid and Ash admits the club’s achievements are outstanding. 

“I’m really proud of what we have done, I could speak for hours about it to be honest,” Connor told Non League Yorkshire.

“What we have done is brilliant. We have turned it (the ground) from a local park pitch into a good Non League ground. From where we were when we first started to where we now it is a massive transformation.

“(Alongside the ground improvements) we’ve gone from one man and his dog watching to getting several hundred watching. This season if it wasn’t for the restrictions we’d get a lot more because we’re getting 300 watching now.

“The local derby with Shelley (the first game under floodlights last season) when you saw how many people were in the club, it was unbelievable. There were 700 or 800 people watching, that was unthinkable a few years earlier.

“When it first got out that we were going to do it (push for Step 6 football) there were a lot of people who must have thought we were mad and probably laughed at us thinking it was never gong to happen.

“It was at the end of the first season (2018) when we first won the league when we first discussed it. We’d heard rumours that the West Riding County Amateur League was going to fold and it was a case of do we move sideways into the Yorkshire Amateur League or West Yorkshire League or have a good go and try and push into the North West Counties or North East Counties?

“The first conversation with the North West Counties, they were brilliant with us. They came out and looked at the ground and told us what we needed to do.

“The first thing we did was get the ground enclosed. We drew down some funding and that allowed us to get further investment for the pitch and the other facilities we needed in order to move forward.

“Myself, Gav, Ben Senior, Pete (Gledhill) the chairman, Ian Whitehead the president, Andy Naylor, Luke, Andy’s son, have all put a massive amount of time in, writing funding bids, drawing down money from where we can. There’s lots of people who have spent time volunteering.

“The club captain at the time James Buckley, he fitted out the bar for us. There’s so many people who got involved and got us to where we are now.”

The journey though is not over according to Connor who wants to replicate the success of other notable former Step 7 clubs who have enjoyed fantastic times in Non League Football in recent years.

“There’s so much more we can do,” he said.

“There’s a good following and the whole community is behind us and we’re all ambitious. The team all want to kick on and gain promotion this year and who knows because when you gather momentum you never know where it may take you.

“I’d say we have similar potential to Brighouse Town and Penistone Church. I look at Brighouse Town and I don’t think we are million miles off.

“That’s the aim. Penistone have done brilliant and Ian and Duncan (Richards) have done a superb job and yeah we’d like to do something similar.”

The Holker Old Boys clash at Golcar is part of the North West Counties League’s ‘restart day’ fixtures and Connor is hoping his promotion-chasing side can claim their first home win of the campaign. 

Golcar have been almost pitch perfect on the road but at home it hasn’t gone well. 

The Huddersfield-based side are third with ten points from a possible 24 but the league is very distorted as some teams have played few games.

“We’ve been brilliant away from home, we just can’t win at home,” Connor said.

“We’ve played four games away and won three, drawn one and at home we’ve played four and lost four.

“If we can turn the home around we expect to be right up there come the end of the season.

“We haven’t played particularly badly at home. There’s a couple of games where we have struggled to score and it has cost us. We’re confident we’ll turn it around because we’ve got the players to take it around.

“Lower Breck ran away with it last season and they were unlucky not to get promoted. We’ve played them at home, we’ve played AFC Liverpool at home, Bacup at home. They’re all good teams and there are no easy games. 

“Whether it is because they come to us and play in front of a big crowd and that gets them up for it, I don’t know?”

Analysing their matches, he said: “You look at our home games.  We lost 2-0 to Steeton but we must have had ten good chances to score. Against Bacup it was 0-0 at half-time and we had three or four great chances to take the lead. 

“We were 3-1 up to Lower Breck with 12 minutes left and ended up losing 4-3. AFC Liverpool were a very good team and we were 3-0 down and we got it back to 3-2. 

“We can’t panic and worry about it. The away form is fine. We’ve gone to Cleator, one of the hardest places to go to, and we managed to win there 2-1.

“We played Darwen and we had a man sent off in the first half and then we had Jordan Townend sin-binned in the second half. So we were down to nine men for ten minutes of the second half but we managed to get a late winner from a corner from Mike Fish. That was a great result.

“The last (league) game we played was at Bury and we were 1-0 up with seconds left and they equalised with the last kick of the game.” 

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NLY Community Sport, run by James Grayson and Connor Rollinson, has always had combatting social isolation at the top of our objectives when running our Disability Football teams. When we properly return to ‘action’, our work will play an important role in reintroducing our players, who have disabilities and learning difficulties, back into society.

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