If talk of the magic of the cup leaves you cold and tales of David versus Goliath feel overblown, then pause for a moment to absorb the story of George Elokobi, whose FA Cup journey is built on the remarkable foundations of daily hunger and career-threatening injuries. The manager of Maidstone United deserves every bit of luck that comes his way as he prepares to face Coventry City in the fifth round this evening.
First off, though, it is important to bust the myth that the National League South team simply trucked up at high-flying Ipswich Town and fluked their way to becoming the lowest-ranked team since Blyth Spartans in 1978 to reach the last 16. No team were better prepared for the fourth round than Maidstone. Elokobi, 38, even hired a grass pitch and marked out the dimensions of Portman Road so that his players, who usually train on a 3G surface, would be familiar with the spaces and distances they could defend and run into, and that their legs would be familiar with how heavy the ground would be.
The former Wolverhampton Wanderers defender knew that his team, 98 places below the Sky Bet Championship side Ipswich in the football pyramid, would suffer an onslaught, so they practised dealing with wave after wave of attacks while remaining alert to the possibility of a rare counter in which they could exploit their pace.
This is precisely how the tie panned out, with Maidstone taking their two chances on the break with breathtaking assuredness. He had introduced chaos into training so they would be ready to do more than one job and be used to their defensive rhythm being interrupted. Hearing him explain how he coaches and prepares his players with dossiers is like listening to a Premier League manager. The Cameroonian’s attention to detail is astonishing, as is his insistence that the players enjoy the intensity.
After beating Ipswich 2-1, Elokobi applauded the home fans and they applauded him back, and then he stood at a certain spot on the pitch. It was where, 16 years previously, he had so badly damaged his knee when playing for Wolves that surgeons gave him a 1 per cent chance of playing professionally again. He shed a tear and then remembered, with a smile, how little sympathy the Ipswich fans had given him that day.
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Elokobi was only 11 years old when his father, a customs officer, died. He was the last of his father’s 13 children with three different women and they were close.
“I was his little prize child, I was the baby,” says Elokobi, whose dad would make sure he got additional milk. The extras stopped, however, when he died. No one understood the extent of the impact on the young boy.
“It became survival of the fittest,” Elokobi says. He went from having two meals a day to one. That meant he ate wild berries, climbed tall trees to reach coconuts and caught fish in dirty rivers. He used sticks and machetes to kill venomous snakes which he would boil and eat, and he caught wild birds after tempting them with rice grains. He had friends whose families had money and he would sit and watch them eat “and just swallow the saliva”.
His mother, who had moved to London to earn a decent living, sent money for him to attend a boarding school in Buea, southwest Cameroon. They fed him there — but not enough, so he would dig for potatoes and eat them raw.
His stepmum did not want him to play football in case he got injured because they would not have been able to afford any medical bills. He told her, aged 13: “One day I’m going to bring the crowd to this house through football.” In 2011, when he returned as a Premier League player with Wolves, there was a crowd of excited locals gathered at her home.
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His mother’s desire to provide for her three children led her to Lambeth, where she became a benefits assessor, but it also meant that by the time Elokobi flew to Heathrow aged 16 he had seen her only twice in five years. They wrote letters to keep in touch and, now and again, he used a neighbour’s house for a one-minute talk on a landline.
He was both excited and nervous when his mother paid for the ticket to London. They hugged “the biggest hug” and he instantly felt the need to make her proud. It was January and, he says, “bloody freezing”. The next day they went shopping for winter clothes.
Life at Archbishop Tenison’s School, opposite the Oval, was a challenge. He had never used a computer before, was picked on for his accent and did not like the food or gang culture, but on the other hand he felt privileged to have eggs and toast for breakfast.
His Sunday league coach recognised his potential and alerted Dulwich Hamlet, where he was coached properly for the first time. He was so grateful that he decided he would be first in and last out at training and run the hills of southeast London in his spare time.
While playing a Kent Cup game, a scout took note and alerted Colchester United who signed him, aged 18, on £90 a week, and he moved into digs with a family he is still in touch with. Elokobi did not like mealtimes at first but he read that the top professional players ate what his landlady offered him so he decided to embrace it, even a plain chicken breast with no seasoning. It was an example, he says, of his willpower.
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He made his professional league debut on loan for Chester City under Ian Rush. “I didn’t know he was,” Elokobi says, “then I looked him up and then I saw what I saw in training because he used to join in.”
The former Liverpool striker told Elokobi, who played for Chester for a month, to aim to be consistent. Colchester won promotion to the Championship and then Wolves came in for their left back in 2008. “There was no stopping me then,” he says.
After his unlikely recovery from a knee reconstruction he made his Premier League debut off the bench away to Manchester City in August 2009, when he was up against Shaun Wright-Phillips.
“This was the moment I had been waiting for since I was born,” Elokobi says. “I didn’t disappoint. I made them sub Wright-Phillips off.”
Elokobi was not built like a normal full back and Wolves fans appreciated that he was not supposed to be able to play again after his injury. The dream soured when Mick McCarthy, his mentor, was sacked as manager and replaced by Stale Solbakken, who was nowhere near as enamoured of the defender as McCarthy had been. Elokobi asked to go on loan to gain some playing time and he joined Nottingham Forest. He helped them to avoid relegation to League One but Wolves did not accept their offer to make the move permanent.
Then came a period of so little action that by the time Elokobi went on loan again he was not match fit and three days into his time at Bristol City he ruptured every ligament in his ankle. These days he likes to wind up security staff at airports with his metal plate. “I say, ‘Relax, I’ve got some screws in there, come feel them.’ ”
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Wolves suffered back-to-back relegations while Elokobi was injured and it upset him that he was not available to help them out. He did play in discomfort in League One for them, then joined Oldham Athletic and understood his best days were behind him. It was at Aldershot Town that his manager, Gary Waddock, suggested that he took coaching seriously, telling him he had a natural gift for leadership underlined by the fact he regularly accepted invitations to engage in public speaking, whether at schools or corporate events.
Elokobi was humbled by the respect shown by Ipswich last month. The club let Maidstone park their team coach at Portman Road overnight as there was no space for it at their hotel and he has an open invitation to watch training at the Suffolk club.
The attention generated by the cup run is, he says, “surreal”. There is a heightened atmosphere at the club’s league games and the fans are “inspired”. Supporters are flocking to join the local gym used by the team. “Our players have rewritten history,” he says.
Elokobi, his players and staff have already been afforded a civic reception, so goodness knows what will happen if the team reach the quarter-finals, and Coventry be warned: he has also taken note of the measurements of the CBS Arena.
Coventry City v Maidstone United
FA Cup fifth round
Monday, February 26
Kick-off: 7.45pm
TV: ITV4 and ITVX
