Should King’s Lynn have an inferiority complex or one of superiority? The timid in their ranks might murmur fearfully that they are the lowest-placed team left in the FA Cup and have been drawn to play a club who were 60 seconds from the final a dozen years ago.
The brash, in contrast, would trumpet the fact that, by one measurement, they are the most successful FA Cup team in history among existing clubs.
Only the defunct Tunbridge Wells Rangers have a better ratio of wins to FA Cup matches in the competition and, having beaten two teams from higher echelons of the non-League pyramid this year, King’s Lynn will have some hope of improving their record when they play host to Oldham Athletic in a second-round tie on Friday.
Sky is so keen to televise the match live that it is prepared to provide floodlights, but improved lighting is not the only change that regulars at The Walks will notice. Health and safety officials have doubled the capacity to 6,200 on condition that crush barriers and a new PA system are installed for what will be arguably the greatest occasion in the club’s history.
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At least the pitch does not need extra work because, being situated on the edge of the Fens, King’s Lynn decided recently to take extra steps to remove underlying water.
“We’ve spent quite a lot of money in the last two or three years getting the pitch into good order,” Ken Bobbins, the chairman, said. “We’ve got big drainage tanks and pumps so we can keep that under control now.”
Bobbins recalls the problems he encountered as a reserve-team player at the club. “In the Sixties and Seventies you would stand at the centre spot to kick off and you could feel yourself sinking into the mud,” he said.
Other geography-related problems test King’s Lynn. Being in west Norfolk, there are few League clubs nearby. “It’s one of the disadvantages that we have, being stuck out on a limb here,” Bobbins said. “We don’t have that ready supply of footballers available. We have to search — and that becomes more expensive. We have to entice them to travel to Norfolk to train twice a week and play. People are not that keen on travelling two hours to come to training.”
There is also the lack of dual carriageways in the region that reinforces the isolation.
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The club are also trying to entice a new manager to replace Tommy Taylor, the former Leyton Orient manager, who has joined Peterborough United, the Coca-Cola League Two club, as a coach, but no appointment will be made until after the match against Oldham, so as not to halt the momentum built up under Shaun Carey and Dean West, the caretaker managers and once players with Norwich City and Burnley respectively.
King’s Lynn also had no manager when Bobbins became chairman two years ago, but otherwise the circumstances are vastly different. Bottom of the British Gas Business League premier division at the time (three levels below the Football League) but second in the table now with two games in hand, they were in administration when Bobbins took charge but were already expecting to have wiped out their debt this season even before they embarked on an FA Cup trail paved with gold.
“The club had not really progressed over the previous few years and now we’re doing that,” the chairman said. “I don’t think the club has been run as a business previously — it’s almost been a hobby and you can’t do that. Our average attendances are nearly 1,000, which is tremendous in our league. If the club is more successful, we could get a lot more people in.”
The Cup run has earned the club more than £100,000, most of which has come from Sky for Friday’s match. “It’s unquestionably the biggest game for this club since 1962 [when they lost an FA Cup third-round tie away to Everton], but in some respects it is bigger because it’s live on television,” Bobbins said.
Assuming there is no monsoon, at least viewers will not see the players sinking into the pitch.
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Numbers game
58.73 King’s Lynn’s percentage of wins per FA Cup ties, the best among existing clubs
53.96 Arsenal, the best of the big clubs, in seventh place
53.87 Manchester United, languishing in tenth place
53.69 Liverpool, not even in the top ten of this table
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48.96 Chelsea, also-rans
Source: FA