Warwick Road: a name immortalised in song by Manchester United fans.
“Walking down Warwick Road,” they still sing. “To see Matt Busby’s aces.” Tens of thousands of United fans still walk down that road, before it turns into Sir Matt Busby Way. But there is another United and another Warwick Road linked to English football.
One hundred miles north is Carlisle, a small city whose population of 75,000 would fit entirely inside Old Trafford. Close to the Scottish border, it is framed by the hills of the Pennines and the Lake District to the east and south, the dangerous quicksand by the waters of the Solway Firth to the north west. Three rivers tumble off the hills and meet in Carlisle, which stands on the main west coast rail line between London and Glasgow. The Romans made Carlisle a chief station on Hadrian’s Wall.
It is November 26, 2016 and football fans are walking along Carlisle’s Warwick Road ahead of their League Two game against Mansfield Town. Carlisle are England’s most isolated club, with Newcastle United, 58 miles to the east, their closest neighbours. The sub-freezing temperatures ensured a pitch inspection was needed, the game given the go ahead two and a half hours before kick off. The uncertainty trims the crowd short of 5,000, but the fans shuffle along in optimistic mood. They pass dozens of trees with silky blue ribbons tied to them two metres or so up the trunk. Carlisle United play in blue, but the ribbons are not in celebration, but to mark the level of the floodwater which rushed into Carlisle on December 4 and 5 2015.
The River Eden was recorded at its highest ever level, the results of unprecedented rainfall due to the effects of Storm Desmond. Flood defences built after a flood in 2005 were overwhelmed and over 2,000 properties were directly affected, while Carlisle’s Brunton Park football ground was submerged under two metres of filthy water. The team were unable to play games at home for two months and the effects of the floods are still clear a year after.
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Despite being badly hit themselves, the football club were integral to the clean up effort, with all the players using their muscle to shift the ruined sofas, carpets and furniture of their neighbours. The memories of that time are still vivid.
“We left Carlisle early on Friday morning for a game in London,” recalls captain Danny Grainger, 30, one of the few local players in the team. “The rain had been so heavy that I could only leave my village in the Eden Valley because my brother-in-law had swept the water away in his 4x4 car. I’d never seen it so wet and saw overturned lorries as I drove away. The rivers were already overflowing into the fields. When we arrived in London, the floods were becoming national news.”
“We’d had two flood warnings and the groundsman came to the pitch to try and keep water off it,” remembers Phil King, the club’s sales director. “It was a valiant, losing, battle.”
“Rain had been heavy in November and the flood banks at the back of the ground by the river were already full of water,” says Susan Kidd, Carlisle’s finance director. “We knew the risk was there. One of the ticket office girls who lives near the ground called at 4am and told us: ‘Water is coming up through drains, we’re flooding’. By 6am it was on national news. The water continued rising until 10am. When we saw the aerial photos on the news it was devastating.”
The players were also receiving updates from one of their teammates.
“Mark Gillespie, the goalkeeper, was injured and staying in a house owned by the club at the side of the ground,” says Grainger. “We have a players’ WhatsApp group and he kept showing us how the water was rising. He sent us a picture of the statue of [club legend] Hughie McIlmoyle surrounded by water which was starting to go into the houses. We knew before we played that the floods were serious.”
Gillespie had to be rescued.
“The floods were becoming headline news and we could see Carlisle under water from a police helicopter,” says Grainger. “You could only see the top of the goalposts; it was heart breaking. I was getting messages from friends. One mate was flooded and he had to move upstairs. Another sent a video showing the water coming up through the drains. The players had left their cars in the car park and they could see them flooded on the news. One of the cars had a wheelie bin on the roof. Cars are easily replaced, peoples’ homes are not.”
Kidd went to the affected area.
“The club tried to help the residents,” she says. “There was a young mum with twin babies. She told us that she had no power, no heating. Carlisle is a small city, faces are familiar. These were fans who you see at matches. It was dangerous; the water was flowing very fast. Lifeboats and mountain rescue units were arriving from all over Britain.”
Carlisle was in crisis and the captain of their football team was deep in thought.
“I was getting quite emotional, I knew these people, I’m from the area,” Grainger says. “A football game didn’t seem important, but we were going to play it. I said to the lads: ‘Let’s get a result now, our fans need it’.”
Carlisle won 5-0 at non-league Welling and were rewarded with a home tie against Yeovil Town, but they wouldn’t be able to play it at home. The players got back on the team coach for the long journey north. Despite the win, the mood was subdued.
Grainger sought out the opinion of the other players.
"We had to help," he tells The National. "We knew the people who lived close to the stadium. There were elderly folk and young families. It would be a lot easier for 20 fit young lads to go into these houses and do heavy lifting. We could be of use; we told the manager that we had to get out into the community. We didn't want publicity, we wanted to help our people."
Huge swathes of their cathedral city were flooded, but by Tuesday, the water had receded and the clean up began.
“We started at one end of Warwick Road and worked our way right down it,” Grainger says. “Seventeen of us went into one house and it took us 15 minutes to empty it. We did it as the home owner was there: sofas, TVs, carpets, furniture, the lot. The stench was awful, like dead fish. We were quickly filthy. We burned our own clothes when we finished.”
Carlisle’s players also had the small matter of playing football themselves.
“Our training ground was flooded,” Grainger says, “but Newcastle United allowed us to use their training ground. Preston, Blackpool and Blackburn all let us use their grounds for home games.”
“They all did it at cost,” King says. “But we also had to sort ourselves out. We lost everything: our computers, our phones. It was a challenge to run our day-to-day business. Our chairman and sponsors gave us some office space. The community chipped in to help, the club and community came together.”
“It was December. Cold and dark,” adds Kidd. “The smell was horrendous. There was slime and silt all over our offices. My desk was on top of another desk. It made you realise the power of the flood. Doors wouldn’t open because they had swollen, the ceiling tiles were bust as the water had gone so high. Beanbags from the creche had floated up to the ceiling. We soon liaised with insurance – and they were very good. But people came to help. It was the worst of times, but brought out the best in people.”
“We put a message out to fans on the Tuesday night asking if any fans could come and help us,” King recalls. “On Wednesday morning fans arrived. Some had been flooded themselves. There was a mark at six foot around most of the ground floor offices. It was disgusting because it was sewage water. We had to strip everything out from floor to ceiling.”
Fans and players worked together.
“Fans saw a different side to us,” Grainger says. “That we don’t just turn up, get our wages, play football. It showed that we do care about what is going on in our community.”
The disruption also left its mark on the team.
“We were on a good run until the floods and our form dipped after, but we won’t blame the floods,” Grainger says. “Not playing at home didn’t help, though. Nobody likes coming to Brunton Park, it’s the furthest point, it’s a lot colder, it’s a big pitch which not all our rivals enjoy.”
A year on and things are looking up for the football team, if not everyone affected by the floods – 674 families are still out of their homes in Cumbria, 448 in Carlisle.
Silt and sewage meant Brunton Park needed a new pitch. It was laid and ready to be used by January 23 as the team returned to play Everton in the FA Cup fourth round, a game which attracted a capacity 17,100 crowd. Carlisle lost, but the crowd helped make up the shortfall from missing home games. The Everton players had the novelty of using portable showers erected in the car park.
This season, Carlisle were the only unbeaten side in England’s Football League, a record which lasted 16 matches until a November defeat at Newport. That one defeat is still less than any other team.
“The manager has come in and put the team into a different mould,” Grainger says. “The positivity around the club is great.”
“The club have moved offices to a higher floor,” King says. Onwards and upwards in more ways than one.
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On a bitterly cold afternoon, positivity abounds against Mansfield as fans watch in the shadow of the nearby snow topped hills. Dan MacLennan is a lifelong fan who follows Carlisle home and away and helps run the popular thecumbrians.net forum. MacLennan once spent a day travelling to a game at Newport – rare because there are often no trains back to Carlisle after games. Yet there were so many delays he arrived with 26 minutes of the game left. “We arrived just as Newport scored,” he says. “We lost”.
MacLennan is speaking under the Tardis-like main stand at half time, where fans meet and drink in a city long celebrated for the manufacture of biscuits. The sense of community, with the football club central to it, is tangible, the frustrations of globalisation, too. Sixty per cent of voters in Carlisle opted for Brexit in the EU referendum.
Brunton Park is a throwback, a football ground with more terracing than any other in England. At the front of the main stand, which has wooden seats, a large standing paddock ensures that fans can proffer their opinions directly to visiting managers. It’s visceral; it’s real, but it’s not for all. When player/manager Ivor Broadis signed from Tottenham Hotspur in 1946, he described the move as like “stepping down from the Savoy Hotel into the Jungle Cafe ... the old wooden stand looked to be reeling drunkenly under the weight of its years”. Three years later Broadis became the first manager in English football to arrange his own move elsewhere.
His replacement was Bill Shankly in his first managerial appointment in 1949. He described the ground as a “glorified hencoop”. Yet Brunton Park was the first outside London to install floodlights.
“It’s our home,” says McLennan, who knows almost everyone who sits near him. Nearby, in a wooden seat, an 85-year-old fan rises from his Carlisle United cushion.
“I’ve been coming to matches for 71 years,” a man introducing himself as “Mr Nairn” says proudly. “Seen us top the first division.” The Cumbrians won their first three games of the 1974/75 season, their only one in England’s top flight, before relegation that same season.
Fortunes have been mixed since. By the late 1990s, the club that produced Peter Beardsley, Matt Jansen and Rory Delap looked in continual danger of following fellow Cumbrian sides Barrow and Workington into non-league. Cumbria is England’s third largest county, but its 41st most populated, with Carlisle its only city.
In 1999, they were about to be relegated and crowds had slipped to 3,200 when Jimmy Glass, an on-loan goalkeeper, scored a last minute goal against Plymouth Argyle which kept them in the Football League. Delighted fans invaded the pitch. His manager, Nigel Pearson, said: “If I could write scripts like that, I wouldn’t be in this game. I’d have a very good publishing contract.”
Many think the goal saved the troubled club from extintion. They did go down in 2004 for a season, but it proved to be their making. Crowds surged to 7,200 on their return and things have never been as bleak since, Carlisle soldier on. Coaches leave the city for the brighter lights of football in Manchester, Newcastle and Liverpool every weekend, but a hardcore remain loyal to their local team, through thick and thin and flood. A mooted billionaire benefactor attracts hope and scepticism in equal measure, but the success on the pitch is real.
As the fifth goal goes in, the main stand rises with a chant of “United! United!” The whistle blows and their manager, Keith Curle, punches the air to chants of “We are top of the league!” from fans in the paddock, for the first time this season. A year after those catastrophic floods, things are looking up for Carlisle United.
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