Selfies and juggling day jobs: Chatham Town land ‘amazing’ Women’s FA Cup tie | OneFootball

Old-school sweet dispensers stand tall pitchside at the Bauvill Stadium, almost as if watching the action. Behind them, Bobby’s bar is bustling and above the club logo on a wall behind one of the goals are four unmissable words: “If I can dream …” Helping to manifest that dream is the shiny Women’s FA Cup trophy, temporarily on display in the boardroom. The group of players who have just finished a day’s work are about to begin their training session at 8.30pm.

Chatham Town Women, the lowest-ranked side in the fifth round of the Women’s FA Cup and one of only two sides remaining from below the second tier, are preparing for the game of their lives, against big-spending Birmingham City at St Andrew’s on Saturday, live on television, vying for a place in the quarter-finals. Chatham cover their players’ expenses but do not pay football salaries, unlike their full-time opponents.

Chatham, who play in the fourth tier, entered the competition in the third qualifying round in September and have won five ties, two on penalties away to third-tier opponents, AFC Wimbledon and Exeter City.

The run has earned the Kent club £107,000 in prize money and they will get another £20,000 if they lose on Saturday, or £80,000 if they can stun Birmingham. Chatham’s manager, Keith Boanas, estimates that the £107,000 “sustains and helps build the women’s game here for at least the next two to three years”.

The prize pot is vastly different from the £5,000 reward that went to the Cup winners in 2005 when Boanas managed Charlton to glory. He led the club to the final four times between 2003 and 2007, including three in a row that culminated with their victory, when an 18-year-old Eni Aluko’s goal gave a Charlton side that also included the Canada head coach, Casey Stoney, and the club’s current manager, Karen Hills, a 1-0 win over Everton.

Boanas’s assistant that day at Upton Park was Matt Beard, the former Liverpool, Chelsea and West Ham manager who died last September at the age of 47. It is clear Beard has been in Boanas’s thoughts through this Cup run.

“I do look to the side of me when I’m on the touchlines sometimes – I feel him there,” says a visibly emotional Boanas, before taking a deep breath and having to pause his answer. He later says: “When we won with Charlton, I collapsed on my knees and looked up, at that time, to my mum. This time, if we win on Saturday, I’d say: ‘Cheers, Beardy.’”

The duo were great friends and what Boanas and Beard achieved together has granted Boanas the deep respect of his squad. Chatham’s former England youth defender Ellie Perkins, who had a spell at Arsenal, says of Boanas: “He’s so full of wisdom, expertise, experience, and I think everyone here just absorbs that from him. Everything he says, take it on board, because he’s been there and done it. So we get behind every decision he makes.”

Perkins, who works as an estate agent, says Chatham will try to keep everything as “normal as possible” this week. “We’re anticipating them being that bit more athletic, that bit faster, that bit stronger than us, just because they have the facility to do this as a day job,” she says of Birmingham. “For us it’s a case of doing your nine-to-five through the week, getting home from work quickly, getting your Chatham clothes on, having a quick dinner and getting straight back in the car to go to training. So we’ve got to try and do what we can from the mental and technical side of the game.”

There have been many heroines during this Cup run, such as the midfielder Elle Jeffkins, who has scored from outside the box four times, and the goalkeeper Simone Eligon, a Trinidad and Tobago international, who has made shootout saves. In the league, they are mixing it with bigger-name clubs such as Fulham and Norwich towards the top of the Women’s National League Division One South East and sit fourth.

The co-captain Grace Coombs says of the Cup run: “It’s brought us closer together every single game. Our [fourth-round] win here was absolutely amazing – that feeling was probably one of the best feelings of the girls’ careers.”

Coombs, who works in project management for the NHS, says: “My job is not as physical as a lot of the other players’ are, and I don’t have a long commute or a long route to training compared to some of the others, who have it a lot harder than me. We have two training nights a week and then we get ourselves to the gym and do workouts around our work schedule. We’ve got great resources here that we can tap into but it’s in our own time around our schedules. You make it work because you love it.”

About 200 fans are expected to travel to Birmingham for a game shown on TNT Sports 1 & discovery+. It would have been significantly more but for the men’s team having a home fixture on the same day. The excitement around this community club, sandwiched between Rochester and Gillingham, the town whose name this team carried until a rebrand in 2023, is clear. Before training the players gather excitedly for selfies with the trophy, while the staff lay out the cones on one half of the pitch, with the men’s team training in the other half.

Boanas’s wife, the former England goalkeeper Pauline Cope-Boanas, a police officer, has been helping with goalkeeper coaching when time allows. Her husband, 66, is juggling an extensive list of other football roles on top of managing Chatham, including coaching boys via a Millwall community project, coaching the England colleges national side and the English Universities women’s side (both voluntarily), tutoring coaches doing their Uefa B and C licences and being president of the Surrey Football Coaches Association. “I should be retired,” he says, chuckling.

He has taken charge of the Estonia women’s national side and clubs such as Watford and Millwall Lionesses and he says this run with Chatham makes him almost as proud as winning the Cup with Charlton.

“Even getting this far has come really close to that,” he says. “I mean that, genuinely. I was a little bit unwell a couple of weeks ago because I had kidney stones. I think if we win on Saturday, you’ll probably need the ambulance at St Andrew’s to come and pick me up off the pitch for different reasons.”

Header image: [Photograph: Rachel O’Sulllivan/The Guardian]