Why Liverpool FA Cup tie means a lot after as soon as in a lifetime draw: Accrington Stanley’s most well-known fan Bumble meets membership chairman forward of Anfield journey

Mail Sport’s David Lloyd, who played semi-professionally for Accrington Stanley in the 1960s, returned to the club this week with his home town gripped by FA Cup fever.

‘Bumble’ caught up with owner Andy Holt, the local businessman whose money saved Accrington from going under a decade ago, to discuss all things Stanley before heading to Liverpool as one of the near 5,000 travelling support on Saturday.

David Lloyd: This is the biggest game in the history of our club. In 1960-61, when I was a lad, we played Preston, who were a top team, and held them to a draw at Deepdale. We brought them back to Peel Park and they beat us 4-0, but what sticks in my mind is that there were 15,000 on, everybody standing. Great atmosphere. In those days, you’d go behind the goals at the end your team were kicking towards and then change to the other end for the second half. There were no advertising boards and so your dad would take you and lift you over the wall, so you could sit pitchside. But today outstrips everything for me.

Holt: There’s no doubt about that. It’s probably the biggest game we’ll ever play. We are a really happy team here and when you’re happy, you get luck, I believe. It comes because you’ve earned it. You make your own luck in life and when people get bad luck you can see what’s led up to that too. This club has been through changes, applied more common sense to the way things are run and put in rules about the way it operates and this is just reward. I watched the draw at home, sat with my wife and kids and relations. Man United got drawn against Arsenal. Then, when Aston Villa and West Ham were paired together, I just thought: ‘Here we we are again, all the Premier League clubs are playing each other.’ I got up to make a brew, but when Liverpool came out the hat, I turned round. ‘Go on,’ I am saying. ‘Twenty-one! 21!’ When it came out, I nearly jumped through the roof.

Lloyd: I saw it the other way at first. I was watching with my missus and said: ‘What have we done to deserve this?’ But you’ve to got to dream, and having played professional sport, I immediately thought about what the players will be going through. It will be flipping sensational for these lads to emerge from the tunnel to ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone.’ To see the ‘This Is Anfield’ sign on the way out. It sent my mind back to Bill Shankly, Joe Fagan and those lads who created the Liverpool dynasty: Emlyn Hughes, Tommy Smith, Kevin Keegan.

Holt: I’m still pinching myself, because it is a once in a lifetime draw. Getting to the third round is never a given for us, but it’s important because we’re a small town community club. Because you can make a few bob, what you don’t want is to be away at a non-league club, a 500-mile round trip, because it costs you more to go than you get out of it and there are no guarantees of going further against opposition fighting hard to go as deep into the competition as they can.

Lloyd: There’s obviously a financial consideration, too, and this will be a massive boost to our coffers, I’m sure. What will it mean for us in money terms, Andy?

Holt: I haven’t got an exact figure, but doing some simple mathematics, I am hoping for about £300,000. We will get £75,000 for the TV coverage. We get £25,000 if we lose, but £125,000 if we win, so we’ll be giving it a good shot! Let’s hope they leave Mo Salah and one or two others out. You then get 45% of the gate after expenses; the home club gets the same and 10% goes to the FA. We got as many tickets as we dare – 4700 – and sold them like ‘that’. Anfield’s going to be ram-jam full. The crowd will be 60,000 guaranteed and the top price our fans are paying is 20 quid. When we charge £20 for matches, we make £12.80 net on a ticket, so that’s an overall £720,000 before stewarding costs. To be honest, though, the rules are there and whatever we get, we get.

Lloyd: One thing I find a bit disappointing – because the Wham Stadium is a great stadium – is that we’re still getting gates of 2000-2500. It’s alright buying a ticket against Liverpool, turn up against Colchester United, please.

Holt: It’s a fact that we’re a small club, but we’re doing everything we can to grow it, and this is a special day for so many people that have helped us on our journey. Like Bill Holden, been here for donkey’s years. He’s 81, just had a stroke and as one of our directors he will be up in the Liverpool boardroom – after decades of support for the game locally and for this club.

Lloyd: He’s like a Mr Accrington Stanley, isn’t he? Never misses a game.

Holt: He was our long-term handyman. Everything that was in bits, he’d try to fix. You would see him climbing on the roof of the old changing rooms, fixing a hole. Following week, he would be back up there. We’d joke: ‘Why do you keep moving that hole round?’

Lloyd: That sums up Accrington. A club where people get their hands dirty. Muck in. Before the development of the ground, if a player was subbed and went off to have a shower in the Portakabin, the lights would go off. Mark Turner, the secretary, called me to tell me we’d got a bit of a problem one day. ‘We haven’t got CCTV,’ he told me. You need CCTV to operate in the Football League. ‘Well, what you ringing me for?’ I asked. ‘Three and a half grand,’ he replied.

We needed to get it that week or we couldn’t play on the Saturday. So I forked out. 

Holt: Not so long ago, if the sprinklers come on at half time, you couldn’t wash your hands in the toilets as we only had a domestic water supply.

Lloyd: Can you remember first agreeing to take over? What made you get involved?

Holt: It was a moment of madness that lasted more than a moment. A chap called Murray Dawson had been pestering me loads, asking me to sponsor the club as a local business. In the end, I thought: ‘You know what, I will.’ The club was struggling. Always on the verge of packing up. Everybody, including you David, would be coppering up at the end of matches, seeing who could put in what. Fans were lending the club money. It was a really good community effort to keep things going. I will never disrespect where the club was then, because the fact that people got it anywhere, let alone the Football League, was a miracle. I had only been once before in my life, a 7-4 win over Gillingham back in 2010, when I said I would come on board for a pre-season friendly against Burnley. I got a picture of my lad with Sean Dyche. I was happy enough to be here, watching the match, having a pie and a pint. The problem was there was no beer. I asked: ‘What’s going on?’ They’d not paid the bills. Peter Marsden, the chairman, asked to have a word. ‘Would you like to get more involved?; I said: ‘Well, no, not really.’ He subsequently asked me a couple more times and I said I’d have a look at it. They couldn’t pay the wages. So I lent him £100,000 from my business that September, telling him that if I didn’t come back to him within a month, he could consider the money a gift, and he’d never see me again. 

When I looked over things, there was nowt positive, no real business, no chance of the club making money. They said it was losing £300,000 a year. In reality, it was losing five or six hundred grand. The wife and kids, the accountants and lawyers, all said: ‘Don’t do it.’ And they were right. But I met the kids in the academy. I met the kids who work in the Community Trust, and as I have a foundation that donates bits of money to local cricket clubs, rugby clubs, the purpose of which is getting kids off the streets. I thought: ‘You can’t let this go.’ The club had to survive. I knew it was wrong, I agreed with everything I was being told by my family and advisers, but in terms of bang for buck, if you’re donating to local clubs, running Accrington as a football club gives a lot more kids a lot more benefits. So I came in on that basis. Jesus Christ, if I’d have known what was coming, I’d have run a mile. But our Community Trust is brilliant. Our academy is kicking out great players now. It’s well organized, well run by good people. The pub’s brilliant too.

Lloyd: Lloyd: I did something for the Community Trust one lunchtime last month. A Q and A. Peter Beardsley was in the audience. Lovely fella. A far cry from when you came down and couldn’t get a drink!

Holt: When I arrived at the club, let’s say the accounting system had some irregularities in it. That’s normal when everybody working for you is a volunteer. Not long before then it were non-league. Like most non-league clubs, stewards would get paid with cash from behind the bar. They would only take a grand. They had to do it to survive. When we did a full check of the accounts, I realised that when the tax man paid us a visit, all the directors would be liable. So, I rang you and told you I was sacking you in your best interests. Then, I had to go to the tax man and beg for forgiveness. They were fair, took into account we’d come clean and agreed to pay.

Lloyd: There are all sorts of trials and tribulations in being a football club owner. What does this game versus Liverpool give you personally, Andy?

Holt: As an owner, you need a bit of upside to keep you going. It’s not a bowl of cherries running a football club. You’ve got a lot of stakeholders: fans, people in the community, all with opinions. The Football League are forever putting in more and more rules, then there is the FA and the government.

Lloyd: This last budget has hit sporting organisations massively, hasn’t it?

Holt: Yes, it’s the reduced threshold on National Insurance. Virtually every penny that comes into this club goes out in wages. We have a lot of bar staff – because this place is full to the gunnels on a match day. We have a lot of academy staff. It will hit us for £150,000 from April, and that’s a tax on a club that’s losing money. At our level, things don’t add up. We’re looking to break even this year, even with this Liverpool match. It’s not going to do any more than that, because we’re recovering from big losses in the past. When we got relegated in 2023, we were left with an overpriced, overgrown squad, and players that were in contract that we couldn’t cut. The costs from League One came down with us, but the revenues didn’t. We lost £1million from the football authorities and half a million from attendances, as the gates that you get in League One are far bigger. But don’t think ours is a tale of woe. Just being in League One is a dream for a club like ours.

Lloyd: Five years in it too. Playing Sunderland. They could fill the place themselves. It was good fun, it didn’t last, and now we’ve got to survive in League Two. Precarious is the word when it comes to league position. It’s important to stay in the Football League. Things have picked up with a great couple of results, but we don’t need this match to be a distraction.

Holt: I’ve been here 10 years now and there are a handful of games – including cup ties against Leeds and Middlesbrough – I could pick out, but there isn’t a bigger one than playing the top of the Premier League. We played West Ham after we beat Burnley here in the League Cup, which is my favorite ever game because I come from Burnley. We won it in the 120th minute with a Matty Pearson goal, then went down to West Ham and nearly beat them.

Lloyd: We did, yeah. They beat us with a great goal, from the last kick of the match.

Holt: A free-kick from Dimitri Payet. He was a top player. It was a screamer. For 96 minutes prior to that we matched them.

Lloyd: Fifteen years ago, Roy Hodgson brought Fulham here in the third round – and they couldn’t change in the Portakabins as there were too many players and staff. They changed at the hotel, instead. Great day, we played well, but lost 3-1.

Lloyd: Has John Doolan been and scouted this lot?

Holt: He went to the Manchester United game. Liverpool were here scouting us last week too. We’re going there, hoping for a great game, but if we don’t win, I’m not going to be too hard on him!

Lloyd: For 40 years, no matter where I have gone in the world, people ask me whether I am from Yorkshire or Lancashire and when I tell them I’m from Accrington, I routinely have that Ian Rush milk advert quoted back to me. ‘Accrington Stanley? Who are they?’ ‘Exactly!’ By the way, I think we got £10,000 for that!

Holt: I heard it were five. And the money only appeared after the event. It wasn’t part of the original deal. Apparently, somebody went to them and said: you need to pay us something for that. People focus on the condescending element of it, but I’m of the opinion that there’s nothing better than free publicity, and people love underdogs.

Lloyd: I was proud to pull on the shirt. Do you get the same sense of feeling from your players?

Holt: I will struggle not have a tear in my eye, watching our lads go out there. It’s recognition for the amount of work they’ve put in. You will have seen Josh Woods jumping up and down in his house after the draw. That social media video went viral. That shows you what the players are feeling.

Lloyd: You’ve got, a young kid like Josh Woods, who is learning. Then there is Shaun Whalley, a boyhood Liverpool fan, who is 37 years old and netted two this week. Fit as a fiddle. It feels like Josh could be his son. But they’ve both got a chance of playing at Anfield. What a story for them.

Holt: I’ve got no influence on on the squad that’s picked or anything like that, but if things aren’t going as well as I’d like, and we’re not 2-0 up at half-time, I’d like to see as many of our kids get a taste of being part of this day as possible. Just going to Anfield is exciting. You can’t get a ticket normally and I’ve only been once before. As a kid of 13-14, I worked in a bakery on a Saturday morning, and the bloke I worked for had some tickets. I can’t even remember who the game was against.

Lloyd: I can’t wait. The beauty of the FA Cup is that shocks happen!