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Ebbsfleet win signals dawn of a new era in non-league football

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After hotfooting it back from Wembley, The Boz muses on the way the world is turning in his penultimate non-league blog of the 07/08 season...

I was described as 'fanciful' for dubbing Saturday's FA Trophy final 'The Future versus The Past'.
But to me, Ebbsfleet are the epitomy of modern football. A new name to reflect their commercial standing, 30,000 new owners organised via the internet and a sense of financial stability and feelgood factor that is wholly unusual in UK non-league football!

Whatever happened to British doom and gloom, the sense of pessimism that serves us so well when the rest of the world is winning?

Well it will live on with poor old fashioned Torquay who have battled their demise from the Football League in the old fashioned way. Playing old fashioned football, entertaining the hordes by scoring goals with little care for what they might concede.

It was somehow inevitable that Ebbsfleet should prevail on Saturday and it's a sign for me of what is now to come. The following day, the FA Vase was won by a team who are instantly changing their name from the gloriously old fashioned Kirkham & Wesham to the hip and trendy FC Fylde. They will compete with the upward moving FC United, AFC Wimbledon et al in a football world where the despotic chairman is going the way of the dinosaur.

To hammer the point home, hot on the heels of the Wembley celebrations for Ebbsfleet and FC Fylde came the news that Halifax - that bastion of old fashioned football in the north of England - had finally bitten the dust. This was down to boardroom bungling at its mightiest, something the taxman will no longer tolerate.

This is the modern world. Football is flooded with money and if you cannot demonstrate your fiscal ability alongside your soccer skills, you are out mate!

Halifax's demotion from the Conference is sure to be confirmed this week which will be a sad day indeed for a club of proud tradition. Doubly ironic that Myfootballclub.com came close to purchasing the Shaymen rather than the Fleet. Presumably they were put off by the size of the financial black hole into which their internet moolah would likely disappear!

But one man's catastrophe is another man's Mecca. Altrincham look set for their third reprieve from relegation in three years. Some things don't change! The weird thing about watching Ebbsfleet at Wembley was the way the football was played. For all the sea change going on around the way the game is organised since the advent of the internet and the notion of Supporters trusts, the way the game is played on the pitch has varied little in a hundred years. Chris Mcphee could easily have been Tom Finney (if you ignored the shorter shorts!). There was even a moment when John Akinde barged the Torquay goalkeeper Martin Rice (who had a good game by the way) and the referee turned away without so much as a twitch toward his card pocket.

On the field, football remains consistent. Ebbsfleet's victory also secured a 37.5 point profit for the portfolios that I have published in this blog throughout the season so not everything is changing!

Be ready though for the sight of a few more Ebbsfleets in the years to come. I already have them on my shortest of shortlists for next season's Blue Square Premier championship and it will be worth keeping an eye on FC Fylde too. The fact that all the supporters trust teams are on an upward curve in non-league football is no coincidence. We are indeed at the beginning of a new era at grassroots level and it is looking likely that the Halifax experience - which has always dogged the game - could soon become a thing of the past.

* Catch The Boz's preview of the Blue Square Premiership play-off final between Cambridge and Exeter at Wembley on Sunday as the curtain comes down on another season of non-league football.