Telegraph Sport has seen its share of weird and wonderful football grounds in its time, but this is the first one it has entered through a hole in the fence.
The quickest route into Eastleigh’s Silverlake Stadium – if not necessarily the safest – is by clambering up a muddy bank just off the M27 in Hampshire, darting across five lanes of traffic, fording a drainage canal and squirming underneath a gnarled fence with a barbed wire collar. Ticketless Bolton Wanderers supporters planning on making the trip this Saturday may well be taking notes at this point.
For this is just one of the many ways in which the FA Cup’s last remaining non-League team are quite happy to break with convention. Here is another.
When manager Richard Hill departed in September, the Conference club decided to advertise the job vacancy on Twitter. Although a fair few hoax candidates put their names forward, the initiative delivered around 60 applicants from all over the world. In the end, they decided to give the job to their 34-year-old central defender, a genial Welshman called Chris Todd.
Todd is not your typical manager either, and for more reasons than his age.
Lee Cook says the players want to impress their manager
The first thing he did was to switch his training gear for a smart suit. “I get a little bit of stick for my clothes,” Todd admits. “I like to look smart, I like to look the part.”
The next thing he did was to introduce a fine for anybody using his playing nickname of “Toddy”. From now on, Toddy was “gaffer”.
There is something else that sets Todd apart. Seven years ago, he fainted at the wheel of his car. A blood test revealed an early form of chronic myeloid leukaemia. An immediate course of chemotherapy was successful, and he was back on the pitch later that season. The cancer has been in remission for five years now, but he still takes his chemotherapy drug every day and will need to do so for the rest of his life.
“It’s just a tablet, like having insulin for diabetes,” he says. “I’m as healthy as I could possibly be, but my tablets keep me in that position, so I still have to take them.
“I’ve seen things in my short lifespan that somebody who’s 60 or 70 won’t have seen. I’m a lucky person. Lucky to be alive, and lucky to be sitting in a position where I’m manager of a great football club.”
Todd has taken on a variety of guises in order to raise awareness of the condition. He joined a choir and performed in a cancer fundraising concert at the Royal Albert Hall. He documented his struggles in a book called More Than Football in the Blood. He has acted in a short film, released a charity single and appeared on This Morning. But in terms of exposure, a famous Cup giantkilling on Saturday would trump the lot.
The Eastleigh pitch will be unfamiliar to the Bolton players
Many of Eastleigh’s squad have played at a higher level, yet they pay tribute to their rookie manager’s boundless energy and unbridled ambition.
“You want to play for him,” says Lee Cook. “The second he got the job, the difference was unbelievable. The tempo in training was up 10 per cent.”
Cook himself is a symbol of the club’s aspiration. A former Queens Park Rangers winger once rated so highly that Premier League Fulham were persuaded to pay £2.5 million for him in 2007, Cook was one of a number of star players signed by Eastleigh last summer in an attempt to propel them out of the Conference. Defender Dan Harding was playing for Nottingham Forest last season. Joe Partington was signed from Bournemouth. This is a Football League squad in all but name.
None of this has come cheap. Eastleigh are being bankrolled by a local insurance tycoon called Stewart Donald, who has pumped around £3 million into the club since taking over in 2011, and is prepared to spend around the same again on bringing their 5,200‑capacity ground up to Football League standard and beyond. They are fourth in the Conference.
“He wants this club into the Championship as soon as he can, and he’s got the heart to do it,” Cook says. “He’s put in a lot of his own money. Attracting a fan base is difficult, because of Portsmouth and Southampton, but when he first took over they were getting 300 a week. Now we’re getting 1,500. Let’s just hope we can reward him on Saturday, and get some money for the club.”
In fact, the longer you spend in Eastleigh, the less they sound like underdogs. Bolton may be three divisions above them, but Neil Lennon’s team are bottom of the Championship and in dire financial trouble.
The Conference is a world away from the Championship
Relegation beckons. Eastleigh know they are unfancied, but are equally aware that this is a game they can win.
“If they even think about taking us lightly, they’ll come unstuck,” Cook warns. “The pitch isn’t very good. They won’t like playing on that. I don’t think the Bolton players have been paid in a while. No matter what people say, if you don’t know when your next pay cheque is coming, it’s distracting. We’re going to stick it up them, as they say.”
There are extra motivations. There is a simmering resentment at Eastleigh that the game has not been selected for live television coverage, which would have given the club a £144,000 windfall.
“The FA Cup is basically for the lower-league teams,” Harding complains. “The BBC have paid for it, and I just presume it’s a cheaper way of getting Premier League football. Because that’s all they’re showing.”
Todd, meanwhile, has a more personal mission this Saturday. Since taking over as manager full‑time, he has found it harder to make time for his charity work. Perhaps he can find some way of combining the two. “Who knows, maybe we’ll do something for the fourth round,” he says.
“If we end up with a Premier League team away, maybe they’ll let me put some collection buckets around to raise money. I’m always looking for avenues to go down.”
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