Heartbreak, euphoria and another chance for an FA Cup giant-killing in Macclesfield

For all the recent upgrades and revamps, like most non-league stadiums, Moss Rose feels like it fell together by accident, a hodgepodge of barren concrete standing areas and plastic seats beneath rolling Cheshire hills. But then, all things considered, much of the new Macclesfield is the product of good fortune and good intentions. Robert Smethurst bought the club in 2020 for £500,000 in the haze of a four-day drinking binge having just sold his car trading company. He was a local boy but never really a fan or football expert. John Rooney had no plan to retire when the opportunity arose for him to move from player to manager last summer.

And for all the planning and hoping, beating Crystal Palace in the FA Cup third round – perhaps the greatest shock in English football history – required equal parts resilience and brilliance and luck. Now the Toronto Star are previewing the fourth-round visit of Brentford and a L’Equipe reporter has travelled to Cheshire on a leaden Thursday afternoon. Unsurprisingly for a sixth-tier team, Moss Rose does not have the permanent infrastructure to support the world’s media descending, so the FA Cup sits between Rooney and Luke Matheson, a 23-year-old defender, at the far end of the club bar for a makeshift press conference. A framed memorial match sheet from the Palace game perches over Rooney’s shoulder.

Sponsors around the synthetic 4G pitch include a pallet delivery specialist, a local solicitors and a taxi firm, and between the two substitutes benches a banner reads “in loving memory of Ethan McLeod”. McLeod, a 21-year-old forward who joined last summer, died in a car accident on the way home from an away game against Bedford Town in December. His parents were at the Palace game and were invited into the dressing room post-match, where McLeod’s picture sits above his empty seat.

His funeral only took place last week and the club asked media to avoid questions about Ethan. United by recurring injury issues and youth, Matheson and McLeod spent much of the first half of this season together, and Matheson wrote on Instagram after his friend’s death: “You gave such a genuine piece of yourself to so many people across the footballing world and while you watch us from above, I know each person will continue to play the game you loved with that piece inside of us and let you watch the game through our eyes.” Isaac Buckley-Ricketts, who scored the winner, said “I was thinking about it when the final whistle went. Ethan was here.”

And so the overwhelming sensation that fans and those around the club talk about in the wake of the Palace victory is surreality. Yes, it was euphoric and dramatic, but also so strange that it was almost impossible to process. Results like this don’t happen, especially not having gone 2-0 up and largely holding on to a lead with ease. Rooney said that he has not stopped for the chance to begin feeling everything; it might take these players years to process the fullness of what they have experienced. The previous season they had played Mickleover and Leek Town in the Northern Premier League. Five years prior, they didn’t have any players or sense of what the future might entail. In three weeks, many around the club experienced what they would call the best and worst days of their lives to date.

Rooney keeps talking about the “bread and butter” of the league, about just focusing on the next match, futile attempts to stop the club from becoming trapped in the orbit of their achievement. This is his first season in management, coaching players who were his teammates last season, and for all he has experienced through both his own career and his brother Wayne’s, there is no playbook for how to handle this. And having taken the Sunday to sleep off their hangovers, defender Sam Heathcote had to return to being a primary school teacher, goalkeeper Max Dearnley a brickie.

Both matches being at home means that this run will not necessarily bring in a fortune-shifting windfall. Palace were blocked from sharing their gate receipts from the third-round match as it would have breached FA regulations, meaning that Macclesfield only took 45% of the revenue from a sell-out crowd of 5,348, not exactly the £400,000 or so that Exeter earned from being beaten 10-1 at Manchester City in front of 50,000 spectators on the same day.

But the impact of this victory is intangible, a restoration of pride and belonging. Identity as a phoenix club can be complex, built on a history both your own and not, always treated with a certain sense of pity and distance, your mere existence permanently framed as an act of rebellion and a monument to a broken past. But one match has redefined what the club means to both its community and the wider sporting world, a proclamation of intent and strength.

The Silkmen have won five of their six league games since, climbing from 14th to sixth. Rooney was named January manager of the month for the National League North. If there is any way of quantifying the boost provided from beating a team 117 places above you in the pyramid, this is it. Sometimes you do not know what you are capable of until you do it.

Having scored for Rochdale against Manchester United in the EFL Cup as a 16-year-old, Matheson can teach his teammates something about how to process these highs, how to frame them in the wider context of careers and lives. Having gone from League One to the Premier League – he was signed by Wolves in 2020 – and now down to the sixth tier, having spent far too much of his young career injured, he still calls that Old Trafford goal “one of the best experiences of my life”.

Most players would swap years of their careers to experience one defining moment like this; Matheson has had two. Every non-league club would swap years of decline for Macclesfield’s January afternoon rapture. What would they exchange to be able to do it again?

Photograph by Simon Stacpoole/Offside via Getty Images