Those of us in the press box are supposed to be unbiased observers, of course, and for 98 minutes on Saturday I obeyed the unwritten code. The mask stayed in place even as a Morecambe team flung together in the previous 72 hours took to the field, and families I’ve known for decades exchanged tearful hugs over their miraculous resurrection.
But when, with two minutes of added time remaining and the ball ricocheting around our box, we somehow conjured a winner, my euphoria could no longer be contained.
Tearing off my jumper to reveal the new club shirt bought for me by my niece Lauren (who was leaping manically behind the goal with husband Iain and 10-year-old son Alex), I was no longer a Surrey-based exile. I was at one with the Sand Grown ’Uns: my tribe.
A few days ago, it seemed that shirt was never to be worn on the pitch. Time appeared to have run out for the club I have supported for 62 years, and the 2025-26 kit was being flogged off in a cafe on the prom.
With zero in the bank, the ground shuttered, staff wages unpaid, and just five players still on the books, the owners Bond Group Investments, headed by Essex-based wheeler-dealer Jason Whittingham, were for some reason refusing to sell up.
Charitably, the National League (to which Morecambe had been relegated) had allowed the club to postpone their season until August 20, missing their first three fixtures.
David Jones spent almost all of Morecambe’s clash with Altrincham keeping his allegiances under wraps – until he could wait no longer
The Shrimps had been wracked with financial troubles under their previous ownership
But last Sunday a new ownership group – Panjab Warriors – (Morecambe CEO Ropinder Singh pictured right) were cleared to take over
Yet with creditors circling like seagulls, chief among them HMRC, who were owed upwards of £600,000 and had issued awinding-up order, extinction appeared inevitable.
My beloved Shrimps were just an empty shell. Losing the football club, which served as a hub for military veterans, pensioners and vulnerable children, would have been a dagger to the heart. The club’s impending demise was even raised in Parliament. But in the town that spawned one half of Britain’s best-ever comedy duo, humour and hope are etched in the DNA, and in Panjab Warriors – a little-known sporting consortium based 280 miles south in Hounslow – an unlikely saviour emerged.
Undeterred by Whittingham’s rebuttals, they finally got him to make a deal last Sunday.
In the six days before Saturday’s match against Altrincham, the operation to get the club up and running in time has been a study in communal effort.
A few days ago, the only part of the Mazuma Stadium that remained open was the gym, owned by Tyson Fury, who lives nearby.
An unpaid contractor had stripped the lights out of the dressing room and bar, leaving bare wires hanging down. But an army of volunteers ensured Saturday’s show went on. Local MP Lizzie Collinge picked weeds from the terraces. A real vote-winner, that. Meanwhile, professional football’s first Sikh manager, 30-year-old Ashvir Singh Johal, was rallying players to the cause. Between Wednesday and Friday night he had signed a dozen.
The squad we saw on Saturday arrived via more countries than Phileas Fogg and played in leagues from Indonesia to Azerbaijan.
Though secretary Adele Laffan burned the midnight oil to obtain international clearance for them all, two were still ineligible at kick-off.
New manager Ashvir Singh Johal has become the first Sikh manager in professional football
After Altrincham threatened to spoil the party with an equaliser new signing Daniel Ogwuru claimed the winner at the last
Morecambe’s players could celebrate wildly with their fans, who have been through so much
Morecambe’s award-winning pies weren’t on sale, either. We had to make do with chip vans. Who cared? The ambience was that of a huge family reunion.
When our colourfully turbaned saviours took the pitch to milk the adulation of 3,700 supporters, they seemed blithely unaware that they were being stalked by the club mascot, an outsized Cheshire cat.
And there were times in the match when players who had trained together for barely a few hours almost fell over one another as they made the same runs.
Turbo-charged with adrenaline, however, the team of strangers played some off-the-cuff stuff and after six minutes took the lead. The strains of Bring Me Sunshine, Eric and Ernie’s signature tune, must have been heard as far as the bespectacled funnyman’s statue, a mile away on the seafront.
Like unwelcome party gate-crashers, however, Altrincham equalised and by the final minutes Morecambe’s exhausted ranks were besieged.
Somehow Daniel Ogwuru, a young lad who was signed on Saturday from Norwich City, summoned the strength to break away and score our winning goal.
But I wouldn’t have cared two hoots if we had lost, and every Shrimp I spoke to shared that same sentiment.
We have got our club back, and Saturday that was all that mattered.
