Halesowen Town

The fixture that matters most at The Grove comes once a season against Stourbridge, up the A456, and the road gave the derby its name: the Number Nine. Nothing about the football itself explains why the meeting carries the weight it does, only the miles between the two towns and however many years of running into each other.

The nickname predates any of that. "The Yeltz" is Black Country dialect at work, the kind that swaps an initial H for a Y, so Halesowen becomes something closer to Yalesowen — though some at the club trace it instead to "Ye Earls," a nod to the Earls of Dudley. Either version has stuck longer than most club nicknames manage.

Paul Joinson's name still carries the most weight in the record books: 658 appearances, 368 goals, a career spent almost entirely in yellow and blue. Jim Rodwell went the other way, leaving for £40,000 after four seasons in the 1990s and building a career as a football executive once his playing days ended. Between them they cover most of what the club has been proud of on and off the pitch.

Two FA Vase finals, both won, both in successive years — Fleetwood Town beaten 3-1 in 1985, Southall put away 3-0 in 1986 — remain the high point, a run no other spell at the club has matched. There was a low point too: a financial crisis in 2011-12 that cost them their place in the Northern Premier League Premier Division, the kind of relegation that has nothing to do with results. They found their way back up through the play-offs in 2023, and this season they are back in the Southern League Premier Division Central.

The club itself goes back further than most of its rivals in the division, to 1877, when it played simply as Halesowen Football Club, decades before it took the "Town" in its name and settled at the Grove Recreation Ground around 1881.