Basford United

Greenwich Avenue does not look like the ground of a club approaching its 125th year: the pitch is 3G, laid down in a redevelopment worth some £3 million, with a further £750,000 grant from the Football Foundation going into new facilities in 2016. Basford United, founded in 1900 in the Nottingham suburb that gives the club its name, spent most of that history well outside the National League pyramid, which it only joined in 2007 under chairman and manager Chris Munroe.

What followed was a climb rather than a slow rise. Under Darren Saunders the club took the Central Midlands League and Floodlit Cup double in 2012, and under Martin Carruthers it won the Midland League Premier Division in 2015 before a 2018 season that brought exactly 100 points and the Northern Premier League Division One South title, taking Basford into the Premier Division. The Football Education Academy has since sent players on into the professional game, among them Colby Bishop, now at Accrington Stanley.

The yellow and black kit, fading from gold into black, is behind the nickname The Ambers, worn by a club whose colours are more talked about locally than its badge. In 2021 the under-18s reached the third round of the FA Youth Cup as the lowest-ranked side left in the competition, before West Bromwich Albion ended the run.

Nottingham Forest and Notts County have met Basford only in cup football, and neither carries the weight of the fixture against Ilkeston Town, known simply as the Derby, or the Bank Holiday Derby when the calendar allows. That one has spilled past the final whistle before now, with police called to trouble outside the ground in September 2023. Worksop Town supplies the other local needle, billed as the Nottinghamshire derby, though it is Ilkeston that Basford's supporters mark on the calendar first.