The Non-League Paper

 

Waiting for ‘The Pink’, the Coventry Evening Telegraph football paper, on a Saturday evening remains one of my most vivid childhood memories, the van arriving around 6pm and eager hands passing over their money before rushing off to digest the afternoon’s reports.

It was a tradition I continued after moving to Sheffield but the battle for survival facing the ‘Green Un’ and others became more evident as the years passed, a number of price rises in quick succession and later delivery (if at all) on a Saturday evening as production moved away from the city centre.

Of course, all of the information is available at the touch of a button nowadays but I still don’t think the format of seeing all of the scores, scorers, attendances and tables, on one page has ever been bettered.

That has always been one of my favourite features of The Non-League Paper over the years, the disparate strands of the pyramid in England pulled together on the page in addition to the promise of the fixtures for the week ahead from the Northern League down to the South-West Peninsula.

Those simple pleasures are currently denied us, with only the National League season still being played, but the paper remains a focal point for the game at all levels outside of the EFL as the debate over what becomes of the 2020/21 campaign begins to intensify.