Port Vale: The Last of us. Working class football in one of the six towns.

Words: Tom Reed

Images: Tom Reed

There’s an oatcake shop just up the hill from Port Vale Football Club in the county of Staffordshire, England.

The production of the round, savoury oatcakes is a sign of resilience, they were made in farming households to get through tough winters and for the potbanks, where they filled the stomachs of people grafting to make the very vessels of life itself; something to eat from and sup out of.

Oatcakes will keep a while, you can transport them and eat them later, they endure and you can endure on them, just like Port Vale Football Club keeps going through adversity.

The thick layers of relegation had been coiled, though not yet kiln fired, with the Valiants near the bottom of League 1.

But before we get to that, we have to find Port Vale, a place that doesn’t exist and understand the travails of playing professional football in a city that seems like it has been forgotten about.

If you ask “where is the city centre?” at Stoke-On-Trent train station, they’ll reply “which one?” because it is a city of six towns, with their own stories.

There’s Stoke Town one way and Hanley another, Tunstall, Fenton, Longton and Burslem, where you’ll find Port Vale Football club, formed in 1876 when the potteries really were firing and black gold pulled from the land.

When Googling Burslem one of the first returns is “Is Burslem rough?” which is galling for those that know its history as a boom-town, which was noted as “the mother as it is the metropolis of the Staffordshire Potteries” in the mid-19th Century.

Undulations have happened since, retractions even.

Pete Stonier, Vale fan and press photographer for the local paper ‘The Sentinel’ remembers Burslem “buzzing when I was at college in the mid 90’s but heritage buildings have gone up in flames and like many towns, the high street has been left.”

There are places in the six towns, which can feel like outposts of the British Empire, rather than parts of a united England. Boarded up shops sit alongside the odd cafe serving cooked breakfasts to the locals in Stoke Town, which hints at the strong community that has to take the place of any sort of government that cares about this place too half-way between Birmingham and Manchester for its own good.

England has given nothing to Stoke-On-Trent but Stoke-On-Trent has given much to England. The North Staffordshire Regiment gassed and enfiladed at the Hohenzollern Redoubt in the Great War, and then sun baked, strafed and shelled on the beachheads of Anzio in World World II.

Back home, a mining disaster saw 57 men and boys toiling for the war effort in 1942, killed in an explosion at the Sneyd coal pit in Burslem.

Sneyd was later merged with the nearby Wolstanton colliery and was the first in the Midlands to mine a million tonnes of coal in a calendar year, but was closed under the Thatcher administration in 1986 and replaced with a retail park.

Any post-war consensus came and went, as did the major employers. The Brexit dividend seems slow in coming now.

At Burslem, the Wedgwood Institute stands proud and yet to be bettered architecturally, named after Josiah Wedgwood, who started his career there and built one of the best know pottery houses in the world.

The Institute is symbolic of a time when paternalistic industrialists had to step in to the void between people and profit but now there are few industrialists left.

The pub Robbie Williams grew up in, the Red Lion is boarded up, there’s talk the singer and Vale fan will take over the club but it never seems to come to anything.

Vale Park, in its own way was a gift to the people, giving some afternoon sunshine in bleak winters.

Originally planned as the “Wembley Of The North” and a capacity of 80,000 it was opened in 1950 carrying a still, significant 40,000 with Stanley Matthews having made Stoke City FC just down the road, serious competition for crowds.

The Railway Stand of Vale Park rises up like a motte and bailey castle, with steep grass banks.

©Tom Reed/ Terrace Edition. Port Vale FC.

Behind it was once the Potteries Loop Line railway, which joined up three of the six towns and carried up to 40 trains a day before Dr Beeching saw to its demise.

For a Football League ground, it’s still a vast site with a large forecourt where a modern fan-zone is in situ. The tunes played by the DJ there are vintage with Hector Rivera’s “I want a chance of romance” blaring out at just the right volume to get your feet tapping.

“This one’s a rare one” says the DJ on the mic and he’s right about the Latino Northern Soul number and the football club itself.

Vale supporters are often painted as cold, tough people, maybe due to the two fingered salutes given to away fans rolling in and out of Burslem.

But the fans we speak to are as friendly as they come and pleased that someone has mooched around Burslem to bust a few myths about a misunderstood club and where it’s been and what it’s lost.

They are worried about the results and some fans want the Director of Football, David Flitcroft gone. The club’s co-owner Carol Shanahan OBE, who took over the club in 2019, after building a successful IT business, carries a great deal of respect but losing streaks can pile the pressure on, no matter how much credit she carries with fans.

The January transfer window was quiet and the illusive goalscorer that every club is after never came in and there were injuries at the worst time.

“We bought this football club almost five years ago because we fell in love with Port Vale” read a Shanahan statement in the week building up to the match with promotion chasing Stevenage FC, making it clear that Flitcroft was going nowhere.

In fairness to her, Vale Park is an obvious money pit and in some ways Shanahan is paying to keep a living museum for the community going, a ground with more character in one stand than modern stadia have in entire wrap around bowls.

The top four in League 1 have all played Premier League football with budgets to match, meaning Vale are on a hiding to nothing in various ways, and breaking glass ceilings can often mean just bouncing off.

“When no-one else can understand me” sings Elvis Presley as the players take to the pitch vs Stevenage, signalling a turnaround in football fortunes for the home side, who once played in front of 49,768 in the 1960 FA Cup at Vale Park. Today’s opponents Boro were playing in the Southern League back then.

Vale, in their classy white, gold and black homes shirts don’t read the lyrics and decide to boss the ball, scoring an early opener via a Stevenage own-goal from the wonderfully name Terence Vancooten.

However, Guyana international Vancooten who has played in the CONCACAF Gold Cup, made amends by scoring the second of Boro’s goals at the right end, killing off the hope and consolation in even the most ardent of Vale supporters with a penchant for the King of Rock and Roll.

And yet, in the 98th minute, the ref pointed to the spot after a handball from Stevenage’s Dan Butler, leaving Funso Ojo to knock home to secure a precious point for Port Vale.

With the Potteries Loop Line gone, the nearest station is at Longport, a 25 minute walk downhill through Burslem.

The first arrival found not a soul in the station, like a scene from the TV Series “The Last Of Us”.

And that is what Port Vale are, the last of a working class football community trying to hold on in a changing game of distorting top-tier millions, where real progress seems something from another age.

Less earthenware made from this ground, no more coal pits, no more trains passing by. Your modern Wedgwood plate is more likely to have been made in Indonesia than within cheering distance of Vale Park.

We should be kinder to them and them to each other.

The next day, the oatcake is still in my pocket, the cheese and bacon congealed, it soothes my hangover reliably.