Every now and then a manager and his environment just seem to fit together. Graham Coughlan is a tough guy and Newport County is a tough club; they all know what it’s like to punch above their weight and they all know what it’s like to have their teeth caved in.
On Thursday afternoon a few of us were talking to him about such things. We were sitting in a makeshift press conference room on Rodney Parade and outside it was raining while a man was mowing a field last used for rugby.
A sign stuck to the till said ‘Manchester United sold out’, and people were a bit amused by that, but Coughlan was thinking of a quieter weekend in 2007.
He is now 49 and has never been a big player. He was a tough centre-back from Ireland who traveled between the Championship and League Two in almost 500 games. But along the way he met some of his heroes and came to tell us a story about Roy Keane.
As a serious United fan he can’t speak highly enough of the guy and one Saturday in January 2007 they faced off.
Graham Coughlan is a tough guy and he embodies Newport County well
The soul of the FA Cup can be found at clubs like Newport as they prepare to face Man United
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Keane led Sunderland and Coughlan was the granite of Sheffield Wednesday’s defense until he threw his face into the path of a goalkeeper’s knee. “My nose, my teeth and the roof of my mouth were all destroyed,” he said. “I was sparko.”
What Coughlan remembers most is that, while the game was still in progress, Keane followed him through the Hillsborough Tunnel to check everything was OK. He then sat with him until Coughlan’s wife arrived and also called the next morning. “Told me that was the best I ever seen,” Coughlan said and they laughed about it.
Hard men come together and Coughlan, like Keane, is a hard man. A man running through walls and headbutting his knees.
It’s one reason why Newport County fans love their manager. He’s one of them. He fits a tough, resilient club and he fits a tough, resilient city that is weathering terribly difficult times.
When I visited for a few days this week, it was easy to understand what the locals there say about their tides.
Once at the top, the River Usk is a beautiful sight as it meanders along the waterfront plains, making Rodney Parade invisible from the main roads. When it gets to the bottom, you see the deep, wide mud banks and the wheels of lost bicycles.
Like any river, like any place, they have those ups and downs and there have been a few in Newport lately. Insurance company Admiral closed their large offices in 2022, Debenhams went bankrupt in 2021, leaving a hole in their new shopping centre, and Covid shuttered more of the high streets, like everywhere else.
Coughlan spoke highly of Roy Keane after a post-match meeting in January 2007
Last month news broke that 300 jobs were at risk at what was left of the once mighty Llanwern steelworks. These ebbs can never be matched by the flow of football results, but they can help and improve, especially when a community is as embedded in a club as Newport is.
It’s a stadium woven between the houses, with fans on the board and a pole collecting countless coins in countless buckets at countless crisis points over the decades.
And that’s why the house will be rocking this afternoon when Newport County and Manchester United are brought together.
It’s a beautiful thing: the club that won everything travels 73 rungs south on the ladder to a club that fully and absolutely understands what it means to have nothing. Actually nothing.
Not struggling, not going broke in the exaggerated language of EFL chairman Rick Parry, not the administration – gone. Like Bury. Like Maidstone.
It’s 35 years since Newport County went bankrupt and was relaunched by 400 fans deep in non-League at a ground in Gloucester. That was a dramatic old period and so was the time in the mid-1990s when they were expelled from their own country by the Football Association of Wales – the second time in exile.
Then there were the dramas of 2018. If Mark O’Brien, a boy with a faulty heart valve, had not scored in the final minute of the last game of that season, they would have disappeared from the Football League. This would have resulted in them being liquidated again. Again: basically nothing.
They have been a club of boundless chaos, largely of their own making, but to use the title of a fantastic BBC documentary, they are the team that refused to die. Kneel them in the face and they’ll find a way to laugh it off.
When we talk about the fading charms of the FA Cup, when we delve deeper into the arguments about its relevance, it is encouraging how a draw like this can immediately correct sentiment.
Newport averages about 4,000 visitors, but it’s 4,000 that really care
It may sound trite and tired even, but in the age of state ownership and unrest in the Super League, of aloof parasites called Glazer, it is clubs like Newport County and Maidstone United who, for me, will always give the Cup its soul.
It is clubs like Newport and Maidstone that save the Cup and it is the Cup that saves clubs like Newport and Maidstone.
With clubs like them in mind, we should see any proposal from the bigger guys to scrap cup replays, and therefore the money they generate, for what they are: an abhorrent abuse of the environment.
It’s the stories of players like Will Evans – the reject from Shrewsbury turned farmer who became Newport’s top scorer – that keep the Cup special. It’s about the wry smile of their midfielder Scot Bennett, who told me the other day that they were using three training sites this week, and most weeks, because a little rain causes chaos.
Carrington a bit dated? Everything is relative and the Cup has the useful habit of showing us how much. I understand County’s first team wages this season are £500 to £2000 per week, with a bottom five wage bill for League Two of around £1.2m per year – that’s what Casemiro earns in a month and that’s what Newport’s losses are. were on their most recent bills.
Will Evans is a reject from Shrewsbury turned farmer who became Newport’s top scorer
Man United’s Casemiro earns around £1.2million a week, the same as Newport’s annual wage bill
Had former Swansea City chairman Huw Jenkins not stepped in this week with a £500,000 takeover, leaving 27 percent in the hands of the supporters’ trust, they would have been on their way to collapse again .
Fortunately that didn’t happen, but it shows for the umpteenth time the hand-to-mouth existence for many lower down the chain.
These can be boring conversations – talking about equilibria and pyramids and the redistribution of wealth. But if we want to discuss the virtues of the cup, one of them is that it gives a real face and name to the smaller clubs that we perhaps don’t spend enough time on.
Newport only has an average attendance of around 4,000, but they are 4,000 who care deeply about their club. Not necessarily more than the millions who follow United, but at least as many, head for head.
Coughlan had a story about that for me recently, about a summer in which he had to thrash a number of key players this season before a ball was even kicked.
“I’ll always remember there was a little girl of six, knee-high as a grasshopper,” he said. “She was there with a bucket going across the field to help us pay players. You don’t forget things like that. That’s why I love this city.’
The last time Newport received this much attention was in 2019 when they faced Man City
Together with Jenkins’ arrival, the Cup run will help Newport. It has been worth £400,000 so far and brings back memories of the last time County received this much attention, in 2019, when Michael Flynn’s side of vagabonds, drifters and a former prisoner hosted Manchester City in the fifth round.
The story then was that they made enough in television money to repair the damage caused to their training ground by an exploding clothes dryer.
That story was even better and sticks in my memory far more vividly than anything City did when they finally lost their teeth at Newport five years ago. United may throw a few more out, but you suspect County will find a way to laugh about it. They’ve had worse.