‘I was a Man Utd fan dumped by Newport - now I have a shot at FA Cup fairytale’
Newport County know this territory. If we’re being honest, this is their territory. The club don’t get drawn into plum ties so much as plum ties draw them.
Manchester City, Newcastle United, Brentford earlier this season. The club have made plonkers of Leeds United, Leicester City, Swansea City, Brighton & Hove Albion and Middlesbrough. Tottenham Hotspur required the last-gasp intervention of Harry Kane to avoid the ignominious downing of a Goliath.
Indeed, if time travel was ever invented and for whatever reason one football club was selected via a lottery system to skid through time to stand vis-à-vis a world-beater of their choosing, the result is hilariously predictable. 1970s Brazil? 2011 Barcelona? That Euro ‘88 Dutch team? Sold. To Newport County in the FA Cup fourth round proper.
The Manchester United of today - volatile, perennially engulfed in a vortex of self-destructive doom, soft and rubbery around the edges - might struggle as company to the aforementioned teams. But this is (someone check on Gary Neville) Manchester United Football Club. For Newport’s Nathan Wood, it is the tie of a lifetime.
Wood is candid. This - a Newport County tie with one of English football’s giants from the vantage point of the first-team dugout - is the 25-year-old’s “first one”. The attacking midfielder says this in the same way someone might a first-ever beer or flight outside the country or a Star Wars film: with the unfettered, almost ecstatic anticipation of the uninitiated.
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Born in Newport, raised in Newport, playing in Newport, Wood knows the drill. The FA Cup is English football’s one prevailing purveyor of all things fairy tale. The sole survivor of fantasy in a world of money and greed and VAR and money.
The sell is a stretch roughly up until this point: A club which, over 30 years ago, was forced out of business. Then rose from the ashes of the ninth tier to eventually ascend to the orientation of professional Giant Killer, annually making a mockery of their place in the football pyramid.
And then there’s Wood. The local Newport lad who, after being dropped from his boyhood club at the age of 16 following Newport’s return to the Football League in 2013, was forced to drop deep into the Welsh football system. Men’s park football became his sanctuary and school.
Nathan Wood went to his first Manchester United game at Old Trafford at the age of seven (Nathan Wood)The education was quick, cut-throat and itinerant, spanning Undy Athletic in the Welsh third tier to Penybont in the Cymru Premier. Finally, an unlikely return nine years on to the club which discarded him all those years ago. And now, a date in the FA Cup fourth round with Manchester United, the very team he grew up supporting.
“I remember always thinking, in the back of my mind, I always felt that this was achievable but I didn’t see how,” Wood says. “It feels like I shouldn't be here. It’s…wild.”
“A wild journey that’s all worked out” is the abridged, grime-less version of this story. It skips over the real-time adjustment to the unforgiving and intimidating world of men’s football at the tender age of 16. Or the years in between working odd hours at a coffee shop to make ends meet. Or the self-issued ultimatum last year that if a full-time offer did not arrive, the boots would be hung up once and for all.
Perhaps fittingly, Newport - a club once exiled and self-resuscitated - has become a sort of resuscitation site for circuitous footballing journeys. Star striker Will Evans is case and point, as is James Waite, both having arrived to the Exiles from the Cymru Premier.
That Wood was dropped from this place all those years ago is an ironic twist in the usual tale. Wood recalls the walk through the club’s training ground back from the manager’s office at the start of this season upon signing his first professional contract. Deja vu swallowed him. The ground, the walls, the smells were as they were nine years ago, when he was on a very different walk, tears prickling raw red eyes.
“Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise that I did have to go through it because mentally, I am stronger now. I know who I am as a person, I’m comfortable with it. My maturity in terms of my game and my person couldn’t have come at a better time. I mean, I’ve drawn Manchester United.”
Wood's boyish incredulity is inescapable. If Newport County represent a fairy tale, then Wood represents the square root of that. A microcosm of the microcosm. The footballing equivalent to a yellow-shirted Russian doll. Or, as Wood puts it, an important football lesson that often gets little airtime.
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Newport's Nathan Wood borrowed inspirations from Marcus Rashford as he scored in the Welsh Cup last season (Nathan Wood)“I never wanted to be someone who had to admit I was good enough but I didn’t make it because I didn’t have the drive. If I didn’t make it, I wasn’t good enough,” Wood says. “But not many people go into the professional game at 25, so when I was released from Newport, that did feel like the last step. No one goes into the pro game at 22 onwards. So it did hurt.”
He adds: “My story, it’s wild but I’m glad that I can be something to younger players, in that if you get released at 16… I never had anyone to be like, just keep going. Everyone else quit around me. So if I can be an example to any young footballer in the Cymru Premier or the National League or anywhere someone might’ve been released, players like me, just keep going, give yourself a chance.”
From standing on the terraces of Spytty Park and eventually Rodney Parade, Wood knows the value of a chance. He isn’t the sentimental type. When he was released by Newport, he cried into a tissue. After signing his first professional full-time contract with the club, his dad presented him with a glasses case with the release date etched onto it. Inside, the same tissue.
Wood’s first instinct was ‘gross’. But he’s since grown fond of nostalgia. He can appreciate layers and symbolism and the unique pleasure of full circles. His earliest FA Cup memory is that of a back garden, imagining himself as Wayne Rooney and pinging balls against his home’s outside wall much to the despair of the brick. After scoring in the quarter-final of the Welsh Cup last season, against Holywell Town, he borrowed inspiration from Marcus Rashford for his celebration.
Wood’s not afraid to tease the idea of fate or the nebulous conceit of FA Cup magic or even those invisible spirits inside Rodney Parade willing the unlikely into being. And why not? The FA Cup is all about unlikely routes to the top.
Nathan Wood posing with a cut-out of Wayne Rooney as a kid (Nathan Wood)That many within Newport’s FA Cup grizzled ranks (veteran Scot Bennett and manager Graham Cloughlan qualify) consider United their team evinces this. Growing up, Wood's existence was bilateral: Newport were his local team and United were his Premier League team, a common and wholly acceptable arrangement of loyalties given the likelihood of County, then warring in the Conference South, and Manchester United, then reliably Champions League, meeting competitively was hilarious.
“Newport, we’re up against it,” Wood says. “I don’t think anyone at the club would feel it was a secret to say we aren’t financially blessed. We don’t have the best facilities in terms of training ground, our own ground, even. But we work hard for everything that we have. We’re not pushovers.
“You look at Wrexham on Saturday. They’re probably going to go and get promoted again. I think, for Newport, we kind of get disregarded a little bit. Little Ol’ Newport. But this is for the fans, these moments are for them.”
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The thought of Bruno Fernandes flamboyantly swirling his arms into the Gwent night, distaste oozing off of him at whatever unspeakable officiating decision has just transpired, is a thought Wood has indulged plenty this week (“I wouldn’t even tell him off for it either”). Conversations around shirt-swapping are hushed but fevered. Wood’s iPhone camera roll is choked with hither-to lost evidence of his United faith. He was watching United on Match of the Day last week. This week, he’s watching them in training videos.
Underneath everything, though, thrums the knowledge that the unthinkable is, actually, totally thinkable. The injection of what could be close to £400,000 for Newport reaching the fifth round proper for the second time in over 70 years is the sort of lucrative prospect that alters margins. If any club has become synonymous with margin altering, it is Newport.
“At the end of the day, we’re massive, massive underdogs. But we also have a job to do. We want to give a good account for ourselves and the city and the fans. We’ve done that before.”
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