FA Cup countdown: Horsham happy to break sound barrier

It is a little after eight on Wednesday evening and the players of Horsham FC, arm in arm on the floodlit pitch at Broadbridge Heath Leisure Centre, are dancing and singing in the rain. You can sense their rising excitement as they jig up and down, and you can understand it. Tonight, these raucous part-time footballers from the Ryman Premier League salesmen, estate agents, fitness instructors, IT specialists, landscape gardeners, students and scaffolders are due to make an even bigger splash as they contest the FA Cup second round for the first time in the club's history.

Their opponents are Swansea City, currently four divisions above their hosts. It is a classic Cup contest, and one that has attracted the cameras of Sky TV to Horsham's 103-year-old Queen Street ground in the middle of town which, at the end of this season, will be replaced by a complex of 80 houses. Perhaps the developers will tip their cap to history by naming it Queen's Crescent.

The 75,000 fee due for the TV coverage, plus related earnings of around 45,000, could therefore not have come at a better time for the club, which has just bought up a site on the north of town on which it plans to build a new stadium while it spends a season or two ground-sharing.

"You couldn't have written a better ending for the ground," says manager and groundsman John Maggs as he stares out at his players from the dark dampness of the stand. "And the money is going to be vital for us."

Maggs, who joined Horsham after spending 37 years as player, then manager, then chairman at nearby Crawley FC, is not as unabashedly upbeat as his footballers as he looks up into the sky. He is concerned that the pitch at Queen Street, due to be covered only 24 hours before kick-off, will be getting waterlogged.

His unease is shared by Frank King, now chairman after an association with the club which started in season 1944-45, when he used to sell programmes for "tuppence each". As his border collie Sophie, a regular and well trained attendee at Queen Street, circles around him, the chairman is clearly perturbed. "All this bloody rain..." he says. "That pitch is John's pride and joy. It's like a bloody billiard table."

Maggs is already running through an uncomforting scenario. "It'll be covered tomorrow but that will keep all the dampness in," he says. "I won't get the chance to fork it until three hours before kick-off..."

The thought of postponement, with its attendant risk that the TV caravan will move away and not return, hardly bears contemplation. But no such weighty concerns afflict the young men in training bibs.

You can sense the eagerness for the fray in Lee Farrell, a 24-year-old local lad who came on as substitute in the first-round tie against Maidenhead United and scored the last goal in a 4-1 victory.

Farrell has been deaf since birth but has already made his mark in the game as a swift and determined goalscorer. His winning goal earned a gold medal for Britain at the 2005 Deaf Olympics in Melbourne, and he has recently returned from the European Championships in Portugal, where Britain lost in the final to France. Farrell communicates with mouthed words he managed to get himself booked for dissent last Saturday and with the additional help of his father Graham, and uncle Lee, who can sign.

At the mention of France, Farrell's uncle draws his fingers either side of his mouth as if pulling out a long moustache. This indeed is the signing for France. Farrell grins, and swiftly adds the sign for Germany, which involves a finger pointing upwards from above the forehead. It derives from the spiked helmet worn by the Kaiser and his fellow countrymen.

Farrell's father says that opposing teams often try to wind his son up. "Earlier this season when someone got into Lee very early on and then when he was on the ground started making noises at him," Graham recalls. Lee, who can lip read, begins to communicate urgently. "He scored two goals that day, which he says is the best reply," Farrell Snr added.

On the pitch, Farrell says he communicates easily with his team-mates, adding that he has "eyes in the back of his head". The knee injury that kept Farrell on the bench against Maidenhead is on the mend, although he is not sure of starting tonight. What is certain is that he is not worried about facing the League One leaders. "It doesn't matter," he says with a shrug. "Once I see the goal I just go for it."

Defender Tom Graves, meanwhile, has been assessing the opposition, having travelled to see Swansea play Hartlepool earlier this week in company with assistant manager Rob Frankland. "To think we are just 90 minutes away from the possibility of facing a Premier League side is mind-blowing," says Graves.

Horsham's previous Cup runs saw them reach the first round on two previous occasions, taking a 1-0 lead against Tommy Lawton's Notts County side in 1947-48 before succumbing 9-1, and, in season 1966-67, losing 3-0 at home to Swindon Town.

That match was watched by a record Horsham crowd of 8,000. Tonight's sell-out crowd of exactly 2,854 a figure that may not include Sophie.

Despite the relatively reduced numbers, Horsham will count on their usual good-natured support from a group of fans who have styled themselves "The Lardy Boys", and are committed to all things unhealthy, with lager and burgers top of the menu. Rather than expressing animosity to the opposition, their songs pour pure hate in the direction of low-fat spreads, and they are given to building a wall constructed of bars of lard on the top of the opposition dug-out. The town's supermarkets sold out of economy lard before the first-round tie against Maidenhead, and history is set to repeat itself. Swansea, it seems, should beware slip-ups.