Football: FAN'S EYE VIEW: No 221: Farnborough Town

I first stood on the terraces at Cherrywood Road almost 20 years ago and I've never really thought of sampling my football anywhere else.

You can take your big crowds, all-seater stadiums and players with huge wages and egos to match - I'd rather be watching Farnborough Town FC, thank you very much.

Big-club fans will never be able to appreciate the feeling of involvement you get at non-League level. I've spent many an hour painting advertising boards, flogging raffle tickets and going round with the collection bucket.

I stand under a piece of corrugated iron to shelter from the elements, I can chat with the players after the game and the manager calls me by my first name. It's hardly Old Trafford, but that's the point - it still feels like it belongs to us.

From park football to the pinnacle of the non-League world in less than 30 years - we've done it. From the Surrey Senior League to the Vauxhall Conference, it was a hard slog and we did it on our own.

The council is not interested and local businesses would not recognise a sound investment if it kicked a ball in their face.

People talk about the growing gulf between the rich and the poor in the Premiership, but it exists in the Conference too. Sides like Stevenage and Woking, with millions pumped into them by progressive local authorities, and Rushden & Diamonds, with Max Griggs' millions, mean that financially its near impossible to compete. But on the field we most definitely can.

Rushden & Diamonds arrived at Cherrywood Road on Wednesday with a strike force comprising of Carl Alford (pounds 80,000 from Kettering) and Adrian Foster (pounds 50,000 from Hereford), but it was Boro's 18-year-old debutant Martin Rowlands who ran the show in the 2-0 victory. Rowlands earns pounds 50 a week from Farnborough.

The manager, Alan Taylor, has to work minor miracles on crowds of just over 800 (a third of the attendances at Woking and Stevenage), but so far he's succeeded.

He took charge after the departure of long-serving Ted Pearce and got the club promoted from the Beazer Homes in his first season, 1993-94. Since then we have consolidated with positions of 14th, 10th and seventh.

Taylor, who originally plied his trade as the youth-team manager at Fulham, is an expert at rejuvenating old pros and bringing the best out of youngsters plucked from lower league obscurity or rejected by League clubs.

Rowlands - not considered good enough by Wycombe - was joined on Wednesday by the youthful John Underwood, 22, Barry Hiller and Paul Harford, 22, son of the West Bromwich Albion manager manager, Ray.

Allied with the experience of the former Bristol Rovers front man, David Mehew, and the 35-year-old ex-Orient midfielder Steve Baker, Boro showed that an impressive work-rate coupled with a healthy team spirit was good enough to overcome the Conference's nouveau riche team.

Cherrywood Road is a compact, modest ground with a capacity of around 4,000, hardly a seething cauldron. But plans have been drawn up to turn it into a League ground if we can find someone with the odd pounds 500,000 knocking around.

Any millionaires out there looking for a new hobby?