For lifelong Everton fan Kane Smith, tonight’s game at Goodison Park has come at a particularly convenient time.
“When I was younger, I used to go with my old man all the time, but now playing on Saturdays it’s tough,” he tells Standard Sport. “I still try to go to midweek games, though. I’m actually picking up tickets while we’re up there for Tottenham away next Monday!”
Of course, the more pressing purpose of Smith’s visit is in trying to help Boreham Wood become only the second non-League club to reach the FA Cup quarter-finals in more than 100 years. That, and the a shot at a Premier League giant-killing, would be incentive enough even without Smith’s Everton connection, which added a little edge to the fourth-round meeting with Bournemouth last month, the fifth-round draw made earlier in the day and the carrot already dangling.
“We were still at home just before we were due to meet up to travel, so I watched it in the front room with my missus,” Smith says. “I went crazy. One of the lads, Tyrone Marsh, FaceTimed me straight after and he’s got a couple of screenshots and my face is a picture. I messaged the boys straight away and just said, ‘We can’t lose this’.”
Given the gulf between the Cherries and the Wood, who are pushing for promotion from the second and fifth tiers of English football respectively, that might have seemed an unreasonable demand, but Mark Ricketts’ first-half strike proved otherwise as they produced the upset of the round to set up the tie of the next.
Born in 1996, Smith was too late on the scene to witness Everton’s most recent FA Cup triumph a year earlier, but picks out a 2009 victory over Liverpool in the competition — “the famous one where the TV cut off and Dan Gosling scored in extra-time” — as perhaps his favourite match-going memory.
He names Tim Cahill as his early childhood hero but adds that “as I got older and became a right-back, I just loved Tony Hibbert”, which will not come as a shock to anyone who witnessed the post-match celebrations at Bournemouth.
“I always wanted an Everton shirt as a kid and I got one, I had Cahill, but I always wanted Hibbert on the back,” Smith says, picking up the story. “My old man would never buy me one. He said, ‘No way, I’m not buying you a Tony Hibbert shirt!’ So, when I saved up a bit of pocket money when I got older, that was one of the first things I bought.
“Then, when the draw happened, I said to my missus I’d have to take the shirt just in case we got through — I’ll hide it in my bag, so if we get beat no one will see.
“When we won we were celebrating for ages and I saw my mates in the crowd who are Liverpool fans and it just clicked. It was my quickest sprint of the game, I think, running back to the dressing room to get the shirt!”
The sight of Smith dancing round the Vitality Stadium in his Toffees strip quickly marked him out as the human story of the tie, bringing levels of media interest that were unfamiliar, to say the least.
“From the minute the Bournemouth game finished it’s been hectic,” he adds. “At first you love it and take it all in and enjoy it, but then you start to think, ‘Is this what Premier League footballers deal with every week?’ I don’t know how they do it, it’s incredible.”
Smith, who has had similarly intense demand from family and friends to deal with, sorting 60 tickets for tonight’s game, finds himself in a peculiar position, knowing that an embarrassing FA Cup exit would send the club he loves deeper into crisis as they battle for Premier League survival under new boss Frank Lampard.
“On paper, you’d write us off straight away, we ain’t really got a chance,” he admits. “But people wrote us off against Bournemouth. We’ll go there with a game plan like we did at Bournemouth, and hopefully implement it just as well.”
And if they pull it off? “Well, I might have to keep my head down in the away end at Spurs!”
