‘THE GREASY POLE’ – PART ONE
Matt Hanlan holds two unique claims to distinction. He scored the winning goal the last time a bunch of part-time non leaguers dumped a top-flight team out of the FA Cup. Two days later, he became the only person to have ever appeared on “Wogan” having been building a new branch of Asda that morning.
Such were the crazy events and the crazy aftermath of Saturday 7 January 1989, a date cherished by Hanlan almost as much as his wedding day or the births of his children. ‘I’ve dining out on that ever since,’ he beams, conversely declining the offer of lunch and sticking with a cappuccino in this Borough Market café. It’s twenty-seven years and a day since, as a twenty-two-year-old Sutton United winger, his close-range volley dispatched Coventry City from the competition.
Since then, Hanlan and his team-mates have been embroidered into the rich tapestry of FA Cup folklore, an act of giant-killing second only to Hereford United’s mud-coated vanquishing of Newcastle United seventeen years earlier. Coventry had, after all, won the cup less than twenty months previously and were sitting in fifth spot in the old First Division. Sutton – a motley crew of builders and insurance salesmen, presided over by a pipe-sucking poetry-quoting manager – were drifting in mid-table obscurity in the GM Vauxhall Conference.
Hanlan recalls: ‘When Coventry came out of the hat, I remember being a little disappointed. We could have had Man U or Liverpool or Arsenal. [Asst Editor - the alert reader - come on - there MUST be ONE of you out there, might have just registered the fact that amazingly, some twenty-eight years later in February 2017, Sutton did draw Arsenal, in the fifth round, losing 2-0 on their artificial 3G pitch – a world away from 1989 when the pitch was heavy and covered with sand to make sure the game was even played]. It wasn’t until the following day that it sunk in. When you ran through their players, you realised it was a proper game. They’d be bringing their first team. Keith Houchen, who scored in the final two seasons earlier, ended up only being on the bench.
‘We trained on the Tuesday as normal. On the Thursday night, the local BBC cameras came down and then another film crew on the Friday, so I nicked a day off work on the Friday and with a couple of the other lads, filmed some set pieces, including me smashing a volley in!
‘I can’t imagine what Coventry thought when they saw the pitch. The groundsmen had worked hard and you were able to play football on it, but there was a lot sand up the middle. Whether it was youthful exuberance or arrogance I don’t know, but I don’t remember being phased by the occasion at all. I just went in on the day, did some training, had beans on toast and scrambled eggs and soaked my feet because they were cold. That’s all it was. It wasn’t until afterwards that it was “Hold on. What’s happened here?”’
The sixty-first-minute magic is remembered in admirably forensic detail. The lead-up to the corner. The short ball played to Sutton’s right-midfielder approaching the apex of the penalty area. The players that his cross evaded. The point at which Hanlan made his run to coincide exactly with the arrival of the ball in the box. Who knows how many thousands of times he’s replayed it in his mind, doubtless always accompanied by John Motson’s classic commentary. ‘Oh, and driven in! And number eleven Matthew Hanlan followed that in! And Sutton have done it again from a corner kick, bringing this little ground to life once more. The Coventry defence were standing still…’
Hanlan’s celebration – which included an angry, arm-swinging rant at an unspecified target – shares an equal standing in FA Cup history with the goal itself. ‘I don’t know where that came from. There was a time when I wasn’t particularly well-liked by a certain section of the crowd at Sutton. Maybe that had something to do with it. It wasn’t premeditated, it wasn’t thought out. It just happened.’
On the final whistle – after Coventry had besieged the Sutton goal in search of an equaliser and a face-saving replay at Highfield Road – Hanlan the bricklayer was consumed by a whirlwind of media attention. ‘I was whisked off to be interviewed by (now Sir) Trevor Brooking for Radio 2, then straight on to the Final Score part of “Grandstand”. The manager, Barry Williams, went off to do “Match of the Day”. We had press around until the small hours – and it didn’t stop. I went to work on the Monday. We were building a new Asda. The site manager rushed over. “Your dad’s been on the phone. You’ve got to go home.” “What’s happened? What’s wrong?” This was before the days of mobile phones. I rushed home. “The BBC have been on the phone. You’ve got to go on “Wogan” tonight…”’
The café is now busy with office workers looking for somewhere to perch while they eat. We need the table space. Hanlan reaches below the table to pull out a bag full of momentoes that he spreads out, the centrepiece of which is a scrapbook put together by his parents and crammed with press cuttings and other ephemera. Even included is the remittance advice from the BBC, detailing the fees paid for various interviews. Back then, it appears you could pocket £50 for a couple of breathless minutes of euphoric post-match words on “Final Score” and £150 for a more considered, but still fleeting, spell on the “Wogan” sofa. Hanlan reaches deeper into the bag and the real prize emerges – the number eleven shirt he wore on the big day, a gold polyester relic from times past. It’s not seen the inside of a washing machine during the intervening years. The Gander Green Lane mud, vintage 1989, is still visible.
‘The whole thing was little taste of what it must be like to play for Man U or Real Madrid up in the top echelons of the football hierarchy,’ he wistfully concludes, folding the shirt back up. The taste of success didn’t linger long on the lips. In the fourth round, Sutton were hammered 8-0 by Norwich City.
Now a director of a building firm, he’s no longer involved in the game, save for his Crystal Palace season ticket and those annual requests to relive “that” day. He still speaks fondly of his own little crazy gang who upset football’s apple cart that January afternoon – Micky and Lenny and Tony and the others. They reconvene occasionally, perhaps for a charity game, perhaps merely to reminisce. Their forensic powers of recall, like Hanlan’s, remain tack-sharp. Every touch, every nuance.
He’s surely part of a dying breed – the part-timer who did battle with household names and emerged victorious. These days, even if a semi-pro non league outfit scooped a plum Third Round draw against Premier League foes, it would inevitably be a below-strength side they’d be facing, the superstars rested in readiness for matches against more elite, more testing opposition. Giant-killing tales of beating a Premier League team’s anonymous reserves wouldn’t hold the value and the improving vintage of tales like Hanlan’s. Unknown names, unrecognised faces. These would not be Speedie or Kilcline, Regis (RIP) or Ogrizovic.
Matt Hanlon’s story is future-proof, bathed in aspic. He can tell it until he dies and people will still listen.

The Wanderer