Bromley needed to lose the 2018 FA Trophy final, and here’s why…

We permanently departed from that timeline when Jack Holland’s penalty hit the post. Moments later, Andy Brown was slotting beyond a bamboozled David Gregory and sending the entire population of Brackley into delirium. It shouldn’t have come to that, but it did, and it hurt. 

Until today, almost eight years later, I had never watched the highlights, but I convinced myself that I couldn’t write this article without reliving it. I waited for the feeling of footballing grief to return, but instead found my heart bleeding for Neil Smith and his team. That was supposed to be their moment, our moment, but in retrospect, it represented the beginning of the end. 

Or was it the beginning of the beginning? 

In the aftermath of that game, it felt like both time and the football club had ground to a halt. But beyond our perception, the wheels of fate were quietly turning. Losing at Wembley put an indelible smudge on Neil Smith’s record, and I believe that nothing short of near-immediate promotion to the Football League could have saved him. That incredibly high measuring stick would, within two seasons, end Smith’s reign and usher in the Andy Woodman era. But would Andy’s era have exploded into being if Neil Smith’s side had beaten Brackley?

Everything had been set up for a win. Bromley residents hadn’t enjoyed a Wembley day out since 1949, and such was the novelty that the club sold around 20,000 tickets. Among the throng of floating fans that day were ten of my friends, some of whom were the kind of floaters who call the football club ‘Bromley Town’ (they don’t do that anymore). As we sank pre-mach pints in the sun-baked beer garden of The Green Man, our playful exuberance had an undercurrent of confidence. Brackley Town? We all had to Google it. The place is small even by market town standards, and its greatest claim to fame is being next to Silverstone. 

This game came at the culmination of the 17/18 season. Bromley were by then an established National League club and had just missed out on the play-offs by three points. Brackley Town, meanwhile, were in the rough-and-tumble of the National League North and were, we assumed, utterly inferior to Neil Smith’s cadre of full-time professionals. Had we looked a little closer, we would have seen that Brackley finished third that season and had a lot of solid players in their squad, but why let important details spoil a party?

I won’t bore you with the details of the match, but Brackley more than matched Bromley that day. The Ravens got a precious early goal but then sat back and invited their opponents onto them, hoping to shut up shop and catch them on the counter. Call it dogmatic or pragmatic, but this tactic was commonplace during Neil Smith’s tenure and never failed to rouse groans and grumbles on the terraces. In this game, as in many others, it backfired, leaving the door open for a last-gasp equaliser that sucked the air out of Bromley’s team, town, and borough.

But what if it hadn’t? What if the pragmatism had paid off and Bromley had ground out the win? We would have been hailing Neil Smith as a tactical genius and a history-maker. I also suspect that having the FA Trophy on his CV would have made him a little more bulletproof when results wobbled in the seasons to come. That’s assuming they would have wobbled at all. Perhaps the winner's purse would have loosened the financial reins a little and allowed Smith to sign a higher calibre of player the following season. Perhaps the confidence afforded by that win would have lifted his squad and pushed them to new heights. Perhaps.

My theory is that in the alternate timeline where Neil Smith lifts the FA Trophy, Andy Woodman doesn’t have any association with Bromley Football Club. This is not meant as a dig at Neil Smith. For all we know, given the time and the right mojo, he might have been the man to take Bromley to the Football League. In my opinion, his side’s results in the seasons following the Trophy loss suggested that Smith had hit a ceiling in terms of what he could achieve at the club. But a Trophy win may have changed that, and at the very least, I suspect it would have bought him more time, causing Andy Woodman to take his services elsewhere. 

The other timeline-altering question is whether Bromley would have gone on to lift the FA Trophy against Wrexham in 2022 if they had already won it in 2018. I strongly suspect they wouldn’t have had the same hunger to return and set the record straight.

You could argue that the team that went to Wembley in 2022 were entirely different from their 2018 counterparts, but that’s because Andy Woodman had built a team in his image. If he hadn’t had that opportunity, I don’t think Bromley would have featured in the 2022 Trophy final, and that’s important because in every conceivable way, that game and the resulting victory were bigger and more impactful than beating Brackley could have ever been.

The Wrexham match was the greatest pivot point in Bromley Football Club’s history. It validated the culture Andy Woodman was building and set him and his side on a path that led back to Wembley two years later. The 2022 final also left a massive footprint on the non-league landscape and changed perceptions across the board. Want proof? Try to find highlights of the 2018 final. I did, and all I got were a couple of shoddy, semi-legal YouTube rip-offs. Highlights of the 2022 final, however, exist in glorious technicolour. And if you want to dive a bit deeper, just watch the first season of the Netflix original Welcome to Wrexham; Bromley feature rather prominently in that.

The easy soundbite says Bromley haven’t looked back since they were promoted to the Football League. The harder bite to swallow is that the club hasn’t looked back since the chest-tightening disappointment of 2018. As well as setting the wheels of fate in motion, that loss provided the hunger, the meaning, and the motive, and without it, the football club of today would be very different, and perhaps not a good kind of different.

We needed the pain.

At around 7pm on May 20th, 2018, I drank the saddest beer of my life in the bar of a Wembley Premier Inn. We were supposed to be out on the town celebrating Bromley battering their lower-league opponents. Instead, we were attempting to drown our sorrows with gassy hotel lager. My friends, the ones who called the club Bromley Town, didn’t really know what to say except “sorry,” like my cat had just died or something. I don’t blame them. They knew I’d been a Bromley fan since the turn of the century and that the game really meant something. Given what we know now, I think it meant more than I or anyone else could have ever imagined.

Bromley Football Club needed to lose the 2018 FA Trophy final. Everything we have enjoyed since that day was riding on it. Have I convinced you?