History in the making at The Lamb

In those days, they were in the West Midlands League; this coming season, they will be in the horribly-titled Blue Square North, in other words, two divisions below the Football League.
The new season began on Saturday and the first home game is tomorrow night, although my 2008-9 spectating debut will have to wait until this coming weekend due to work commitments.
The Lambs [named after The Lamb pub which used to stand at the entrance to the ground until it was demolished in the late-1980s; a house now stands on the site] usually attract around 600-700 diehard fans although that can rise to 1,000 on good days and attendances were regularly around 1,200-1,500 in the mid-1990s.
Expectations among those 600-700 this season are not high. Tamworth were relegated from Blue Square Premier at the end of 2006-7 and fans, players and management fell into the trap which awaits Birmingham City this time around - of thinking that they only had to turn up every week to win promotion.
A catalogue of injuries, bad management decisions and dodgy loan signings scuppered those hopes and by January, fans were calling for the head of manager Gary Mills.
He survived and, eight months later, everyone is older, wiser and considerably less demanding.
No doubt the Lambs' progress on the field will crop up here more than once between now and next April, but I wanted to use this space to publicise something that goes to the heart of why I and so many others love non-league football.
This year is Tamworth FC's 75th anniversary and late last week, the Tamworth FC Supporters Club heard that they had been awarded a grant of £25,000 from the National Lottery's Heritage Lottery Fund to research the club's history.
To that end, a group of volunteer fans will spend the next 12 months garnering the memories of supporters, fomer players and managers and others who have played a part in the club's chequered history.
By the end of the project in 2009, they intend to 1) have built a fully interactive website coupling audio and visual memories and memorabilia with the playing history of the club); 2) have produced an illustrated guidebook about the club's history; 3) produced a set of collectable playing cards detailing great players, managers and events in Tamworth FC's history; 4) staged an exhibition in the town featuring all of the above.
Having been involved in something similar when I was newsletter editor of the Lichfield, Sutton and Tamworth branch of the Campaign for Real Ale (have a look at www.tamworth-heritage-pubs.co.uk to see what I mean), I know that this is going to be hard work but tremendous fun, enormously revealing and will go to the heart of what local history should be all about by getting the local community involved.
And at a time when top-level professional football seems intent on trampling all over its history in the relentless pursuit of money, it couldn't be better-timed.