Only two men’s club sides have won three successive finals at the new Wembley. One is Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City, who won three League Cups on the bounce between 2018 and 2020 before adding a fourth in 2021. The other is Whitley Bay, a part-time club from the ninth tier of English football, who won three FA Vase finals in a row between 2009 and 2011.
The FA Vase, a national competition for amateur teams, was established in 1974, and in more than half a century Whitley Bay are the only club to have won it four times — including those three consecutive triumphs. It is an unprecedented record in non-league football.
The man behind it was Ian Chandler, an unassuming IT manager from Sunderland who had three spells at Whitley Bay as a player and was appointed manager in 2004, going on to spend 10 years in charge. He planned much of the club’s historic cup success in what he describes as quiet moments during the working day, time spent sorting hotel bookings or discussing scouting reports rather than concentrating on meetings. Chandler already had a place in the club’s history before he took the job, having scored the winner in the 2002 FA Vase final against Tiptree United at Villa Park.
The drive for the Wembley hat-trick began with a painful near miss. In 2007-08 Whitley Bay reached the FA Vase semi-finals but lost the first leg 4-0 to Lowestoft Town. They went 3-0 up inside 20 minutes of the return at their Hillheads Park ground but could not overturn the deficit. After that elimination Chandler developed a superstition of never again giving pre-match interviews, having last done so before the 4-0 defeat. Whether it was that renewed focus or a desire among the players to make amends, the group was steeled to make history.
“It’s the hardest thing to keep a team together – as soon as players get noticed, they get picked up at higher level,” Chandler says. “But after we got to the Vase semis, players wanted to stay and prove what they could do. Then the lads wanted to do it again.” And again.
Chandler was appointed by chairman Paul McIlduff, who has held the role since 2001, and took over at 35 with no previous managerial experience. After a slow start he built a side that became the envy of non-league football nationwide. Despite being a lifelong Sunderland fan, he modelled his team on Kevin Keegan’s Newcastle, with entertainment placed even above winning — such was the commitment to attacking football that there was a running joke in the squad about whether they were playing two or three at the back, and on one occasion they chased a game with only two defenders.
“We played good football. We had pace on the wing, fantastic midfielders, and strikers who were deadly,” says McIlduff. “When we brought them in, it was about fitting the psychology of the dressing room. No-one thought they were better than anyone else, they played for each other.”
A growing influence was the player nicknamed the ‘Whitley Bay Maradona’. Paul Robinson came through Newcastle United’s academy before a career across various non-league clubs in the north-east, including Whitley Bay from 2007 to 2013, and like several other players and staff he worked with Chandler both in his day job at the software company Sage and at Hillheads Park. “He was my manager at work and football, I was sick of him,” Robinson says. “But it helped get time off for matches.” It also meant an understanding boss when his mind drifted, which by his own account happened regularly as he pictured scoring and winning.
Robinson’s most famous Whitley Bay moment came in the second leg of the 2010 FA Vase semi-final, when his last-minute diving header in driving rain secured a 6-5 aggregate victory over Barwell and sparked a pitch invasion. The rounds before the finals, he says, were the bigger games, with 2,000 or 3,000 fans at every home match and a feeling of being a real player. By then opponents had begun to fear them: in a 2009 quarter-final against Biggleswade, who turned up in suits and ties, Whitley Bay won 5-2. “We thought, this is their day out, their cup final,” says Robinson.
Off the pitch, success reached the whole town. Whitley Bay, a working-class town near Newcastle whose heyday was as a Victorian-era holiday destination, took pride in the run, and volunteers went into overdrive before each final. They went door to door across shops in Tynemouth, North Shields and Whitley Bay to drum up support, and a van selling tickets was parked outside Woolworths on the high street. Every shop had blue and white stripes in its windows, recalls Jenn Robinson, who became involved because her late husband Mike was a club board member. Newcastle United helped sell tickets for the finals, while North Tyneside Council provided security as thousands flocked to Hillheads Park for the big cup games. Not everything went to plan: a train organised to take supporters to London ran straight to Wembley the first time, but on the second occasion it took them to Kings Cross, leaving the club to organise taxis up to the national stadium.
For those who made it, the experience was memorable. At the first Wembley final, which was played shortly after the new stadium opened, Jenn Robinson sat in the royal box with her husband and was shown to a seat by a security guard who told her it was Prince William’s — a seat the prince had not yet occupied.
The finals themselves brought three very different afternoons. Whitley Bay beat Glossop North End 2-0 in 2009 in front of 12,200 supporters, then returned a year later to thrash Wroxham 6-1, with prolific striker Paul Chow scoring the opening goal after only 21 seconds — at the time the quickest goal in a Wembley final, a mark only surpassed 13 years later when Ilkay Gundogan scored inside 13 seconds for Manchester City in the FA Cup final. The hat-trick was completed in 2011 with a frantic 3-2 win over Coalville Town, who equalised twice before Chow again proved the hero with an 86th-minute winner. Nearly 30,000 fans were in the stands across the three finals, and after each one the club celebrated at The Green Man pub, a 15-minute walk from the Wembley arch.
The 2010 trophy lift was perhaps the most emotional. The players were joined by former team-mate Mark Taylor, who had played in the previous year’s final before being diagnosed with motor neurone disease, which forced him into early retirement. “Mark used to come on the away trips after he got diagnosed, he just wanted to be Mark – we had a good laugh everywhere we went,” says Chandler. “He’s still knocking about, abusing me on Facebook. He was the core of our second and third year.”
Chandler’s son Benjamin was a mascot at all three finals, and the manager admits the occasion could be overwhelming for the players too. The first year, he recalls, was crazy because everything was brand new — the bus driver even scraped the side of the bus driving into the ground. By the second year the squad tried to take everything in, phones at the ready, and by the third it was simply a question of whether they could win three in a row. For the 2010 final the group spent 10 days together, a week as a squad preparing for the final followed by five nights in Marbella, which Robinson calls the best 10 days of his life.
Success changed life for the manager and his players in smaller ways. Reporters turned up at Sage to speak to Chandler and his players, and his mother was interviewed by the BBC Radio Newcastle broadcaster Paul Dixon. Chandler was invited to an annual sports awards event in Manchester, where guests included Sven-Goran Eriksson and Sir Alex Ferguson; he had his wife with him, and Eriksson came over and gave her a peck on the cheek, which she did not understand until Chandler explained later that evening who he was. Robinson, meanwhile, found returning to an IT company after Wembley a “massive comedown” — one year he received a standing ovation walking into the office, but after that it was back to normal, with colleagues teasing him: “are you talking about Wembley again? Give it a rest Robbo!”
Like all good things, the golden era came to an end. Chandler left in 2014 after a dip in form, and the club have not won a major honour since the 2011 FA Vase, remaining in the ninth tier. The memories endure in the football-mad north-east all the same. Chandler recalls going out for a Sunday drink with his wife at a pub in Durham a few weeks ago when a stranger came up out of the blue and asked, “Are you Ian Chandler?” — then began talking about that team.