Gateshead’s season sank to a new low on Saturday as Lee Cattermole’s side were beaten 4-0 at Wealdstone, leaving the club bottom of the National League with one win from 10 matches. Around 100 away supporters had travelled 278 miles to watch a team that has now shipped 15 goals in its last four games.
Wealdstone led through Olufela Olomola’s opener and a Luke Norris penalty, both scored before half-time, and Cattermole visibly sagged on the touchline as the interval approached. Once the second goal went in he sat himself down, distractedly fiddling with his notebook and pen, and his return to the away dressing room was slow enough to delay his half-time team talk. Whatever was said had little effect: a third Wealdstone goal arrived within two minutes of the restart, with a fourth following just before the end.
Cattermole, a former Middlesbrough, Wigan and Sunderland midfielder who collected 88 yellow cards and seven reds in 271 Premier League games, has approached his first senior management role in characteristically uncompromising fashion. With his team bottom of the table, he has adopted the “bomb squad” approach favoured by Enzo Maresca at Chelsea and Ruben Amorim at Manchester United, with eight players reported to be training at alternative times to the first team and removed from the squad’s WhatsApp group chats.
Neither Maresca nor Amorim’s shunning of players proved particularly successful at an elite level, and Cattermole’s tough-love strategy has yet to bear fruit either. Gateshead were six goals down by half-time at home to Southend the previous week. The midweek arrival of Alfie McCalmont, a Northern Ireland international lately of Central Coast Mariners in Australia, offered brief hope; anchoring midfield, the new arrival began brightly before being dragged into the torpor of his new teammates.
Assistant manager Ben Clark was sent out to deliver the post-match verdict in Cattermole’s place. “We conceded a soft goal, and struggled from there on in,” he said. “The lads are struggling a bit with their confidence.”
The away end made its feelings plain, chanting “sacked in the morning” and then “time to go” as the prospect of Cattermole’s departure grew. In the opposite dugout Gary Waddock, a combative midfielder in his playing days and a QPR hero of the 1980s, could lean relaxedly on a handy gatepost, his serenity in a difficult season for Wealdstone standing in sharp contrast to the visitors’ mood.
Wealdstone kicked off fifth from bottom, and the win was a welcome lift. Last season’s FA Trophy finalists, the club has a rich non-league history as the starting point for Stuart Pearce, Vinny Jones and Jermaine Beckford, and became famous in the digital age for the Wealdstone Raider, Gordon Parmar Hill, whose “you’ve got no fans” war cry went viral in 2014 — the same year his single, “Got No Fans”, reached No 5 in the UK charts. He even made himself available for hire on stag weekends, though that revenue stream has since been shuttered.
Before kick-off the club bar outside the ground was doing brisk business. Drinking in view of the pitch is not permitted at a fifth-tier club, and the prime minister’s floated revocation of the 1985 alcohol statute this week would prove a significant revenue driver for clubs of Wealdstone’s size, with sides in the divisions below already making considerable cash from in-game hospitality.
Gateshead’s own history carries weight: the town hosted a Football League club on the southern bank of the Tyne from 1930 to 1960, the last team the legendary Hughie Gallacher turned out for, before extinction came in 1973. The re-founded club has been knocking around the non-league pyramid since 1977 and has little hope of reaching the Football League anytime soon.
Among the doomsday scenarios facing Manchester City is a plunge down the football pyramid, and Gateshead’s fruitless trip south offered a hint of what that might look like. In the National League there are no formal financial fair play regulations or a strict salary cap — lax constraints that Wrexham, Notts County and Chesterfield have taken advantage of to regenerate.