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Prescot Cables

 impsTALK.co.uk >> 2008/09 >> Rough Guide > Prescot
Club Details
Send love letters to:

Valerie Park
Eaton Street
Prescot
Merseyside
L34 6ND

Tel: 0151 4300507

Windows Live map

   
Matchday prices: Grown ups - £7
Coffin dodgers - £4
ASBOs - £2
 
Who the hell are Prescot SCART Leads FC?
A long time ago, in a Merseyside far, far away, there existed a Prescot FC. The original Prescot were formed well over a century ago and were originally a vehicle for a bunch of local lads to enjoy non-competitive kickabouts, basically physical exercise used to ward off 19th century ailments like leprosy, consumption, the English sweat and bubonic plague. It made a nice change from blood-letting, apparently.

The club, who note their year of formation as 1884, were permitted to hoof the ball around on a field owned by the Prescot Cricket Club, and they played their first ever game of organised football there in November of that same year against a local side, losing 3-1.

After five years, Prescot tired of playing rush-goalie and sweeper-keeper and opted to join a league. They signed up for the Liverpool & District League for the 1889/1890 season and remained there for six seasons, finishing as high as third. They also entered the FA Cup for the first time during the same period but were unfortunate enough to be drawn against the mighty Crewe Alexandria in 1891. Crewe, who had just appointed Dario Gradi as their first team manager, rolled into town and also rolled over Prescot 7-1.

Unfortunately, a dispute with the cricket club led to the demise of Prescot FC during the 1902/1903 season. Three years later, Prescot Athletic were formed, swapping between various local leagues until the Great war intervened and killed off most local men of football-playing age. After the war, football returned. Prescot, having dropped the ‘Athletic’ part of their name, did too, joining the Lancashire Combination, then a local Liverpudlian league.

It was in 1928 that a company called BICC, which was in the business of manufacturing cables, began taking more than a passing interest in the affairs of the club. First, mysterious bouquets of flowers would appear at the office door with a card saying, simply, ‘from your secret admirer’. Then, masked men would abseil in through the window and leave luxurious Belgian chocolates on the desk of the club secretary.

The gifts became ever more lavish and expensive until, one day, the chairman arrived at the ground to find that BICC had bought Prescot a brand new grandstand – a stand big enough to accommodate 1,000 spectators. “Why BICC,” declared the then-chairman. “With this new main stand you are really spoiling us.” The seduction worked: the happy couple tied the knot later that year and dour old ‘Prescot’ became happy-go-lucky ‘Prescot Cables FC’, taking on the amber and black colours they boast today.

A year later Prescot, in a bout of post-nuptial insanity, made an audacious bid to be elected into the Football League. The application was considered over a nine hour buffet by a bunch of elderly men with guts the size of Rhodesia and official Football League blazers and was, eventually, rejected, condemning Cables to 50 years of interminable drudgery in the Lancashire Combination as a married club. With just one title triumph in that spell, it’s not surprising that the club suffered a mid-life crisis and did a runner, divorcing the cable company (reverting to Prescot Town) and buying a soft-top convertible.

Sadly, Prescot made the same discovery as every other aging singleton: running away doesn’t work. They suffered badly, letting themselves go quite spectacularly and having to endure the ignominy of crawling back and re-taking the name ‘Cables’ in 1980. Two years later, Cables became a founder club of the North West Counties League and were stuck there for two whole entire decades. Cables finally won promotion to the Northern Premier Divison One in 2003 before finding themselves elevated to the Premier Division a year later during the pyramid reshuffle.
 
Claims to fame
With nought but a dancing goat for the club (unless any Cables fans can obligingly fill in the gaps), we look again to the wider sphere of Prescot town itself to pad out this section with voluminous nonsense as to achieve the preferred word count.

And what (or who), dear reader, have we found? The usual ‘notable residents’, including your obligatory member of a Below Average Indie Band (Dave McCabe, The Zutons), yer two-bob soap actor (Danny McCall, Brookside), yer original Beatle (Stuart Sutcliffe) and yer curveball in the guise of an ex-Formula One doctor (Sid Watkins).

Lastly, the ex-Governor of Canada Lord Stanley is listed as a one-time resident of Prescot. It is after Stanley that the Stanley Cup is awarded to the North American sports franchise which has managed to spill the most pints of bright red blood on the white ice of vast corporate areas across the United States between short bursts of high-speed skating where tv viewers, spectators and players alike are all united in their inability to see the tiny lump of rubber pinging around at twice the speed of light.
 
Last three seasons
2007/2008 – 13th in Northern Premier
2006/2007 – 14th in Northern Premier
2005/2006 – 13th in Northern Premier
 
Where do they keep getting caught offside?
Having never been to Valerie Park, we're not going to attempt to pass judgement on it. Well, not yet anyway. So here's a picture. We'll gather some feedback once we've visited.


Aerial reconnaissance

 
Tell us about Prescot then?
A mere eight miles from Liverpool city centre, Prescot lies within the same municipal boundaries as the birthplace home of surely the most singularly pointless (in the literal sense of the word) football team to have ever played football: Knowsley United.

No team in the history of the solar system has been watched by fewer fans than that bunch of hapless brutish no-hopers, except perhaps Gainsborough Trinity.

Thankfully Knowsley no longer exist, but the people of Knowsley still retain that proclivity for irrational thought, such as granting perennial international failure and not-even-slightly-world-class midfielder Steven Gerrard MBE the freedom of the borough; a freedom granted, presumably, for ‘Services To Shanking Footballs 562 Feet High (and wide) At Every Available Opportunity’.

The freedom apparently gives Shepherd Gerrard MBE the right to marshal a herd of unquestioning, unthinking sheep down the main street of his home town – a right he’s clearly yet to exercise given the lack of 40,000 replica shirt-clad Liverpool fans spotted baaa-ing their way along roads in the borough.

Prescot itself is known for its clock museum, unsurprising since clock-making was once the dominant local industry before they gave it up to make cables instead. Located on the edge of the town is the attraction responsible for easily the worst television adverts ever seen on British television: Knowsley Safari Park. Yes, that’s right: worse than Safestyle UK.

Actual helpful information on eating out in Prescot can be found HERE.
 
Links
Official site
Forum
Tiger Tiger - unoffical photoblog.
 
Anything to add?
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