First published in February 2024. Photo by Freddie Clark.

The last time Harpenden Town lifted a major trophy, Steve O’Reilly scored the injury-time goal to ease the nerves, secure the victory and spark the celebrations.

It was April 2018 and Harpenden still had hopes of clinching second place in the Premier Division, which would have earned promotion to step four, when they faced champions-elect Welwyn Garden City in the Dudley Latham Memorial Premier Division Cup final at Colney Heath.

Welwyn had taken the lead in the first half of the final before Dave Keenleyside scored a free-kick to level the scores. With about five minutes to go, the referee gave Harpenden a penalty, which Keenleyside converted.

The Herts Advertiser’s report at the time said Jack Nevin went down but bounced straight up and the Harpenden players didn’t appeal. ‘It was a bit of a dubious penalty,’ admits Steve, ‘but with five minutes to go in a cup final you’re not going to complain. After that we were hanging on a bit because Welwyn were pushing to get an equaliser.’

With the Welwyn goalkeeper up for a set-piece in injury time, Harpenden had the chance to break and the ball fell to O’Reilly to finish the job.

‘I probably should have scored more goals for Harpenden, but it was nice to get one in a cup final. That capped a really good year for the club,’ Steve says, sipping tea on a cold January day in the warmth of the clubhouse, having turned on the heating. ‘That’s football at this level,’ he quips. ‘I’m assistant manager but I still know how to turn on the heating.’

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Having played for the club during its most successful recent period, Harpenden Town is in Steve’s veins. Although he lives in Wimbledon, he works in Harpenden two days a week, which helps him fit the team’s training sessions around his work in IT. Sometimes, though, it must feel like he’s fitting work around the football. ‘Every day’s a football day,’ he says.

Steve grew up in Shropshire and his team is Derby County, thanks to his Dad, a lifelong Rams supporter. ‘We’re a football-mad family but we didn’t get to go to many games because Dad was playing Saturday and Tuesday,’ he says. ‘My Dad played at a pretty decent level into his fifties. Then me and my brothers – one is four years older than me, the other four years younger – were playing youth football.’

In his early 20s, he moved to North London and played for Wembley, enjoying four good seasons with them. ‘I left Wembley because I was coaching the junior team and I decided I didn’t want to do that anymore. It got a bit political and they said if I didn’t want to do the coaching I wouldn’t play. I’d never left a team mid-season before, but I decided to go.

‘It was February and I wanted to play for a team that was either going for promotion or fighting relegation because I wanted to play in games that really meant something.

‘I put something up on Twitter saying I was looking for a club and Danny Plumb, who was managing Harpenden, got in touch, even though he admitted he wasn’t a fan of finding players on Twitter.’

Twitter and non-league football can be a minefield. Everyone’s Pele on Twitter but football social media is littered with players who’ve turned out for a dozen clubs in the space of three years. Steve was the opposite – the model of consistency and reliability.

‘I’ve seen this since I’ve got into coaching and management,’ says Steve. ‘Everyone has a list of clubs and when you look into some of them it turns out they had a trial here or played one or two games there. I get it, it’s your CV, but people do embellish a bit.

‘I spoke briefly to Danny on the phone. Then he called me back about five minutes later and said, “I’ve just looked you up and you played 50 games last season, 50 games the season before. You’ve played 30 games this season. We want to get you in.”

‘I came up to meet him at a reserve team game here [at Rothamsted Park]. Wembley FC have got a nice ground and a really great pitch and I remember sitting in the stand here and the pitch had no grass on it. The clubhouse was more basic then, there were no beer pumps or anything. But straight away I met Danny and the captain at the time, Jack Cartwright, and a few other people and I could tell they were good people.

‘Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed my time at Wembley, but Harpenden felt very similar to the clubs I’d played for at home. There were people around who really loved the club and were invested in it as a local football club.’

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Steve made his debut at Chesham United Reserves in March 2017 as Harpenden were chasing promotion from Division One. ‘When I came in we were third and we needed to get into the top two to go up. Danny really trusted me to come in and help the team over the line but I did feel the pressure to perform straight away.’

He played the last 12 games of the season, Harpenden lost only once, and they pipped Baldock Town to the runners-up spot by a single point.

The following season, in the Premier Division, Steve was a fixture in the starting line-up, playing 50 games as an all-action midfielder. ‘I was an extremely high energy player,’ he says. ‘I left everything out on the pitch – full of commitment, very hard working. I was perhaps under-rated in terms of what I could do on the ball, I’d say, but I was happy to do my role for the team and let players like Dave Keenleyside and James Ewington shine. I like people who give everything and my mentality has always been that it’s a team game. What appeals to me about football is that teamwork element.’

Harpenden finished third in the Premier Division, behind Welwyn Garden City and Berkhamsted, and but for a couple of sticky patches during the season might have edged out Berko for the second promotion place.

‘We had a fairly decent start but I don’t think anyone believed, at the start of the season, that we were going to go up,’ he says. ‘In hindsight, we had a really good team and perhaps were only one or two players short of what we needed to go up. If you look at the players, there were people who went on to step four and step three. Ewey [James Ewington] went to St Albans City. It was a really great group but at the start perhaps we didn’t believe we could do it. We had a really good run in the autumn but over Christmas we had a dip.’

Harpenden lost to both promotion rivals, Welwyn Garden City and Berkhamsted, around the turn of the year, then lost at Cockfosters – ‘which can easily happen, but it dented us a bit,’ says Steve. ‘We had a very good squad but it was a small squad and we had a couple of spells where that hurt us a little bit.’

Harpenden finished strongly, winning eight of the last nine to close the gap but were always playing catch-up and Berkhamsted edged the second promotion place by two points.

The following season the team broke up a bit and although Steve played a lot of games, he was struggling with injuries. ‘I had a problem with my knee, my groin, all sorts but I played through it,’ he says. Harpenden finished 14th, then Danny Plumb left and Steve applied for the manager’s job.

‘I applied for it and spoke to Roman [Motyczak, the chairman] but the club made a really wise decision and brought in Martin Standen as manager, who brought in a big group of players to get things going again.’

Steve took the opportunity to take a break from football and spent a season watching his beloved Derby County home and away. Then Standen left Harpenden to go to Bedford Town and Roman called Steve to ask if he’d help new manager Micky Nathan until the end of the season.

‘In the back of my head I was still thinking about playing but the draw of the club and the chance to coach was strong. This club means a lot to me. I did three or four games with Micky and Liam Dwyer and then Covid hit. During lockdown, Micky asked me if I wanted to do it permanently.’

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As assistant manager, it’s coaching and working with the players that fires Steve. ‘The most enjoyable time of the week is when I arrive on a Thursday and plan the session with Swanny [Rob Swan],’ he says.

‘Micky [Nathan] and I have a very honest relationship and we spend a lot of time talking. We really go through a process before we make decisions, we don’t just make a spur-of-the-moment decision. We’re not necessarily 100 per cent in agreement all the time but I am respectful of the chain of command. Once a decision has been made I am 100 per cent behind it.’

The biggest challenge for any management team at this level is achieving consistency in a state of constant change. ‘Until you do a full season you don’t really know what it’s like,’ he says. ‘This is our third full season and there are going to be challenges when things aren’t going great but you have to have the humility to recognise you might need to tweak something without veering away from what’s important to you and what the long-term view is. We have such high standards and expectations of ourselves and what we ask of the players and we’re confident success will come, but [progress] isn’t a straight line and it doesn’t always go up.

‘The key is to go with decisions you have conviction on. You can make the right decision but not get the right result. That’s football. You’ll only regret a decision if you didn’t fully believe in it.’ GREEN&GOLD