Jay Lovell has spent more than 15 years in non-league football, but on Sunday the 33-year-old escalator engineer from Hertfordshire will walk out at Wembley with Cockfosters for the FA Vase final. The club from Enfield in north London face AFC Stoneham, from the Hampshire town of Eastleigh, in a match that will give Cockfosters their first chance to lift the Vase in the club’s history.
Lovell’s route to the biggest day in the club’s history has a twist few footballers can match. He works for the company that has installed, maintained and upgraded the escalators at Wembley, and on event days he and his colleagues are required to be on site in case anything goes wrong. After Cockfosters beat Punjab United 3-1 on aggregate over two legs in last month’s semi-finals, that duty was handed to someone else. Lovell said one of his bosses joked about him having a two-hour break to go and play football, and added: “Now that I have actually reached the final, no-one is working.”
The final has left him thinking back to where he was a year ago, when he was at Wembley for the previous FA Vase final and watching from the other side of the barrier. “I remember walking around on the day of the FA Vase final last year before everyone got there,” he said. “There is a silence and you think, ‘I could actually get here one day’. It’s like winning the lottery - you spend the money in your head before you’ve won it. I never thought I’d get to Wembley.”
That feeling has turned into something far more concrete. Lovell said: “It is fairly emotional for me because I’ve worked it, I’ve been there and I’ve walked around Wembley.” He also said: “It’s always been what-if, and now the what-if has come true. It still hasn’t sunk in that I’ll be there on 17 May playing.” For Cockfosters, the moment is as much about the club as the player leading them out. They are chasing the FA Vase for the first time, and for Lovell, the night he once imagined from the stadium concourse is now the one he will live from the pitch.
