From Caleb to celeb as Bath have designs on fame academy

Graduation day is beckoning for the students of football. Alan Hubbard reports on the Cup's unlikeliest lads

Graduation day looms for the footballing students of Bath. When they meet Mansfield, the basement club of the Second Division, at their modest campus ground on Saturday it may not be exactly the FA Cup final. But for a born-again bunch of youngsters knocked back by League clubs it is certainly their finals. The mocks are over; now for the real examination.

It was back in August that the uplifting story of Team Bath was first chronicled in these pages. Since then the collection of academy cast-offs and failed apprentices who have found their feet again, and are getting an education to boot, have romped their way through five qualifying matches to be right in at the deep end of the game's most famous knockout competition. By reaching the first round proper of the FA Cup they are the first varsity side to achieve such distinction in 122 years.

Unlike most fairy stories, though, sooner or later this one is bound to end in disappointment. But it will hardly matter. What was the brainchild of the University of Bath's sports director, Ged Roddy, has already become a fascinating slice of football history. "If we don't go any further at least we have shown there can still be a life in football for some of these young players who thought their world had ended, and were on the scrapheap,'' he says.

Players like 23-year-old Caleb Kamara-Taylor, released by Wimbledon, and who also had a spell in non-League football. When he struck the winning penalty which gave his new side their shoot-out victory over Horsham and a place in the first-round draw, they virtually pinned the Order of the Bath to his chest on the spot.

Team Bath know that to have designs on the trophy would be ludicrously over- ambitious, but Kamara-Taylor at least has designs on his team-mates. Some of them wear the tattoos he has drawn up in his spare time. His off-field talent is for sketching and painting, and if his spell at Bath doesn't end in his restoration to League football he hopes to make a career as a designer.

The London-born midfielder turned striker whose parents come from Sierra Leone joined Bath last year, but his appearances were restricted when his mother suffered a stroke while visiting the USA. She is now recovered, and Kamara-Taylor has been able to recapture his own self-esteem in football while working his way through an HND sports performance course at Bath.

He was studying advanced art design at college and playing for his local team, Dulwich Hamlet, when the Wimbledon offer came along. Although he never made it into the first team, like most of his Bath colleagues who also received a "sorry, son'' shrug from their club manager he felt "gutted''.

"Although I was still keen to stay in football I also had a hankering to go to university, and when I heard about the Bath scheme it seemed the ideal solution. They gave me a trial and luckily I had all the right qualifications. This Cup run has been good for the university, good for football and certainly good for me.''

Now Kamara-Taylor, who works in his spare time with underprivileged kids in Bath, is back in the big league. For at least a day, anyway. Calling him and the rest of the team students may be misleading – the majority, after all, are ex- pros, and a couple have even played for leagues in Italy and France – but it is not a misnomer as all are on the HND course, though only one is working towards a degree.

When Kamara-Taylor struck the winning penalty in the replay against Horsham he recalled that he wasn't really nervous. "But I did say a little prayer when I stepped up to take it. 'Please go in', I thought. Fortunately it did.''

The rest is now football history upon which Bath plan to build their expanding sports programme. As Ged Roddy says: "We've been trying to build a sporting environment in the university over the last few years, and this success has really captured people's imagination and brought to attention what we are trying to do.

"We know this sort of exposure is not going to last for ever, so it is good to get the message across while we can. I've never known an atmosphere like it on the campus. The Horsham game was so dramatic, we played with 10 men for an hour, hit the bar in extra time, had two cleared off the line and then it went to penalties. Even in the shoot-out we were a goal up and then missed one. An absolute roller-coaster.

"What was really great was to hear the spontaneous applause from around the ground for the football we were playing. It was the reaction of real fans, and most had come from outside the university. Cup fever has really hit Bath. It would have been great if Bath City could have joined us in this round, but they went out to Yeovil in a replay. I hope they will now support our efforts, because Bath has always been predominantly a rugby town.

"We know we'll get a pretty big crowd against Mansfield. We've always had a good relationship with Bath; we've got players who played for them playing for us and vice versa ,and Ivor Powell [the 86-year-old coach known as "the professor"] once coached them and took them to the third round of the Cup. We've also had a lot of support from the rugby club – they'll be looking after some of our ticketing arrangements.''

Saturday's Sky-screened game will have a probable 5,000 limit, including temporary seating, and will be played out to a background of muddy banks on a pitch fringed by an athletics track. Last Friday night, Roddy and the head coach, Paul Tisdale, saw Mansfield beat Colchester 4-2. This was the second time they had watched them.

"Like a good university, we are doing our research,'' says Roddy. And like a good university they are hoping for a decent result. An upset is by no means improbable, but no one is counting their chickens. Or Stags, as the case may be.