Wills right on queue for FA Cup

It is quite another thing when you are expected to play in goal on the night in question.

Warrington Town number one Karl Wills could not confirm until Wednesday that he would be free to play in their FA Cup first-round clash with Exeter at Cantilever Park on Friday night.

Wills works as a web developer in Manchester and faced a last-minute dash straight from his job to the BBC2-televised showdown before receiving the news he and Warrington manager Shaun Reid wanted to hear.

It will also have come as some relief to the handful of family members for whom Wills spent part of the week queueing for match tickets, which were so prized even preferential treatment for players was strictly forbidden.

Warrington-born Wills, whose previous career highlight involved sitting on the bench for Crewe in the Championship, says that policy is entirely understandable given the phenomenal interest in a club whose gates in the eighth-tier Evo-Stik Division One North seldom scrape past a couple of hundred.

Wills told Press Association Sport: "I had to put in a holiday request this week and if it hadn't been granted I would have had to work until 5pm on Friday and rushed straight over to the ground in time for kick-off.

"It's nothing like when I was at Crewe. There you had tickets put behind for you and everything. Here I had to queue with everyone else and buy the tickets I needed so my friends and family could come and watch me play."

Warrington's story may appear to be a traditional tale of FA Cup romance but beneath the cliche lies a real determination to use the profile of the Exeter game to maintain the momentum of the club's '2020' project launched last year.

A new ground is planned to replace the current 2,500 stadium and the club is working towards the four promotions required to reach the Football League within the next six years.

Currently languishing 17th in the league table, that ambition may seem a little far-fetched, but Wills sees no reason why the FA Cup run cannot be a first step towards at least changing the perception of Warrington as solely a rugby league town.

"There's no doubt it's a rugby town and growing up here I was and am as big a fan of the Wolves as anyone," added Wills.

"But this is a massive opportunity and the fact that the tickets sold out in a couple of hours really shows how excited the community is getting about the football club for once.

"Obviously we're not going to win the FA Cup, but hopefully by the time we do bow out we will really have gone some way towards changing how people think of the football club and raising its profile.

"The big drive is to get the club into the Football League by 2020. It seems a big ask at the minute but with the right funding and support there is no reason why the club cannot give it a good shot."

:: Karl Wills wears Schmeichology 2 goalkeeping gloves designed by Kasper Schmeichel and Precision Goalkeeping. For more information go to www.precisiontrianing.uk.com/goalkeeping