Blog Archives

Mu Maan - The First Interview

30/5/2024

Mu, welcome back to Corinthian-Casuals, as manager. How does that sound?

Amazing. I’m delighted to be given this opportunity, first and foremost, and thank you to Brian Adamson for that. This club is a place that I call home, it’s my local club and it feels great to be here.

What are your abiding memories of this place and what kind of an atmosphere do you associate it with?

I ended my career here under James Bracken and, to give credit where it’s due, what he had here was unbelievable. I’ve been around non-league football for a long time and I feel like they were the best years of my footballing life. The fans were unbelievable, they would come out in numbers, even on Tuesday nights, away from home, they would still turn up. I am trying to bring that back.

You know the potential of this club. Where do you want to take it?

Wow, what a question! It might sound mad, but I think we can take this club wherever we want to. The club has got fantastic people behind the scenes and I feel like, with what I will bring as well – I’m a young manager and I’m hungry, very committed – we can go wherever we want to take this.

What has been the first stage of your plan upon taking over as manager?

Having the right people around me. I need strong people around me, people that I can trust. That’s always the case, whether it’s business, whether it’s life, and football is no different. That is the foundation – having people around you who will be there for you when you need them to be.

Mu the player was gifted, committed, and had a knack of popping up with a contribution at key moments. What is Mu the manager shaping up to be?

Listen… I’ll leave you to be the judge of Mu the player! This is something that is massive to me, it’s not new to me, but of course managing a team is completely different to playing. I will approach it with hard work, commitment, morals, standards. Those are the principles and if you do those things right, and have the foundations right, then I feel like we’ll be alright.

You’ve named James Bracken and Brian Adamson already, and you’ve worked with a few other well-respected non-league managers in your time. Have they influenced you?

Of course. You live, you learn, you pick up bits here and bits there, and you put your own twist on it. Gavin Rose, top manager, at Dulwich Hamlet – a young, knowledgeable manager. Jamie Howell, at Bognor Regis – exactly the same. Jim Cooper, at Met Police, was another top manager, but he taught me in a different way. Mick Sullivan, at Leatherhead, had an unbelievable squad and he knew just to let us play our football. I feel like I’ve picked up bits from all of those managers along the way and learned from them. Now I’ve got my own philosophy, my own beliefs, and I’m going to try and implement that.

What would be your message to the supporters about what they can expect?

First and foremost, to the supporters, I want to say you’re in good hands. You have a man here who cares for this club. I love this club and I want to bring success back to the club, because I feel the fans deserve that. I know the fans, I know what they’re like and they deserve success again. I don’t really want to speak about the last two years, because we all know what’s happened, but I’m here to change that and give them something they can actually shout about.

0 Comments

Funeral Arrangements For Gerry Young

24/5/2024

0 Comments

Funeral arrangements have now been finalised for the late Gerry Young.

Thursday 13th June at 10.20am.
Catholic mass at St Cecilia’s church, followed by cremation at North East Surrey Crematorium.
A Wake will be held at Worcester Park Athletic Club.

0 Comments

Casuals Appoint Mu Maan-ager

15/5/2024

0 Comments

Corinthian-Casuals are delighted to announce the appointment of Mu Maan as our new men’s first-team manager.

Maan is already well known to Casuals fans from his three spells here as a player, during which he made 133 appearances and scored 20 goals. The midfielder first signed for us under Brian Adamson’s management back in 2009, before departing during the 2010/11 season, then rejoined under James Bracken in 2016, playing a role in our rise to the Isthmian Premier Division. After departing in autumn 2019, he returned for one more brief stint when Adamson stepped in as interim manager midway through the 2022/23 season.

An all-action central midfielder, Maan became a popular figure with the supporters, in no small part due to his knack of popping up with important goals, including a memorable free-kick in our epic 4-3 play-off semi-final victory over Greenwich Borough at the end of the 2016/17 campaign.

Maan brings with him a wealth of experience of the non-league game in this region, having also played for Leatherhead, Dulwich Hamlet, Bognor Regis Town and Met Police during a playing career that also included a spell in Dubai.

Having successfully built up his waste management company, Skip It, in recent years, the 35-year-old has now decided to step into football management, and cannot wait to get started.

“Corinthian-Casuals holds a special place in my heart,” he said. “It is more than just a football club to me – it is home. I am a local lad and my connection to the club runs deep. I understand what Corinthian-Casuals means to the fans and the community, and I am keen to bring my skills and dedication to increase the remarkable work being done behind the scenes.

“This opportunity represents a significant project for me – one that I approach with a lot of seriousness and commitment. My intention is to invest myself fully in the success and longevity of Corinthian-Casuals. If given the chance, I would sign a 10-year contract tomorrow.

“On the pitch, my priority lies in assembling a team that mirrors the values of Corinthian-Casuals – respect and integrity. Together, we will set high standards, support one another and strive for success.”

Maan brings with him a new technical director, Ali Gsaib, who has worked in the top flights of Algerian, Congolese and Moroccan football, and has English non-league coaching experience with Faversham Town and Clapton FC. His backroom staff will also feature brother Mo Maan, a former Corinthian-Casuals goalkeeper; Richard Blackwell, previously of Croydon Athletic and Carshalton Athletic; and Casuals stalwart, Alan Winnett, who was goalkeeping coach under James Bracken.

Chairman Brian Adamson is delighted with the return of his former player to this new role in the dugout and spoke candidly about the appointment.

“Firstly, I would like to welcome Mu back to Corinthian-Casuals. I had the pleasure of making him one of my first signings for the club when I was manager in 2009. He did so well for me that Leatherhead came along and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

“Mu was a leader in the dressing room and always wanted the best for the team and the club. I remember a few years back when he had been playing in Dubai and returned to the UK. He phoned me and said he wanted to go back to Casuals and asked if I had any connections there. That’s when I introduced him to James Bracken.

“When I took over as chairman, I was very frustrated with the appointment of previous managers. Some of them were on a club merry-go-round, getting a job here, then getting the sack and moving onto the next club. Our previous managers had been long serving and this is what is best for our club.

“My first thoughts were, ‘Let’s find a young, keen manager who has got a good team around them, who knows the club and what it stands for… someone looking to get into management.’

“So, why not Mu? He played over 130 first-team games for us, and was captain of Corinthian-Casuals, Leatherhead and Met Police. He knows how to run a dressing room and is a very successful businessman who employs a number of people, so he knows how to communicate like a leader.

“‘But it’s his first job,’ I hear you say. Well, let me remind you all of Scott Harris, who went to Walton & Hersham at Step 6 with no experience in managing and was given his first job. He guided them to three promotions and was very close to a fourth this season. Now I am not saying Mu is going to win three promotions in a row, I am just saying let’s give someone young and keen the opportunity to guide our great club back to where it belongs.

“We tried the merry-go-round and that got us relegated twice. It’s time to get off the merry-go-round and I believe we have the right man for the club and its loyal fans.

“I am very much looking forward to working with Mu and his team.”

Images: Harvey Abbott and Stuart Tree

0 Comments

Rest In Peace, Gerry Young

14/5/2024

4 Comments

Everyone at Corinthian-Casuals was deeply saddened by the news that Gerry Young, our former assistant manager and loyal supporter, passed away this week at the age of 75.

Gerry (pictured above, on the right, with his good friend and fellow Scot, Ronnie McNamara) was an incredibly popular figure at the club, a near ever-present at our home games and someone who could be relied upon to offer stoic words of comfort during the tougher periods for the club. He had seen it all in the game and formed part of a group of former players from his time here in the late Eighties and early Nineties who remained staunch supporters of the team and have become part of the fabric of the club. Sat alongside Larry Ryan, and Ronnie and Rob McNamara, Gerry was a jovial raconteur in the clubhouse after matches, happy to tell younger fans how it had been in our early days in Tolworth.

And he knew that story better than anyone. After all, Gerry was part of the Tolworth FC setup who played at King George’s Field before our amalgamation with them in 1988, and then remained as assistant manager of Corinthian-Casuals after we took over the lease on the ground that summer. He recalled those events in an interview for the Broadway to Brazil podcast a few years ago.

“Tolworth FC took a lease on the pitch here,” he said, “but there was nothing here. There was no clubhouse or anything like that. All it was… was a football pitch, fairly overgrown, with a running track.

“The premise was to obviously develop it, that was our idea. But we didn’t have the finance, nor did we have a very big name. So eventually, having run out of money and not having any means to make any money to upgrade the ground and finish off what we started effectively, there was a connection between the committee of Tolworth and Geoff Harvey, who was involved at Corinthian-Casuals.

“Corinthian-Casuals didn’t have a ground at the time. They were looking for a ground. They approached us, we had a meeting, and we decided that they would come down here. They had a bit more financial backing than we had, and eventually they put money into the club to upgrade the ground. Tolworth went by the way and Corinthian-Casuals took over the lease.”

Gerry had been assistant manager of Tolworth and he kept the same role with Corinthian-Casuals during a vitally important period of our history. When manager Kevin Crouch – who also sadly passed away last month – resigned midway through the 1988/89 season, Young took interim charge of the team before Martin Caller took over until the end of that campaign.

It was a stark period for the club, who struggled for players, leading Gerry to pull on the shirt on two occasions, meaning he also goes down in the Corinthian-Casuals annals as a former player.

“I had to hold things together,” he told Rob Cavallini in Corinthian-Casuals: The First Seventy Years, “so I ended up phoning around people to see who was available. I got the bare eleven and I was the twelfth man! It was a bit surreal as although it was 1-10 we did not play that badly, but every time Cheshunt had a shot, it went in. Afterwards, I put it down to a one-off and we all went in the bar and had a good drink.”

Steve Bangs took over as manager in 1989, ushering in a new era for the club as he made some key signings, but Gerry remained his ever-reliable assistant into the early Nineties.

That loyalty, that consistency of character and dedication to the club, remained throughout the decades that have followed, as Gerry became one of the most recognisable figures at King George’s Arena.

His passing will leave a void in our club that we can never fill. He will be remembered as a generous spirit, a kind soul and a crucial figure in the history of Corinthian-Casuals Football Club.

Words: Dominic Bliss
Image: Stuart Tree

4 Comments

The Corinthian Who Helped to Put Women’s Football on the World Map

1/5/2024

0 Comments

Jackie Scherschel is a proud Corinthian-Casuals supporter and a member of our women’s team committee, but she also represented her country in one of women’s football’s first international tournaments. This is the story of the footballing pioneer in our midst…

Words: Dominic Bliss

You won’t hear her shouting about it, but one member of the Corinthian-Casuals Women committee once represented her country in an international tournament.

Jackie Scherschel, who became a Corinthian-Casuals supporter when her daughter Sophie played in our girls’ section during the early 2000s, once played centre-half for the Northwood Ladies side who were invited to represent the United Kingdom at the World Women’s Invitational Tournament in October 1978.  A marquee event in the mould of a World Cup – the tournament was hosted by Taiwan and was the first of its kind in women’s football, contested by 13 teams from four different continents.

While the other countries sent their full national sides, we were unofficially represented by Northwood – whose men’s team faced us in an Isthmian League fixture here recently– and it just so happened that Jackie had joined the club a few months earlier, almost by pure chance.

“The person who initially got me involved in playing was a guy called Paul Byrne, who was club secretary for Northwood,” she recalls. “I’d known him for years and one day I was over the park walking the dog when I saw him and he said, ‘We’re thinking about getting a ladies’ team together. Would you be interested?’

“I was 18, and initially I’d said no because I didn’t have much interest in football at the time, but then I thought it could actually be a good way to keep fit after leaving school and college.  So I decided to play for this new team at Northwood, and we had only been going about seven months when this opportunity came up for us to go to Taiwan.”

Northwood Ladies – who may have been invited to represent the UK due to their manager Harry Benjamin’s connections from his day job as a travel agent – were used to playing in front of 20-odd people for domestic fixtures, so they got a bit of a surprise when their flight was greeted by a full press pack eager to snap photos of the arriving teams.

“We had no idea what a big deal it was over there,” says Jackie, who went by her maiden name Hore at the time. “We were famous for three weeks – it was crazy!”

Jackie got a further taste of things to come when she was asked to be the UK’s flag bearer at the opening ceremony.

“The first thing I knew about it was when I was picked up and taken to the stadium for a dress rehearsal for the flying of the flag,” she explains. “I got to the stadium and just thought, ‘This is enormous!’

“I remember going back to the hotel and just saying to the rest of the girls, ‘Oh. My. Goodness. This is huge!’

“And it was. We were on the TV every day, on the news. They just loved women’s football – wherever we went, we had police escorts…it was just huge.”

The team’s first game was against Thailand in the National Stadium of Taipei, and it attracted 17,000 people even though the pitch was covered in water due to the monsoon rain.

“The pitch was literally under water,” Jackie recalls, “and to try and soak up some of the rain they put down powdered lime! If you went down on the pitch, your skin got burned by the lime – I can certainly remember that!

“I was a centre-half, and I wasn’t by any means a skilful player, but I was fast. I was taught by our trainer Ray Bullen, ‘It doesn’t matter if you get the ball, just make sure you come into contact with something!’”

That first game against Thailand proved to be their only taste of the national stadium, as they moved out 150 miles into the country to play out the rest of their matches in a mountain retreat called Taichung.

Northwood – or the UK – finished tenth of the 13 nations in the pool stage, meaning they didn’t progress, but they did record three victories, over Austria, Canada and Polynesia.

“We were the underdogs and we really pushed ourselves, we really played well,” recalls Jackie. “I remember one of the managers coming to shake my hand after the game and saying, ‘You played really well.’”

Despite the buzz around events in Taiwan, the team discovered that their performances had made little impression on the media back in Britain, where only the local press covered the tournament.

“Back here it was really unimportant, it meant nothing,” recalls Jackie. “They weren’t really interested.”

Her time at Northwood came to an end soon after the tournament, as she was forced to give up football due to work commitments at the weekend. The whole journey from park football to international tournament had taken less than a year. Although her playing days were brief, she had been in the right place at the right time to take part in an historic international event.

0 Comments