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For the players, staff and travelling supporters of Truro City, the gruelling 914-mile round round trip to Gateshead was a mixed blessing in the end. The 12-hour bus journey from Cornwall in the south-west all the way up England’s spine to the north-east bore a single point and a free pint or two.
Truro drew their National League match at 2-2 at Gateshead International Stadium on Saturday having led 2-0 in the 54th minute, in what is turning out to be a season of epic train journeys and unrelenting hauls up and down English A roads and motorways. After goals from Dominic Johnson-Fisher and Christian Oxlade-Chamblerlain, Gateshead rebounded through Kain Adom and, in the 70th minute, Frank Nouble.
Already this term Truro have made a trek to Carlisle for a 3-0 defeat that clocked up 878 miles. Such is the club’s relative isolation that even their nearest away game is at Yeovil Town, around a two-and-a-half-hour schlep along the A30 to Huish Park, 130 miles each way.
On Saturday the first 90 Truro fans to arrive shared a £920 bar tab, courtesy of the EFL sponsor, Sky Bet, with the generous free-drinks fund representing £1 for every mile travelled. At least the players we able to break up their journey with a stop at Derby County’s training ground.
John Askey, the club’s manager, told the BBC: “Clubs that come down to us, most of them are flying down and staying over on the Friday, so for us to have to do it on the coach is not ideal, but because we have so many long journeys, that’s the way we have to do it. We just have to get on with it, but with it being such a long journey, the longest it’s ever been in English football, it draws attention to it.”
Even their Canadian chair, Eric Perez, who appreciates long-distance travel since he regularly flies seven-hours long-haul from Toronto to London, understands the challenge facing the club he took over in 2023 with ambitions of “doing a Wrexham”.
All this time on the road has benefits too for Cornwall’s first professional football club, he believes. “I’m not going to say it’s a short journey. It’s a ridiculously long journey in context,” Perez told BBC Sport. “But what that does is galvanise our side even further – everybody spends time together, we’re used to travelling together.”
One of Truro’s stalwart supporters is resigned to long days of travelling but remains committed, despite the odd flight cancellation and wearisome train treks. John Joyce, who estimates Saturday’s trip cost him around £400 in expenses and lost earnings, told TalkSport: “I worked for Nato in the last six years of my career in the navy, and it was a shorter drive from Brussels back to Cornwall than it is from Cornwall to Gateshead.”
As Askey said after their Carlisle odyssey: “The thing that makes Truro special as a club is that the supporters get behind the team no matter what. I know last season we were very successful [earning promotion from National League South], so it was easy to get behind the players, but from what I know the fans never even moan and they appreciate what the players have done.”
