‘My players deserve this’: Boreham Wood turn focus to Lampard’s Everton

For Luke Garrard, it was all about creating a moment, a rush of joy, something to remember for ever and, given the odds against his Boreham Wood team in the FA Cup fourth round at Bournemouth on Sunday, the manager would have taken anything – and especially a goal.

Garrard got that and what a story it was for the captain, Mark Ricketts, at 37 years young, when he threaded home a low sidefoot on 38 minutes to give the National League side the lead. Ricketts had not trained from Tuesday to Friday and he did the bare minimum on Saturday as he nursed an injury that needed an injection last Monday.

“Mark was still feeling it after the session on Saturday,” Garrard says. “I said: ‘I don’t care. You’re walking us out at Bournemouth. I don’t care if it’s 15 minutes or 20 minutes. You deserve that.’”

Garrard wanted the moment for his players, particularly the stalwarts such as Ricketts; for the fans; for the chairman, Danny Hunter, who has done everything since his takeover in 1999 and, yes, for himself. Why not? “When we scored the first goal, I would probably have taken a 5-1 loss … just to have a moment,” Garrard says.

Garrard and everybody connected to the club ended up with so much more and the scenes after the final whistle, when little Boreham Wood had hung on to win 1-0 and set up a fifth-round tie at Everton, featured plenty of people taking leave of their senses.

At 11pm the previous night, Garrard had received a FaceTime call from a member of the club’s staff who was already in Bournemouth at a hotel. “There were 30 or 40 fans [outside the hotel] and they were singing my name … incredible,” he says. After 17 years at Boreham Wood, initially as a player and as the manager since October 2015, his bond with the support is