‘We have turned lives around’: more to Boreham Wood than an FA Cup run

Luke Garrard is running through some of the players that Boreham Wood’s BW PASE academy has produced. “We’ve got some unbelievable success stories,” the club’s first-team manager says. “There is Iliman Ndiaye at Sheffield United, Pelly Ruddock at Luton, Sorba Thomas at Huddersfield, who has played for Wales. Ben Goodliffe went into Wolves and is now at Sutton.”

There have been others and the headline statistic for the National League high-fliers, who travel to Bournemouth on Sunday for the first FA Cup fourth-round tie of their 74-year history, is that 12 of their youth products have earned contracts at professional clubs. Five of them have become full internationals. Garrard pauses. “It goes beyond all this for me,” he says.

The 36-year-old has been associated with the Hertfordshire club since a brief playing spell in 2005. He would return in 2010 to see out a career that featured rejection by Tottenham at 16, a YTS deal at Swindon and 17 senior appearances for them, and more than 100 games for AFC Wimbledon in the non-league.

Garrard got his foot on the coaching ladder at Boreham Wood’s academy in 2008 and he has been the under-18s manager, the academy director and is now the head of football at the academy. He has been the first-team manager since October 2015, having served as the assistant to Ian Allinson. “I’ve done every job from toilet cleaner,” he says with a smile.

Under Garrard, Boreham Wood have established themselves in the National League, having been promoted in 2014-15, and they went close to what he calls the “Holy Grail” of the Football League in 2017-18, losing in the Wembley play-off final to Tranmere.

They are well-placed this time for another push while the FA Cup run has been “spectacular” and a