Michael Mulryan will travel to Wembley tomorrow with plenty of his oldest football friends. But some will be missing. Some would not be seen dead following Solihull Moors in their National League play-off final. For the fervent few, old wounds still sting 17 years from the painful merger of two old non-League rivals that started a journey that might take Moors to the English Football League this weekend.
Irrespective of tomorrow’s result, they have come a long way from the early post-merger days when their main sources of income included renting spaces in their car park to long-distance lorry drivers for overnight stays and opening the clubhouse as a breakfast venue for night workers at the sprawling Jaguar Land Rover car plant that still surrounds their stadium.