Football: Stevenage suffer post-Cup blues

STEVENAGE BOROUGH may be sitting on a healthy bank balance as a result of their FA Cup exploits of this season and last, but two years of high profile exposure have left the GM Vauxhall Conference club with a price to pay.

Borough have seen top players Barry Hayles (Bristol Rovers), Efetobor Sodje (Macclesfield), Paul Barrowcliffe (Brentford) and Phil Simpson (Barnet) prised away by Nationwide League clubs, which has hardly helped their own efforts to graduate to the bigger stage. Indeed, even after Saturday's 3-1 win at Hayes, they are nearer the bottom of the Conference table than the top.

Now the manager, Paul Fairclough, is resigned to losing another club stalwart in Mark Smith, the defender whose goalline acrobatics were adjudged not to have prevented Alan Shearer's contentious first goal in Borough's Cup replay defeat at Newcastle last month.

Smith has turned down the most lucrative contract ever offered to a Stevenage player, so determined is he to find a League club.

"Mark just wants to play professional football," Fairclough said. "He has been offered substantially more than he earns at the moment, the equivalent of what he would get with a Third Division club. But whatever we offered him it probably would not have been enough."

Meanwhile, the sour taste left by Borough's bitter war of words with Newcastle has been sweetened by a laudable - some might say image-saving - gesture from England captain Shearer.

At the end of the St James' Park replay, pointedly, he had refused to swap shirts with any of the non-League side's players. Last week, however, he sent signed Newcastle jerseys both to Smith and fellow defender Robin Trott.