'I never thought we'd be walking up Wembley Way'
"It's absolutely amazing. I still can't believe it," says Mick Fox as he shows off a huge collection of Crawley Town memorabilia.
The 75-year-old, who describes his obsession as a "Crawley life sentence", will get his rewards on Sunday when he joins 16,000 other Crawley Town fans for the club's first appearance at Wembley Stadium.
He will be cheering louder than anyone else for the Red Devils to beat Crewe Alexandra in the League 2 play-off final.
Mr Fox hopes the achievement will wake the West Sussex town up to the "fact they've got a football team they can be proud of".
But it hasn't always been like this.
The photographs in Mr Fox's extensive collection show the period in the early 1900s when the club played on borrowed fields.
"Quite often a farmer would say you can't play there because I want to keep cows on it or something, so we'd have to move to another farmer's field," he says.
The Crawley resident also remembers lows in his own lifetime.
"The 70s was probably for me the nadir," he says.
"The club had nearly run out of money and there was only a few people who kept it going, otherwise we wouldn't have days like Sunday."
Among those people was Mr Fox's father, a carpenter and joiner who had been a goalkeeper for the side in the late 1940s and put a new roof on the building.
"He used to take me along there, certainly into the 60s I really took note of the game," he says.
Those family memories, coupled with a lifelong love of the team, mean that on Sunday Mr Fox will be thinking of those who "aren't going to be there".
"I'm sure everyone's going to have people they wish were there, but they'll be up there somewhere."
While he is anxious about Crawley being able to keep up the momentum on the pitch, Mr Fox is basking in its current glory.
"I never thought we'd be going up Wembley Way thinking about how Crawley are going to do," he says.
He also hopes its recent successes may lead to a new generation of die-hard reds.
"There's lots more young kids coming along to games," he said. "Hopefully they'll think Crawley are my team, not Tottenham or Brighton. God forbid."
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