The man behind the counter at Greggs on Fishergate has never heard of a butter pie, but try Poundbakery over the street. Poundbakery doesn’t do butter pie, but try Greenhalgh’s on the corner. Greenhalgh’s: closed on Sundays. The chip shop on Market Street does meat pie, meat and potato, steak, steak and kidney, chicken and mushroom, cheese and onion. Butter pie? A shake of the head.
You’ve got to try the butter pie. That’s what everyone says the first time you visit Preston. It was created in industrial times, for the largely Catholic working population to eat on Fridays when meat was forbidden. Often you hear it described as a “delicacy”, but even this is to overstate its intensely yeoman nature. It’s layers of potatoes, onions and butter in a pie. It’s cheap. It’s hearty. It’s unpretentious. It exists to be consumed and then immediately forgotten. It is – with deepest apologies – the very embodiment of Preston North End in comestible form.
Are Preston really the most boring club in the Football League, as a fan group dubbed them earlier this season? Let’s examine the evidence. Nine consecutive seasons of mid-table finishes: tick. Drawn 45% of their league games this season: tick. Sponsored by a local rubber company: tick. Managed by Paul Heckingbottom: tick. Signature snack entirely comprising yellow and beige foodstuffs: tick.
What Preston do better than anyone else is nostalgia. The world’s oldest continually used football stadium. The record win in English football. The first winners of the Double. The first Invincibles. Bill Shankly, Tom Finney, Alan Kelly, David Moyes. The same old facts, the same old tales, regurgitated ad infinitum. And in this context, reaching an FA Cup quarter-final against Aston Villa ranks as comfortably the most interesting thing to have happened to Preston in years.
Of course it should be patently obvious to everyone that Preston are not actually going to win this quarter-final and get to Wembley. That would be too interesting by far. What happens instead is that Heckingbottom sends a depleted Preston out in a cagey spoiling formation, Villa are frustrated for almost an hour and then score three goals with the minimum of fuss.
The first 20 minutes essentially consist of players trying to pop balloons with their studs. Marcus Rashford keeps trying to score from free-kicks. Marco Asensio keeps trying to score from corners. Preston sit in a kind of rugged 5‑1‑4‑0. Then, after being frustrated for almost an hour, Preston submit without ever quite subsiding. Rashford pillages a couple. Jacob Ramsey makes sure.
Briefly an embarrassing rout is on the cards. But of course this too would also be unsustainably interesting. Not for nothing are Preston one of only two teams in the top four divisions to have neither scored nor conceded more than three goals in the league this season. (Sheffield United, another Heckingbottom masterpiece, are the other.) Stuffed with competent but never spectacular players, they carry on running and fighting without ever remotely threatening.
Ollie Watkins misses an elementary chance. The Villa fans toss a giant inflatable penis around the Bill Shankly Stand. Coming soon for them: Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League. Next for Preston: Derby in midweek, and the eight games that will define whether they finish in the top half, drop into the bottom six, or – and here’s the smart money – finish about where they are.
The temptation here is to chide Preston for their apparent lack of ambition, their allergy to jeopardy, their refusal to spend stupid money, or go into administration for the bantz, or take their long-suffering fans on “a journey”, or appoint some 34-year-old Basque with a soul patch to impose a whole new footballing identity. Stability, sustainability, a lightly salted potato and onion filling: by these marks shall you know us.
And yet by the same token, it is possible to see Preston as a kind of bellwether club: a study in existence and endurance as its own reward, in a sport more turbulently unequal than ever. Preston will not provide an American hedge fund with an inflation-busting return on investment. They will not generate Hollywood content or Wembley showpieces. They are neither good nor bad. But they provide thousands of people with a ritual and routine. It’s cheap, it’s hearty, it’s local and it’s real. Will the market allow something this radical to survive?
Finally, after hours of fruitless trekking, in a chip shop just off Friargate, amid a forest of bubble tea emporia and fried chicken joints, a butter pie is located, ordered and proffered. It costs £2.90. The pastry gives way just a little too easily. The filling oozes without conviction. It looks beige, smells beige and tastes beige. It is neither good nor bad. But we should all be heartened that it still exists.
