INSIDE FOOTBALL WITH: Danny Webber - Dreaming of an FA Cup giantkilling with Salford City

Danny Webber has an FA Cup winners medal. Now he is dreaming of a giantkilling as his Salford City side prepare to face Hartlepool United in the second round.

With our FA Cup second round match against Hartlepool United on Friday night, it’s a big week for Salford City.

The players are limited to buying six tickets at £10 each for friends and family. Most wanted at least twice that number, but they understand that the capacity is limited to 1,400 – effectively a line of people standing all around the pitch because Moor Lane has only two tiny stands.

Demand is so high from families for several reasons. Most of the lads in the dressing room have never played such an important game. Most hadn’t reached the FA Cup first round before, let alone the second. They want to savour the moment and for their loved ones to see it.

The two-part BBC documentary about Salford seemed to go down really well and, combined with the FA Cup win against Notts County, we’ve seen crowds surge.

When I did my last column, I said that our average crowd has risen to just under 500. They have doubled since. We had 1,311 for a recent league game and you see a huge difference at matches.

There’s a buzz, people think they’re part of something exciting. Before, there was nothing but a few cars and scaffolding structures behind the goals and the ball could take ages to be returned if you hit a shot wide.

Now, there are hundreds of fans behind, plus another burger van to take the strain off Babs in the serving hut.

I think most of the new fans are Salford people and it’s important that the club keeps their values and respects their traditions and long standing fans, but we had one man come from Aberdeen to see our next game after the Notts County win, a cup match against Trafford.

I also had kids from my old school in south Manchester come to interview the players for a school project.

I’ve spoken to a lot of people around the same age as me at games who say watching Salford reminds them of watching football as a kid. They can stand with their mates and have a pie and a pint. They can bring their kids too. It’s cheap.

I see the attraction of football outside the Premier League bubble, where tickets can be expensive and hard to get hold of. Salford is a big Manchester United area, but I’ve seen City fans at our games too.

People come up to me in the street in Manchester and talk about Salford’s FA Cup run. That’s the power of television, but I’ve noticed a change from the first round. Where we were firm underdogs against Notts County, they now seem to think we’re favourites against Hartlepool. We’re not. We’re still a part-time team and Hartlepool are full-time. They’re also playing three divisions above us – a huge gap.

We’ll have lads who are working in the morning before playing on Friday night. They’re trying to get Friday afternoon off work so we can meet at Hotel Football by Old Trafford - which is part-owned by the Class of ’92 who own our club - for a pre match meal and some relaxation together.

I’ve been doing that for the last 15 years as a professional footballer, but a pre-match hotel and free meal still has a novelty value for most of the lads. It’s good to see them enjoying it.

We’ll get a coach through Salford to the game, where we’ll be met by television cameras. Last time, it was Ian Wright, Trevor Sinclair and Dan Walker from the BBC.

That’s another novelty, stepping off a coach under the lights of a camera and it can add pressure. There are also cameras in the dressing room which have been set up to film us, but nobody outside the team is allowed in there. Knowing we’re being filmed inhibits what we say, it changes the dynamic, the language, but it’s exciting at the same time.

I can’t wait for Friday and we’ve changed our training patterns this week to hopefully help. We usually train on Tuesday and Thursday night, but it’s Monday, Wednesday and Thursday for this week.

We couldn’t find a full size pitch for Wednesday so we’ll work on a smaller one. We also hope that our own pitch is okay. It has rained a lot in Manchester over the last week and we had to postpone a game last week because of the rain. We’re having to cover the pitch to keep the water off.

We also have the small matter of a league campaign and last Saturday our run of 18 straight away wins came to an end at Grantham. They deserved to win, they played the windy and rainy conditions better than we did by keeping the ball on the ground. We didn’t stick to our game plan to do exactly that.

That gave us a slap in the face which was just what we needed. I’m not saying players have got carried away, but they have to stay completely focused on football when all around things are happening for the first time in their lives and their profiles are starting to rise.

That defeat at Grantham brought us right down to earth ahead of the Hartlepool game. That’s not a bad thing.