You have to feel for the manager of Woodford United. There he was with his team, all fired up and ready to rumble, waiting to take on Alveston Football Club Juniors in an important mid-Warwickshire Boy’s League Division Two fixture. He’d selected the squad, doled out the team-orders and done the pep-talk. The hour was near and everything was set.

At the duly appointed time, a coach pulls into the ground. The opponents have arrived. He casually glances over – and instantly does a double-take. It’s an impressive vehicle, all right, certainly not your usual Sunday league team bus. Then – hang on – it says ‘England’ in big letters along the side. And it’s got a whopping great cross of St George on it. And three lions too… It can’t be, can it? It is – lumme! – it’s the England team coach. Yes, THE England team coach!

As visions of the boy Rooney, his team-mates and dread overtake him in equal measures, through the vehicle’s subtly tinted windows he catches a glimpse inside. He spots crisply folded brand new England shirts adorning the polished wood-finish tables. He spies rows of spacious and luxuriously deep leather seats, complete with full three-point seatbelts, in which he can just make out the outline of human forms. 

As the coach draws to a halt its passenger door glides open silently, revealing the silhouette of the opposing team leader inside. “Sven,” gasps the Woodford manager. “No, it’s Duncan,” comes the reply. “Duncan Coulson and the Alveston Under 12s. D’ya like our coach?”

So what was going on? Why had the England Football Team official coach left its London base to venture up country to Alveston, a pinprick on the map in deepest Warwickshire, on this particular Sunday afternoon?

As strange as it may seem, the prime reason was photography. Geoff Bell, Bus and Coach Director for Scania (Great Britain) Limited explains: “We knew the coach had just entered service and that it is arguably the most high-profile vehicle on Britain’s roads today,” he says. “Also, there’s no doubt it looks utterly fantastic – so much so, in fact, that the Scene Scania editorial team agreed it just had to feature on the cover of the next issue.

“So we needed to arrange a photocall. While we reasoned it would have been a real coup to have a shot with the England squad, we also felt maybe we should try something a little different. Football is our national game and we began talking about all those who play at grass-roots level. ‘Just imagine’, someone said, ‘if as a schoolboy you’d got the chance to travel on that coach, and then play for real in the official England strip – it’d be a dream come true!’ And that was that; grass-roots it would be. The next task was to find a team, and that’s where Duncan Coulson stepped in.”

As manager of Alveston Football Club’s junior squad, Duncan Coulson was delighted to help out. “Our Under 12s had a match coming up and, bearing in mind Scene Scania’s publishing deadline, everything fitted in perfectly. I went about seeking the parents’ permission to allow their boys to travel on the England coach and, quite naturally, they all thought I’d gone totally mad!” But nobody objected and so there we were; we had a team of more-than-enthusiastic schoolboys and, with all due respect to José Mourinho, Arsene Wenger, Sir Alex and Sven, the finest Football coach in the land too!”

The next issue was the strip. “A single call to Umbro fixed that,” says Geoff Bell. “They were delighted to come to the party by supplying the kit and all of us are extremely grateful to them for their generosity. On the day, the boys looked great!”

The final part of the jigsaw fell into place with the help of Blueways Coaches London Limited, the proud owner and operator of the coach. Apart from its England duties, the vehicle is available for private hire on a selective basis and on this occasion the company was more than happy to oblige.