Truro City FA Cup Journey: Chasing Glory in 2023
Connor Riley-Lowe has lived enough of Truro City’s FA Cup history to know it has rarely been kind to them. That is exactly why this year matters.
The Truro captain leads his side into a second qualifying round tie away at Merthyr Town, chasing a competition that has so often slipped through their fingers long before the bright lights of the first round.
A Cup that rarely smiles on Truro
For a club operating in and around the sixth tier, the numbers are stark. Since that breakthrough run to the first round in 2017, Truro have only once made it past this stage when playing at their current level or below. The pattern has become familiar: tricky draws, long journeys, higher-ranked opponents, and the nagging feeling that the balls in the pot never quite fall their way.
Last season underlined the frustration. Then in the National League, City pushed all the way to the fourth qualifying round, only to lose on penalties to AFC Totton. Close enough to see the first round proper, not close enough to touch it.
Riley-Lowe does not hide behind clichés. He sees a trend.
“If you look back at our past four or five years, I don't think we've had easy draws, I don't think they've been in our favour at all,” he told BBC Radio Cornwall before the trip to Wales. A lot of away ties. A lot of sides higher up the pyramid. The kind of fixtures that drain legs and test belief before the Cup has even found its rhythm.
This year? More of the same. Merthyr away. Hardly a free hit.
“Even this draw is a real tough draw to get Merthyr away – they're a really strong team,” he said. There were clubs “a few leagues below” in the hat. Truro did not get one of them.
Memories of Charlton and a club that grew up
Riley-Lowe is one of the last links to the day Truro broke through the glass ceiling. November 2017. An away tie at Charlton Athletic, then of League One, and a place in the national spotlight that Cornish football had waited almost half a century to reclaim.
It started with Hampton and Richmond. Noah Keats scored twice in a 2-0 win that made Truro the first Cornish club in 48 years to reach the FA Cup first round. That alone felt like history.
Then came The Valley. A proper stadium, a proper league club, and Truro right in the middle of it. Current City striker Tyler Harvey scored in a 3-1 defeat, a goal that still carries weight for those who made the journey.
For Riley-Lowe, that afternoon sits in rare company.
“Other than the two promotion days, I think that was my next best day in football,” he said. Back then, Truro were small, almost anonymous outside their patch. The trip to Charlton changed that, if only for a moment.
“We took a lot of fans and we actually did ourselves justice on the day,” he recalled. Truro competed. They made Charlton work. The home side rotated, made changes, but the non-leaguers refused to play the part of polite guests. “On another day we could quite easily have nicked something from that game.”
They did not. Yet the experience hardened the group and shifted the way the club saw itself. Riley-Lowe feels it.
“I think we've got a bit more stature in the game now,” he said. Truro are no longer the unknown quantity they once were, but the hunger for another day like Charlton has not faded.
Chasing another shot at the limelight
That is what sits behind this Merthyr tie. Not just progression, but the chance to light up the Cup again, to give supporters another ground, another story, another memory that lasts longer than a single season.
Riley-Lowe knows the draw will dictate part of that journey. “I would absolutely love to replicate it, but again you need the draw to go well for you, don't you?” The honesty is disarming, but it comes with a challenge.
“We've done it before where we've had a couple of tough games and we've made it so there's no reason why we can't produce that this year,” he said.
The FA Cup has always traded on that promise. One run. One moment. One club stepping out of its usual surroundings and into something bigger. Truro have tasted it once.
Now, with another awkward away day looming and a captain who still carries Charlton in the back of his mind, the question is simple: can this be the year the Cup makes heroes in Cornwall again?
