ONE FA Cup first-round debutant is sure to ring a few bells this weekend.

Rushden & Diamonds – the Football League’s ultimate flash in the pan. The team that flew too close to the sun and got burned, that went all in and then folded.

Nowadays they are known as AFC Rushden & Diamonds, having relaunched in 2011 as a fan-owned enterprise after the original club met its grizzly end due to money troubles.

And the road leading to Saturday’s first-round trip to Burton was long and winding.

Those were heady days when Dr. Martens owner Max Griggs bankrolled a two-club merger out of a tiny Northamptonshire town that surged from the seventh tier in 1992 to Division Two – League One in today’s lingo – just 11 years later.

Griggs funded a £30million revamp of the 6,431-capacity Nene Park and built a state-of-the-art training ground for Arsenal legend Brian Talbot, who was the manager at the time.

Alex Raspin, vice-chairman of AFC Rushden & Diamonds and lifelong fan, told SunSport: “The amount of money, the way that it was done, I don’t think it had really been done like it before.

“We were chatting to Billy Sharp a couple of days ago, obviously he’s now back with us for this [FA Cup] game. But he said that the facilities at Nene Park were better than what he had at Sheffield United at the time when he came here on loan [in 2005].”

Club chairman Rob Usher added: “Max didn’t just invest in the playing squad, he created this mad facility that wouldn’t have looked out of place levels and levels higher up in the game. It was all state of the art.”

Former Diamonds player Paul Underwood, who made almost 200 appearances for the club, remembers those glory days fondly.

He told SunSport: “In a way, Max had an open chequebook and said, ‘Look Brian, make this into the type of thing you want’.

“Brian had him put in the training ground. Our facilities were as good as any top tier football club in the Premier League.

“We’ve got our own pegs, our own baths, our own table tennis, our own astroturf. It was brilliant.”

The beginning of the ambitious project’s sad end was set in motion when Griggs pulled his funding in 2005, with the club hemorrhaging cash and losing their best players.

Following quick-fire relegations, the club was shut down completely in 2011.

Kettering Town initially moved into Nene Park but quickly realised they could not keep pace with the extortionate upkeep.

And the fan-launched AFC Rushden & Diamonds had the same problem.

By 2017, their once-glitzy ground was turned to rubble after being left derelict, and at the mercy of squatters and vandals, for five years.

Raspin explained: “[Griggs] gave the club and the facilities to the supporters, but the supporters couldn’t finance the facility that had been built.

“The club started collapsing through the leagues, down two relegations very quickly.

“As I understand it, the guy that came in to save the club originally in 2007 still owns the land.

“They haven’t built anything on it because I think it’s a flood plain. It’s just been demolished and is now just wasteland.”

Eighth-tier AFC Rushden & Diamonds, the lowest-ranked team left in the FA Cup, now play their home games at Hayden Road – a rickety non-league stadium with just 250 seats which they share with Rushden & Higham United.

But Saturday’s adventure will take them to Burton’s 6,900-capacity Pirelli Stadium.

The glamour is back – if just for one day.

The FA Cup first-round proper is the stuff of dreams for AFCRD. And Usher, who does all his work for the club voluntarily, is drinking it all in.

He said: “We’ve got ambitions and we’ve got targets, right? But then we all have dreams on top of that. And you’re not meant to reach the dream, right? You can hit the target and you can hit the ambition, but nobody ever gets their dream.

“So, for me, after the scenes after the Morecambe game [in the FA Cup fourth qualifying round] at home in front of the highest crowd we’ve ever had there, and those scenes at full-time, I’m living my dream. I’ve lived my dream.”