MATCH 3: You're Supposed to be at Home: Horley Town vs. Newhaven

 Horley Town 0 Newhaven 0 (Southern Combination Premier Division)
The New Defence, 5 September 2020

I’ve written before about coming back to my hometown club, Horley Town, my relationship with the place and the role of football in forming my adolescent identity, so I won’t relitigate all that. I stand by everything in that piece for The Real FA Cup, except the line about Horley having ‘Europe’s largest Waitrose’, epitomising the place. Fergal, who chatted to me about the club and town during that match against Corinthian Casuals back in August 2011, read it and said, “Ah, you’ve fallen for the old Wikipedia lie. It’s not even that big.” I had my facts wrong, but somehow this summed up Horley even better: it’s not the town with the largest Waitrose, but the kind of town that pretends it has the largest Waitrose.

Situated halfway between London and Brighton, Horley was a village until 1974, when it was declared a town, having expanded to serve Gatwick Airport, opened nearly forty years earlier – it now has a population of 22,000. It’s part of the East Surrey constituency, one of the safest Conservative seats (I wrote more on local and national politics here); the Local Government Act 1972 briefly moved the town into West Sussex, but due to local opposition, the Charlwood and Horley Act 1974 moved it back into Surrey. Beyond this, there isn’t much to say about it: Wikipedia’s ‘People from Horley’ page includes just seven people, the best known of whom is probably Lol Tolhurst from The Cure. Surveying the town for a book on Surrey in 1962, the architecture critic Ian Nairn described Horley as having a ‘Pleasant scale but no worthwhile buildings’, and I don’t think that’s unfair.

My parents moved here from nearby Redhill in January 1986, when I was four. In July 1993, I had a trial with Horley Town’s youth club and spent a frustrating season in their B side, hardly ever starting and rarely getting more than ten minutes as a substitute, despite the team losing nearly every match. I quit, and that was the end of my involvement in competitive football, bar a couple of games for the local comprehensive, Oakwood School’s second XI a few years later, until I started playing in the Gay Football Supporters’ Network League in Brighton in 2008.

I didn’t come to watch Horley Town until 2011, more than a decade after I left for university, and the Newhaven fixture was only my third visit. (My second was in July 2012, as I was back home, convalescing after surgery.) My father had never been: he’s a football fan, but a casual one, occasionally taking me to watch Norwich City during my youth but otherwise following Wimbledon, and then Arsenal, on television. This is despite the fact that Horley’s ground, The New Defence, was opened in 2003, about ten minutes from our family home. So, when I was planning my season of watching non-League teams, a return to Horley was top of my list, and I thought it would be nice to go along, for once, with my dad. If we both enjoyed it, perhaps we could come back regularly throughout the season, and see more of each other than usual.

I would doubtless be watching Horley Town more this year if they hadn’t recently moved from the Combined Counties League, which covers Greater London and the Home Counties, to the Southern Combination, for teams from Sussex and south-east Surrey. When football stopped in March, all competitions below England’s top two divisions were terminated, and at this level, voided entirely. Third in the table at the time, Horley’s hopes of being promoted via the play-offs to one of the Isthmian League’s Southern Divisions ended; going up would have crowned a successful season, as Town also reached the FA Cup First Qualifying Round for only the sixth time, losing 3-1 at home to Balham. They were starting again today against Newhaven, who were just one place (and one point) below Horley when 2019-20 came to an abrupt halt.

I met my dad outside the ground, a little late as I tried to take a short cut past the river before realising it had added ten minutes to my walk (testament to just how atrocious my directional sense is). There weren’t many Covid-19 precautions – I was invited to sanitise my hands after entering, but the bar and food hatch were open, and there didn’t seem to be any restriction on sitting in the main stand. I looked at the team sheet, written on a whiteboard, and once again, I didn’t know anyone on either side. Historically, Horley have been too far from any established professional team to attract anyone winding down, and have only ever sold two players to English League clubs. The first was Nicky Forster, who left for Gillingham in 1992 and had a decent career with Brentford, Reading, Brighton & Hove Albion and others before ending up at nearby Lingfield almost twenty years later. The second – still talked about often on Horley Town’s Twitter feed – was Ashley Nadesan, who scored 99 goals in two seasons, including 45 in the Combined Counties Premier Division in 2015-16, before being sold to Fleetwood Town. After spending a year on loan at Carlisle United, last summer he joined Crawley Town, whose rapid rise over the last two decades has provided an obvious place for Horley to sell to or recruit from – until then, the nearest professional club had been Crystal Palace, 20 miles away. (The town’s most accomplished footballing export is Faye White, who was born in Horley and also went to Oakwood, but in the absence of a local women’s team, started at Horsham Ladies before captaining Arsenal and England throughout the 2000s.)

Having spent three months back in Horley during lockdown, I was interested in how Town had survived it. At half-time during a goalless encounter between two fairly even matched sides, the club’s chairman, Mark, talked to me about how the Covid-19 crisis had affected them. The loss of income from clubhouse functions – 18^th and 21^st birthday parties, wedding receptions and so on – had been difficult, especially as they weren’t sure when or how these might resume, but were offset by a government grant. Their impressive 1-0 win at Eastbourne United in the FA Cup Extra Preliminary Qualifying Round on Tuesday night had also helped, bringing in an extra thousand pounds. The players had attended fitness sessions on Zoom, and compared times on cross-country runs, before training resumed in June; during the Newhaven match, I thought they lacked sharpness in the first half but was impressed at how they improved in the second, even though neither they nor their opponents could find a goal.

Most notable during lockdown was that the ground was vandalised: there were several break-ins, but the worst was when someone broke into the turnstile hut and ripped out the door and frame, also damaging the interior. The club asked for £2000 in a crowd-funder for repairs; they brought in £2600, and Mark talked glowingly about how generous local people had been, and how they showed the club’s importance to the community. (I put in twenty quid.) At Balham on Wednesday, Andi had said this wasn’t an isolated incident, as his local club in Peckham had suffered the same thing, most likely perpetrated by similar people – bored teenagers wanting to do something, anything, that felt like an act of transgression. The damage has been fixed now: further progress in the Cup would help, but Horley have been drawn away at Kingstonian a semi-professional team from the Isthmian League Premier Division, and a win there would be a significant upset. (Either way, I'll be there to see it, having already booked my ticket.)

The match had few clear-cut chances, with Horley attacking less often but looking more of a threat when they did. My dad and I stood in between the dugouts, listening to both managers (but especially Newhaven's) getting more annoyed with their own team's limitations, especially up front, than anything else. When I'd been back in the spring, I'd kept seeing a van parked near the ground with 'CFC' on it, and at half-time, I heard more talk about Chelsea's recent signings than anything that had happened here, and I started to think about who comes to Horley Town on a regular basis. They're too far from the capital to attract a devoted fan culture like Clapton CFC or Dulwich Hamlet, lacking the former's specific status as a 'community club' or the latter's romantic history, but near enough for the big London teams to suck up support and attention – indeed, the 2003-04 match against AFC Wimbledon smashed their previous attendance record, but most of the 1800 crowd were away fans. The club has quietly been part of Horley since 1896, though, and perhaps it's only when it breaks out of the ordinary – negatively due to vandalism, or positively due to a good FA Cup run – that local people really appreciate it. It's maybe more important to its staff and players, particularly at its youth levels, than spectators, but at this level, they're not really separate: doubtless most of the supporters had friends or family on the pitch, or running the club. And even though I didn't, I could just wander up to the chairman at half-time and strike up a conversation.

Can't do that at Stamford Bridge, can you?