MATCH 8: The Road to Wembley: Hendon vs. Maidstone United

Hendon 0 Maidstone United 1 (FA Cup second qualifying round)
Silver Jubilee Park, 3 October 2020

 

 

I thought I wasn't going to get to see the game I had planned for my birthday, for two reasons. The first was utterly mundane: torrential rain. Not being familiar with the clubs I'm visiting this season, I didn't know that Hendon had an artificial 3G pitch that couldn't become waterlogged, meaning there was no need for the kind of late inspection as at Clapton CFC or Walthamstow. The second, however, was quite surreal - a product of the government's haphazard and badly communicated Covid-19 regulations that clearly hadn't considered the cup competitions. The FA Cup second qualifying round draw had put several Step 3 (seventh tier) clubs from various regional leagues, who are allowed to admit fans to 30% of capacity, at home to Step 2 clubs (from the National League's northern and southern divisions, who enter the Cup at this stage), who still aren't after the national rise in Covid-19 cases led the government to drop the re-admittance of fans at all non-league levels, planned for 3 October.

It looked like all second qualifying round matches might be played behind closed doors, until the FA issued guidance saying that if two Step 2 clubs were facing each other or were drawn at home to a lower side, no spectators could be let in. If a team from Step 3 (or below) were at home to one from Step 2, they could only allow home fans. This obviously seemed absurd: Corinthian-Casuals, due to play Dulwich Hamlet - promoted to the National League South a few seasons back, largely thanks to income from their growing fanbase - put out a statement saying that 'As the coronavirus is clearly clever enough to differentiate between supporters of Step 2 and Step 3 clubs', they could not admit Dulwich fans, saying that 'We’d like to place on record that as a club, we are not in favour of this utterly baffling ruling, we believe it is wholly unnecessary and we are having to put in place these restrictions under duress.'

 

Ahead of their tie against Maidstone United of the National League South, community-owned Hendon stated that they were 'unclear as to the logic behind this decision' but had 'little choice but to follow the FA's directions'. They offered refunds to any Maidstone fans who had bought a ticket, saying that anyone in Maidstone colours or celebrating a visiting goal would be asked to leave the stadium. They reopened sales, making it all-ticket, so I booked for myself and my friend Chris (who had recently joined me at Ilford, as well as Wingate & Finchey's match against Bowers & Pitsea).

We met at a pub in Hendon, where we were instinctively pleased to see Norwich on TV, until we registered the empty seats signifying our ongoing exile from Carrow Road. There was just one small screen showing City; the barman tried to put it on a larger one but found it interfered with the ones displaying Chelsea's Premier League match against Crystal Palace, which the handful of other drinkers wanted to watch, and we ended up not being able to see Norwich at all, after being ushered around the pub's one-way system more than once. We didn't care, by now used to feeling disengaged from the club we'd followed for decades by the pandemic, and talked instead about Barney Ronay's recent Guardian article on how these circumstances were a gift to top-level football's oligarchical owners, most interested in international television revenue than local fans. After lamenting that for the first time in years, our club would sign people that we may well never see play, as we don't expect to go to a City game until next season at least, we felt more frustration at the difficulty of ordering food via the pub's app than we did by the news that Norwich had lost 1-0 to a late free-kick by Wayne Rooney.

 

The technological problems continued when we got to Silver Jubilee Park, which Hendon share with Edgware Town, as Chris couldn't get the QR code for the Track and Trace system to work on his new smartphone. As I still use an old Nokia, I couldn't scan it either, so we joined a long queue to have our names written down, exacerbated by the man on the door having run out of space on his paper. There were no temperate checks as I'd had at Balham or Haringey Borough, but more overt guidance to leave if displaying Covid-19 symptoms than I'd seen elsewhere. Wanting to make myself look more like a home fan, I'd brought a football scarf - I often buy these on foreign travels, and I had one in Hendon's colours that was actually for Karpaty Lviv, that I took over ones for Rapid Wien and Flora Tallinn, also in green and white.

I could have got a Hendon scarf in the well-stocked club shop, with old and new replica kits as well as second-hand books, including the Playfair Non-League Football Annual from 1991-92. That was the original Maidstone United's final season - their third as a Football League club, a status for which they made huge financial gambles that ultimately bankrupted them and they resigned from the league and went into liquidation in August 1992, shortly after Aldershot. The new Maidstone United did not claim the old club's history, but climbed back up to the National League in 2015 before relegation four years later: Step 2 football is unsustainable without paying spectators, as a guest article in the programme by The Non-League Paper pointed out, and so this was the Stones' first game of the season, having last played a competitive game on 14 March. Presumably, that article was submitted before Friday, when the government pledged £10m to help the 67 clubs at Step 2 play behind closed doors, and hopefully avoid the bankruptcies that wiped out many of the fifth and sixth-tier clubs in that old Playfair annual. (What's going to happen to Football League clubs to avoid a repeat of Bury and Macclesfield Town's recent collapses remains to be seen.)

Maidstone United wore their purple away kit when they didn't need to - one of those aesthetic changes of modern football that annoys me far more than it probably should, especially in a context where they weren't showing it off to potential consumers. Seeing how many players were wearing flourescent footwear, I commented to Chris about how Alex Ferguson banned Manchester United's youth teams from using anything other than black boots, stating my (possibly reactionary) belief that such things should only be allowed for players on the Ballon d'Or shortlist. Still, we admitted, Maidstone were likely to be the biggest club we watched all season, and their centre-back George Elokobi, one of the few people I'd witnessed in my pre-pandemic supporting life, was the best player I've seen all season by an absolute mile.

Now 34 and a player-coach, former Wolves star Elokobi organised his defence - which also include ex-Arsenal, Gillingham and Trinidad & Tobago right-back Gavin Hoyte - superbly, meaning Hendon rarely got a sniff of goal despite looking sharper in the first half. The match was goalless at half-time and I sensed that the home team had to score first to have another chance of progressing. In my Karpaty Lviv scarf, near the halfway line, I was surprised to find myself getting behind the home team, willing them to pull off an upset, sympathising with Hendon manager Lee Allinson as he screamed "What's the difference?" at a linesman after his team weren't given a penalty soon after Maidstone had won a free-kick for a similar pull on a shirt a few moments earlier.

On 76 minutes, Maidstone's new Kosovan midfielder Kreshnic Krasniqi played Hoyte in down the right; his cross was deflected to striker Ibrahim Olutade, who spent most of last season on loan at Leatherhead, and who made it 1-0, just after coming on as a substitute. Unexpectedly, I heard cheering: I looked around to see if anyone was getting kicked out, then saw a group of Maidstone fans peering over a perimeter wall in a way I've only ever seen in Pathé clips of football from before World War II, clapping and singing. They kept up the noise for the rest of the match, which finished without further score, and later, I saw a short video of them posted on their club's Twitter feed, captioned 'Come on you Stones'.

 

Flicking through the programme as the ground emptied, I learned that Hendon's best ever Cup run was in 1974, when they drew 1-1 at Newcastle United in the third round before losing 4-0 at home in the replay, played at Watford rather than Hendon's old Claremont Road ground to maximise revenue. Walking out of Silver Jubilee Park, I could see Wembley Stadium on the horizon, but whoever I support this season, this is likely to be the closest I get to it: I may find a team in the third or even fourth qualifying rounds who are still admitting fans, but beyond that it's likely to be television or nothing, and for me, that's just a turn-off.