MATCH 11: That's All for Now: Horley Town vs. CB Hounslow United

Horley Town 5 CB Hounslow United 1 (FA Vase first round)
The New Defence, 31 October 2020

 

When spectators were allowed back into non-League games, I'd planned to blog about every one I watched. That didn't happen: I soon found that in the absence of live music or theatre, with my reluctance to visit socially-distanced cinemas in a face mask and my friends' shared unwillingness to meet in pubs or restaurants, football became my main social activity. At times I went to two, three or even four matches a week, finding it was the only thing that offered any sense of surprise, any opportunity to visit places I normally wouldn't, even if those places were no more exotic than Carshalton or Leatherhead. I didn't always have enough to say, about the club(s), the matches or the experiences, to make a long piece worthwhile, and as I predicted after my second game, at Balham, this project started to feel like a bit of a chore: a lot of effort for not much reward in terms of readership, money or creative development.

 

I've covered a lot of ground: besides the ten games written up here, I've been to Wingate & Finchley, Haringey Borough, Tooting & Mitcham, Corinthian-Casuals, Hornchurch, Cray Valley Paper Mills and Cray Wanderers. The latter provided one of my favourite moments in a season where I've lamented the lack of any familiarity when Merstham, bottom of the Isthmian League Premier Division, brought on their player-coach - 48-year-old ex-Fulham striker Barry Hayles, who got booked for screaming at the referee in his team's 6-0 defeat. Apart from that throwback to 2001 - and the days when high-level players wound down by dropping through the leagues - there hasn't been much to say that a conventional report wouldn't do. Hence not writing up the best game I've seen this season: Colliers Wood United vs. Redhill, when Redhill went 3-0 up in the first half, Colliers Wood pulled back two goals just after half-time and then equalised after 70 minutes, Redhill grabbed a late winner and then the home team had a man sent off.

 

I didn't write up my second trip to Horley Town, either, for a 4-0 win over East Preston in the Southern Combination in which the clarets looked a genuinely strong side (and far improved on the first time I saw them this season). Having seen their excellent start to the season, I felt they might be a good bet for the FA Vase, for clubs in tiers 9-11 of the pyramid, and planned to see them at CB Hounslow United in the first round after they won their qualifying tie at Punjab United with a last-minute goal. I wanted to add Hounslow to my list of clubs visited, but the tie was switched to Horley - I didn't know why, but my friend Chris and I decided to go anyway. In the week, I saw Clapton CFC were playing Stonewall, politically a far more intriguing prospect between two teams I hadn't yet seen, but despite that and the torrential rain, I decided to stick with my plan and drag myself back to the New Defence. A good decision, it turned out, as the Clapton game got called off after a late pitch inspection, while Horley's went ahead.

Chris and I ate together in a pub - illicitly, I think, as Horley is in Tier 1 but we'd come from London, in Tier 2, and apparently we take our restrictions with us. Nobody asked, so we sat and checked the result from Norwich's early kick-off against Bristol City and then talked about politics: our mutual loathing of Sir Keir Starmer QC, and the growing inevitability of another lockdown, after restrictions were introduced in Belgium, France, Germany, Greece and Spain.

 

Would it mean the end of our football-watching? It has mostly felt low-risk, with SARS-CoV2 not persisting in well-ventilated outdoor areas for long, but lately, as the infection and death rates have cshot back up and London was put into Tier 2, I've been a bit more anxious, both at games with larger crowds (like the 600 at Corinthian-Casuals v. Leatherhead last weekend) and on busy trains to get to them. As we walked past the River Mole to The New Defence, the weather cleared, and we got a nice afternoon for what we suspected might be our last trip for a while.

Almost immediately, my decision to come, and my hunch that Horley could hope to win the FA Vase, were vindicated. Left-back Ryan Brackpool headed home from a corner on 12 minutes, and Horley soon got two more, with new signings Lewis Pearch (who scored for Kingstonian in their FA Cup win over Horley) and Mario Quiasacca linking up brilliantly with forwards Adam Grant and Kofi Quartey. The Clarets were dominant, forcing several good saves from CB Hounslow goalkeeper Sam Bersey and hitting the post; the game didn't have much tension, especially after Smith scored a penalty early in the second half and then Quartey made it 5-0 a few minutes later, but there was a genuine feel-good factor among the 100 or so fans, and nothing like that mounting sense of dread I'd felt back in March, including at the Spurs game I went to, and which had returned over the last few weeks. I told Chris I'd planned to come back for the next lockdown, having spent the first one here, and hoped I'd be able to watch Horley Town during my stay.

Horley conceded in injury time, but could easily have won by more than 5-1. We celebrated with a quick trip to the clubhouse bar, full of old team pictures like the one above, and walked through the churchyard back to the station, checking our phones for the announcement on the new measures planned for 5pm. That was delayed by more than two hours, meaning Chris and I had parted company by the time the Prime Minister and his scientists clarified what had been leaked to their client journalists while we were watching the match.

 

'Clarified' is a difficult word to use of any of this government's communications, delivered as they are to an imagined audience of idiots through a public sphere that has been shot to shit, but this is almost certainly the last game I'll see for at least a month, with no-one allowed to meet more than one other person outdoors until early December. "Elite" sport will continue, we were told, without fans but doubtless continuing to be put on pay-per-view at exorbitant prices - I hope fans keep boycotting it, like the Newcastle United supporters who gave their £15 to local food banks instead. Chances are I'll watch Norwich out of boredom if nothing else, but expect to find it just as miserable as in June; I'm not expecting to go back to Carrow Road this season, and now I have my doubts about next year as well, and really, I'd much rather go to The New Defence than sit alone through another soulless, sterile spectacle of a fanless football match in any case. Fingers crossed that Horley Town and other clubs of their size can welcome people back soon - and that if my prediction proves accurate and they make it to Wembley, that I am able to attend.

MATCH 5: Out, Out, Out! Kingstonian vs. Horley Town

Kingstonian 4 Horley Town 1 (FA Cup preliminary qualifying round)
King George's Field, 12 September 2020

 

 

If I'm supporting anyone this season, it's Horley Town, but their 2018 move from the Combines Counties League to the Southern Combination means I won't see the Clarets as often as I'd like. I've committed to my non-League ground-hopping, but would prefer to stay near London rather than make long trips into Sussex, which the move will necessitate So I was delighted when the Clarets won at Eastbourne United to set up an FA Cup preliminary qualifying round tie at Kingstonian - a famous old club that I have long meant to visit - but I wasn't sure exactly where I'd be going.

I knew the Ks had left Kingsmeadow, as the story made the Guardian, but not where they'd ended up. Kingstonian only began playing at the 4,850-capacity ground in Norbiton in 1989, but this move facilitated their most successful period since the 1930s, as they rose up to the Conference in 1998, achieving their highest ever finish, 5th, in 2000. They also won the FA Trophy in 1999 and 2000, when former France striker Amara Simba scored their winning goal, and reached the FA Cup fourth round in 2001, knocking out Brentford and Southend before losing 1-0 to Bristol City in a replay. However, they over-reached, went back down to the Isthmian League in the same season as their best-ever Cup run, and ran into financial difficulties. The chairman, property developer Rajesh Khosla, sold Kingsmeadow to AFC Wimbledon - recently set up as a community club after the original Wimbledon relocated to Milton Keynes - for £2.4m, and kept the money. Kingstonian paid a peppercorn rent to stay, until AFC sold the stadium to Chelsea for their academy and women's teams in June 2016, to fund their own move back to a new Plough Lane in Wimbledon.

 

This caused considerable bad feeling, even though AFC Wimbledon gave £1m to Kingstonian to put towards a new stadium on the former Chessington Golf Centre, on the fringe of the Kingston borough. Wimbledon left Kingsmeadow in May; Kingstonian played in Leatherhead for a season before announcing an arrangement to share King George's Field with Corinthian-Casuals in January 2018. So I took the train to Tolworth, on the London-Surrey fringes, after checking the Kingstonian website to make sure fans were still being admitted. The website said, 'With the recent increase in Covid-19 infections, it's crucial that we all take care of each other. Please follow all instructions from volunteers, and the guidance given by posters around the ground.' asked supporters to arrive in masks, which had to be worn in the clubhouse and boardroom, which would have queuing systems, as would the burger van; there would be temperature checks and hand sanitiser on the door, and the supporters' shop would be closed. Between the station and the ground, I lost my mask, but luckily, it didn't come up on the turnstile; if it had come to it, I could have bought a Ks one, but I didn't want to advertise an allegiance when I was definitely there as an away fan.

 

This was Kingstonian's first match of the season, and I bumped into Jamie - a long-time Ks fan, and part of their media team, who I met through the London football blogging circle years ago - on entering. I told him I'd already been to four games this season, packing them in as I didn't think fans would be admitted for long, amidst fears of a big second wave of infection. He was equally pessimistic, thinking like I did that another lockdown would finish clubs far bigger than the two on display today. This led us to exchanged details of our respective clubs, and I said I expected Kingstonian - a semi-professional club with a large following - to make light work of Horley's spirited but limited part-timers. Helpfully, Jamie had written for the matchday programme, detailing K's new arrivals for 2020-21, including Tom Howard, once of Chelsea's academy, to introduce me to some of the day's players, yet again entirely unfamiliar to me.

Part of a crowd of 355 - the largest of any I'd been in since Norwich's FA Cup fifth round tie at Tottenham back in March - Horley had an away following of less than ten people, who were no more optimistic than me about the likely result. I wandered around the ground, noting another sign that this was a more competitive club than some of the others I'd visited this season - I could actually make out the announcements, including the line-ups, on the PA system. I saw Kingstonian flags, an anti-homophobia flag, and a wall of stickers for clubs including several for Corinthian Casuals, as well as AFC Wimbledon, Torino, Mechelen, Rochdale, Glentoran, Streatham Rovers and the Against Modern Football movement. I didn't notice any for the Ks, although I'm sure some were there.

 

Wishing I had a Horley sticker (or scarf), I went behind the goal where Kingstonian attacked in the first half. Next to me was a boy in a Norwich City top: I told his father that I was a Norwich fan too, and it turned out they were season ticket holders in the same Carrow Road stand as me; following last week's government announcement, they didn't expect to be back until the spring, and I feel the same way. I saw fans of other League clubs, and had a chat with a family of Fulham supporters who were quite philosophical about being locked out of their return to the Premier League, and enjoyed how this scenario had brought about camaraderie between rival fans, as we reminisced about games between Norwich and Fulham (including the single worst day I've ever had a match) and people who'd played for both clubs.

 

In his notes, the programme editor noted that that 'hateful virus that has so viciously swept the planet and changed almost every facet of almost everybody's lives' meant that Kingstonian were entering the FA Cup at the Preliminary rather than their usual First Qualifying Round, and Ks manager Hayden Bird wrote about how they could not be complacent, as they'd gone to the New Defence for a behind-closed-doors friendly in August and drawn 1-1, saying he was 'very impressed' with Horley, who had 'talented players in a well-organised team'. As soon as the match kicked off, after the sides took the knee for Black Lives Matter, there was little doubt about the result, as Kingstonian looked quicker, stronger and fitter. Winger Corie Andrews, who scored in the friendly, shot them ahead after 12 minutes; Horley struggled to produce any quality final balls in their sporadic counter-attacks, and once centre-back Simon Cooper put them 2-0 up a few minutes before half-time, I felt the match was settled.

I stayed where I was during the interval, as Jamie and the other passionate Ks fans switched ends to watch their team's attacks during the second half. Horley improved and looked a little more threatening, failing to score after a goalmouth scramble, and then Cooper made it three on 68 minutes to remove any lingering doubts. The handful of away fans were delighted to see the Clarets get a goal through Richard Pingling a few minutes later, before Lewis Pearch - who, one of our group said, had recently played for Horley on loan - made it 4-1. There was no more score so I filed out, sorry but not surprised that my adopted team had gone out of the Cup. That said, Kingstonian are one of the largest clubs currently allowed to admit fans, so if Horley had got much further then I likely wouldn't have been able to watch them anyway. Still, there's always next year - isn't there?

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?