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 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.