This Saturday (26 April), I am going to a football match. For anyone who read the blog I wrote last November called Losing Interest, this might be a surprise. If I’m honest with myself, it is a surprise to me. But, 357 days after my last game, I’m not just going to any match.
I’m going home.
The fixture I am attending is Ashford Town (Middlesex) Football Club’s last game of the season, against Southall. There is little riding on the match – Ashford cannot escape from the Isthmian League South Central division’s relegation zone and the visitors are pretty much certain to finish fourteenth whatever happens at the Robert Parker Stadium. So, you would be forgiven for asking why I am bothering to make a 450 mile round-trip for a match in the eighth tier of English football.
The short answer is that something remarkable has happened at Ashford Town (Middlesex) which I want to see for myself. The Ash Trees have redeveloped their home ground, which now has an all-weather 3G artificial pitch, new floodlights and a raft of other improvements. It’s taken the club’s current hierarchy eight years of work and £1.3 million of grant funding to make it happen but will turn the club into both a sustainable business and a hub for the local community. There are already partnerships in place with Brentford FC to provide a post-16 education programme and the Middlesex FA for disability football. If all goes well, the Robert Parker Stadium will be busy throughout the week, not just on matchdays.
Basically, the club has pulled off a project that was beyond its reach when I was involved in running it, to the point of seeming impossible. The first time the Ash Trees examined the possibility of installing an artificial pitch was in 2008, when a sub-committee consisting of myself, then Vice-Chair Alan Cox and Terry Ryan, who worked for Runnymede Council, drew up a ‘Development Plan’. We were trying to enhance the club, which was competing at a higher level than it does now and make it less dependent on gate receipts and bar income. We knew the changing rooms were a problem and Terry had procured an architect’s drawing which showed how a toilet block in the stadium could be expanded and reconfigured to bring the players out of the clubhouse and free up the space in that (very small) building.
We reckoned that, once the changing rooms had been relocated, it ought to be possible to revamp the clubhouse to create a higher capacity for social activity, functions and so on. This would increase the club’s turnover, and improved financial performance would help Ashford attract exactly the kind of grant funding that has been spent at the club over the last year and help us get that elusive 3G pitch. Because these artificial surfaces can be used more intensively than a traditional grass pitch, so much more can happen at the ground. We anticipated increased income, through pitch hire and bar use, plus reduced costs because the club would no longer need to hire external facilities for training and would be able to stage more of the junior section’s fixtures at the ground. If all this came to fruition, we thought the final stage of development would be a new stand at the Short Lane End of the ground.
This wish list was rather grandiosely named Short Lane 2020 and I wrote up a document with that name which we published on the club website and announced at a Fans Forum.
The project was overtaken by events before it got off the ground. While the three of us were dreaming of doing up the ground, another sub-committee was negotiating a new lease on the site with Spelthorne Council, without which none of our plans were even worth thinking about. While the lease was eventually secured, by the time it was, the club was navigating a financial crisis which put all thoughts of ground improvements on the back burner and led to relegation.
Playing at a lower level made stadium enhancements less pressing, although I did play a big part in a couple of vital changes to the site. In 2012, we secured Olympic Legacy funding to bring a disused cricket pitch back to life as a grass football pitch for training and kids matches. A few years later, we got another grant to replace the clubhouse roof, without which the club might have ceased to exist a decade ago. Once that work was done, there were refurbishments carried out inside the bar, albeit not to the extent our gang of three had daydreamed of. I also had meetings with the Football Foundation to ‘sound them out’ about whether a 3G pitch might ever be installed at the ground. These discussions came about through my employment with the Middlesex FA and while we made only limited progress at that time, one thing became clear; because of the land’s ‘Green Belt’ status, the best chance of getting one was converting the stadium pitch rather than starting from scratch elsewhere within the club’s footprint. Once the funding was in place for the outside pitch, converting the stadium became the only chance, never mind the best chance.
I stepped away from day-to-day responsibilities at Ashford in 2015 and was made a Life Vice-President in recognition of my contribution to the club. (I remain extremely proud to have been honoured in this way.) A few months later, we moved away and, although I got involved at Prescot Cables, the Tangerines remain ‘my club’, the first result I looked for on a Saturday afternoon.
A few years ago, a very basic covered terrace did go up at the Short Lane End of the ground, although it came down to facilitate the pitch installation. It makes me smile to think that quite a bit of our vague ‘development plan’ eventually happened, even if not as first imagined.
Even in 2008, I thought an artificial pitch would be incredibly hard to get; so it proved. I always thought it would be the Council and the neighbours who would be the most difficult people to persuade but I’m told the Council actively encouraged the club to take on the project, due to the positive impact it could have locally. In fact, it was the Health and Safety Executive who placed the most onerous obstacles in front of the club, although their objections were eventually overruled by Spelthorne Council’s planning committee.
There were other hurdles the Ash Trees had to negotiate; the calling of the 2024 General Election significantly delayed the release of a £99,999 grant from Surrey County Council, without which work couldn’t start. This condemned the club to virtually an entire season of groundsharing at Cobham FC, which has led to a difficult campaign.
The Tangerines have got the work done, though and returned home on 12 April, losing 3-1 to Moneyfields in front of their largest attendance for years. I couldn’t be at that game, because it fell on my wife’s birthday and Euston Station was closed for engineering work over Easter, making the Southall game my only opportunity to see the revamped ground for myself.
I’m not just getting to see a revamped facility; I will be able to say ‘hello’ to people I haven’t seen for years. To shake the Chairman by the hand, congratulate him and ask how the hell he and his colleagues pulled off a project many thought was a pipe dream. To feel the long-forgotten butterflies I got every time I walked down Short Lane on a Saturday afternoon.
Almost a year away from non-league football has undoubtedly changed how I feel about it. I stand by every word I wrote in November. But any addict can relapse and, for me, non-League football is essentially a legal narcotic. I can’t ever get as absorbed in the sport as my younger self did and this weekend is more likely to be a one-off than the reestablishment of my original Special Interest.
I genuinely cannot wait.