One of the greatest players of all time, Diego Maradona once said that “football isn’t a game, nor a sport; it’s a religion” which might at least partially explain why I was sitting on a train to London, alone, last Saturday.
Regular readers will already be aware that I was on a very specific mission; I was going to watch Ashford Town (Middlesex) play Southall. Seven years and one week after the last match I watched at the Robert Parker Stadium, I was going on what a fellow Tangerine called a ‘pilgrimage’. I’m not sure my journey was quite what El Pibe de Oro meant but spending half a day on public transport for the privilege of watching your club play in the eighth tier of English football suggests a certain level of devotion.
As I discussed last week, I wanted to see what £1.3 million pounds could do when spent on an all-weather pitch and all the things that go with it.
I have watched hundreds of matches at the Robert Parker Stadium. I formally joined the committee of Ashford Town (Middlesex) FC in January 2007, having been invited to become the club’s Reserve Team Secretary. I had performed this role (and others) at both my previous clubs, Egham Town and Bracknell Town. My second spell at Egham had ended acrimoniously in the Spring of 2006. I was living in Ashford at the time and knew and liked people at the club through the local non-league network so, when I started to miss “the beautiful game”, Short Lane was a natural destination. It didn’t take long for my semi-regular attendance to be noticed, and an approach made, which I was happy to accept.
Ashford was different to both Egham and Bracknell. There was something intangible about the club that got into my soul.
I was valued and trusted by my colleagues and allowed to take on big projects which continue to shape the club today. I’ve talked about some of the grant applications we made before, but I also did a lot of work to convert the club into a Company Limited by Guarantee; most clubs find the process takes eighteen months to get everything in place and the paperwork done to the satisfaction of football’s various governing bodies. We did it in six. In his book, Winners!, Will Boye suggests I was a big support to him when he set up Ashford Town (Middlesex) Women. I worked the Tannoy at First Team matches and took on the administration of the Youth Team as well as the Reserves. But I was always just a part of something much bigger and simply doing my best to help the club grow. It was an all consuming Special Interest, a second home, a love affair.
After almost a decade of living on Merseyside, I couldn’t wait to see how much the ground had changed. But there was fear, too. How much had the club changed since my last visit, on Saturday 21 April 2018? That trip was for my Stag Party, which had been arranged to coincide with Ashford’s final home match of the 2017-18 season. Predictably enough, the game was terrible, and Hartley Wintney won 1-0. But it was a great day, spent amongst friends. I hoped this trip would feel just as good.
Some 2,562 days after the Stag Party, I found myself back in Stanwell and being shown around the ground by the Chairman himself. There were some elements which hadn’t changed; the two seated stands were still there, as was the Tangerine Terrace opposite the Main Stand. However, the survival of the ‘football furniture’ gave clues as to just how much work had been carried out, because the spectator areas were ‘off centre’ where they had originally straddled the halfway line. The new pitch was in a slightly different position to the old one, meaning that there was a lot more room at the Tank End of the ground and this side could now be used for spectators. It had previously been too narrow to be used as a viewing area because the Council had insisted, as part of planning permission for the original floodlights, that the pitch be moved as far from the residential part of Short Lane as possible. The new footprint for the pitch was maybe a metre or two closer to Short Lane than before but this small change makes a massive difference to the ground.
Where there had been concrete and grass, there was now tarmac. The old wooden fences had been replaced by extremely tall metal barriers. The floodlights had been swapped for newer, more energy-efficient models and even the earth from the old pitch had been put to good use, being banked up on the Main Stand side and at the Short Lane End. This has the effect of making the ground feel more enclosed and a bit ‘greener’ than might otherwise have been the case.
The focal point of the project, the brand-new 3G pitch, looked stunning. In the spring sunshine, the forest green of the surface contrasted sharply with the white of the freshly painted pitch markings. It was clear that all the work carried out had been done to a high standard and will stand the club in good stead for years to come.
The volunteers running the club had spruced up the rest of it, too. The portakabin which houses the Tea Bar and Boardroom had had its rather jarring blue paintwork replaced by black, matching both the new fencing and the club’s branding, which leans heavily into a colour scheme of tangerine, white and black. There was a flag featuring the new club crest flying above the portakabin too, which I hadn’t expected. Ernie’s Bar – named in honour of club founder, the late Ernie Britzman – had a new floor, an opened-up serving area and special, branded reusuable plastic pint pots. I paid a pound to get my hand on one, which I think was intended as a deposit which I’d get back when I returned the cup but it was always coming back north with me.
It was clear to me that the club intended to put the enhanced facilities to good use and was attempting to develop both the business and the brand. Which is all brilliant, in the long term, but what about the here and now?
The ground project suffered several delays, meaning the club had been closed for almost the entire season, with the Men’s First Team staging ‘home’ matches at Ascot United and Cobham, with the Women’s First Team at Hanworth Villa. Both will be relegated to a lower tier after a difficult campaign, spent competing with clubs whose financial resources dwarfed Ashford’s. Men’s Manager Luke Tuffs could only offer petrol money to prospective players because what cash the club did have was being spent on keeping the club going. For the final game of an exhausting season, Tuffs selected a young team and had two substitutes available, compared to Southall having a full complement of five.
The Ash Trees may have been short on both bodies and experience, but they used the new pitch to good effect, playing neat passing football. Standing on the Tangerine Terrace idly chatting to old friends, I learned that while the squad had ability, defensively Ashford had been brittle all season. In the fifteenth minute, Makael Scott put the visitors in front, home goalkeeper Marcin Brzozowski having been left exposed by his defence. However, Town responded well to the setback and stayed in the game, creating a few chances of their own, although there were no further goals before half time.
I had been bumping into old friends and former colleagues all afternoon and the interval was no exception. Despite the spectre of relegation and their team being 1-0 down, most Ashfordians were relatively cheerful. It is better to have a club which plays in a lower tier of football than to have no club at all and it was clear that supporters appreciated how hard their team were working, had a huge respect for those who had kept the club alive during the redevelopment and were just happy to be home.
Five minutes into the second half, the ‘All doubled their advantage, Brendan Matthew surging through a gap in the defensive line and shooting across Brzozowski. Ashford’s response was to redouble their efforts and for the next quarter of an hour the hosts enjoyed their best spell of the match. In the 64th minute they were awarded a penalty, which leading scorer Jack Arnold stepped up to take. Arnold’s shot was well struck towards the bottom corner of the net, but young Southall stopper Milan Czerwonka flung himself low to his right and made an excellent save.
Confidence is so important in football and as Southall’s players congratulated their ‘keeper you could almost see the energy seeping out of the home side. As the Tangerines tired, the visitors took advantage and scored three times in the final fifteen minutes. Scott scored his second of the match in the 75th minute and was replaced by Romy Meoded, who scored two minutes after coming on. The scoring was completed by Southall’s captain, Azeez Alabi, whose free header from a well delivered free kick gave Brzozowski no chance.
I lingered for a while after the match, not knowing when I would be in this spot again but certain it would not be another seven years before I was back. No football fan likes losing and under normal circumstances losing 0-5 at home would leave me apoplectic. But these were not normal circumstances. There was genuine positive energy around the ground, a sense that this match was just something that needed to be done before the club could regroup in the Combined Counties League with new facilities, a business plan which puts those facilities to work and a renewed sense of purpose.
At Heathrow Terminal 4, I boarded an Elizabeth Line train back to Central London feeling slightly giddy. I had gone home and seen for myself what had been achieved by the current custodians of Ashford Town (Middlesex). They have given my club a future. That future is bright, but it’s not orange. It’s tangerine.