A year ago, I wrote about the demise of Clapton FC and the emergence of an alternative club, Clapton Community FC. Clapton Community have been in the headlines recently, following the controversial abandonment of a Cup Final in which their women’s team was playing. The club has now learned it will not face sanctions over the incomplete match, but how it came to be abandoned in the first place is an interesting story.
On 25 May, Clapton Community FC Women were playing Dulwich Hamlet Women Reserves in the Final of the London & South-East Regional Women’s Football League Trophy. In their wisdom, the League (L&SERWFL) decided to stage the fixture at Maidstone United, giving both clubs a two-hour round trip. Nonetheless several hundred fans attended, with supporters of both clubs displaying support for the Palestinian people; there was a Palestine flag at the Clapton end of the ground, while Dulwich supporters unveiled a banner which read “Show genocide the red card”. Twenty minutes into the game, with Clapton 2-0 ahead, a League official entered the field and halted play, apparently because of these items. According to the Clapton CFC website, there were two options; as the spectators had refused to take down the offending flags and banners, the game could either be completed without fans in the ground, or not at all. Clapton’s team did not wish to play on in an empty stadium, so the match was abandoned.
In more than three decades of involvement with non-League and grassroots football, I have witnessed a tiny number of abandonments, which can generally be divided into two categories; games which had to be stopped because it was unsafe to continue (because of extreme weather, for example) or matches halted because of a serious injury to one or more players. Even then, the decision to stop the fixture entirely was a ‘last resort’; I’ve seen more ambulances on pitches than I have abandoned games. So, what was going on at the Gallagher Stadium?
Maidstone United issued a statement stating:
“the match was abandoned by league and match officials, in consultation with the stewarding team, for reasons of a perceived risk to safety and with regard to clear stadium regulations and FA guidelines.”
The suggestion that there was a safety risk is interesting. The L&SERWFL Trophy Final featured two sixth-tier women’s teams; Celtic versus Rangers it was not. The two sets of fans were basically on the same side of the ‘argument’ here. And no matter what your opinion about the current conflict in the Gaza Strip, if you think that genocide of any kind is a good idea then you’re reading the wrong blog. How big could any ‘perceived risk to safety’ have been, anyway? According to Clapton’s website, there were around 300 people watching the match, in a ground with a capacity of 4,200 and the two sets of supporters shared common ground as far as the offending articles were concerned.
The remainder of Maidstone’s statement hinted that the club had almost ‘forced’ the issue:
“[the abandonment] was because spectators refused requests to remove non-football related banners and flags. Maidstone United is a football club serving the local community. Ensuring a peaceful and safe environment for spectators in the stadium is a priority. The club does not engage in politics of any kind.”
Dulwich Hamlet issued a statement of their own, pointing out
“we have seen no evidence that our fans have behaved in any way other than the peaceful and dignified manner that we would expect from them, in accordance with the values of our club and that the banners on display were not new, are not in breach of any laws or rules and have been to many games before this final”.
Whether it was appropriate or even meaningful for the banners to be displayed at the match is a moot point. Let’s face it, the Israeli Government is not going to cancel air strikes because they upset the supporters of two football teams who were playing in a regional Cup Final. But it is also nonsensical to suggest that sport and politics should be kept separate and anyone who wants to hold that line needs to start by telling The FA to stop putting Remembrance Poppies on England kits every November. Whether we like it or not, the Poppy is a political symbol in the same way that a Palestine flag hanging from a crush barrier is.
In fact, politics and sport have been intertwined for at least as long as there have been international fixtures. The FA’s decision to order the England team to give the Nazi salute before a match against Germany in Berlin in 1938 is a clear example of political considerations affecting a sporting fixture. After the Second World War, Dynamo Moscow toured Britain and their matches helped George Orwell to conclude that international sport was “war, minus the shooting”.
The boycotts and counter-boycotts of multiple Olympic Games by numerous countries during the Cold War era are examples of politics coming into sport. If you read Schiesse! We’re Going Up! by Kit Holden, you’ll find memories of Union Berlin fans who lived through the partition of Germany and found matchdays were the only time they could speak relatively freely. A similar example is Barcelona fans speaking Catalan at home games during the Franco dictatorship at a time when the Catalan language was officially banned. In the 1970s and 1980s, racist groups like the National Front saw English professional games as fertile ground for recruitment and spreading their toxic message.
Both Clapton Community and Dulwich Hamlet have fanbases who involve themselves in their communities, both socially and politically so the banners and flags ought to have been foreseen, both by the League as the competition organiser and by the host venue.
What happened next?
The League declared the Final ‘void’, meaning that neither side would be deemed to have won the competition, and the two clubs were charged with ‘causing a match to be abandoned’, which is the standard process after a game is halted. Of course, the disciplinary investigation was going to be complicated by the fact that Maidstone United had already stated that their stewarding team had been involved in the decision to stop play. The host club’s ground regulations do prohibit flags and banners, but it would seem this rule is not rigorously enforced; Chatham Town supporters displayed multiple flags and banners at the same ground at a different Cup Final earlier in May without comment or incident.
On Sunday 15 June, the two clubs confirmed that the London FA (the County FA both are affiliated to) had confirmed that neither had a case to answer, observing that the banners were not displayed in a way that ‘would incite any violence or aggravation’, having been put up to ‘show support and solidarity’. Clapton Community issued a new statement with some implied criticism of the League and their Cup Final venue:
“The decision, while of course a relief, clearly does not make up for the fact that our players and hundreds of supporters – and those of Dulwich too – had our big day ruined.
“We will be seeking further clarification with appropriate bodies on the prospect of a replay and refunds, plus training for and apologies from those individuals involved.”
Dulwich Hamlet also called for further action from the football authorities:
“We remain deeply disappointed that this was allowed to happen, and that both teams were robbed of a chance to contest L&SERWFL Trophy final.
“We hope the FA will be holding the individuals responsible for the abandonment accountable, and we look forward to seeing what action will be taken to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.”
Of course, it still isn’t clear who ‘the individuals responsible for the abandonment’ are, much less how they might be held accountable, while the heavy-handed approach taken on the day has generated a huge amount of publicity, including coverage by the BBC and several national newspapers. We may yet discover that the whole fiasco was triggered by one person’s massive over-reaction, which achieved the opposite of what they intended to happen. Instead of making supporters back down, the draconian demands to remove perfectly legal symbols expressing an opinion and / or solidarity simply amplified the messages the fans wanted to express. Perhaps the League will relent and allow the match to go ahead at the home ground of one of the clubs in pre-season, or perhaps they will take the tsunami of negative publicity on the chin, attempt to learn from it and start from scratch in 2025-26.
Either way, with people still dying in Gaza and Israel and Iran engaged in new conflict, the supporters of the two clubs are probably the only people who emerge from the incident with any credit at all.