Today I had intended to fulfil an ambition to travel to a match at Stanway Rovers’ Hawthorns ground by bus. It is admittedly a modest ambition, but it is nevertheless an important one as it will add to the proletarian ambiance of my Saturday afternoon and help reduce, or at least not increase traffic congestion and air pollution; also, according to the published timetable it will only take fifteen minutes from the bus stop just around the corner from my house. It helps that travelling by bus allows me to drink a skinful of alcohol if I so choose and because I am of pensionable age the bus trip will cost me nothing, and I do like a freebie. As it turns out however, my wife Paulene persuades me that I should walk instead. Google maps tells us that it will take seventy-eight minutes; in practice however I find that it takes just fifty-nine.
Despite its relative proximity to my house, I rarely come to the Hawthorns, my last visit being in August 2024 (a goalless draw with Maldon & Tiptree in the FA Cup) and before that in December 2013, when cross-Colchester rivals Wivenhoe Town won 1-0 in what locals with a bent for silly Spanish-based names for local derbies call El-Colo. Today, Stanway play Whitehawk in the Pitching-In Isthmian League Premier Division, a game I want to see because forty-five years ago and more I was at university in Brighton with the Whitehawk club president Andy, and I don’t think I’ve seen him since Brighton & Hove Albion drew one-all with Ipswich Town at the Withdean Stadium in 2005, although we do trade Christmas cards.
Rocking up at the Hawthorns, or the FND & KMCO Community Stadium as it is currently and somewhat cryptically known, I make for the bar having first gone through a wrong door where it looks like a party is being prepared. I scan the faces of the mostly grey-haired men sat drinking and half watching Leeds v Tottenham on a variety of different sized screens around the room. I can’t see Andy, I expect he is in the ‘hospitality suite’. I buy a pint of Greene King London Glory (£4.80) a beer I haven’t seen before with a pump clip that curiously displays a union flag in a move that I worry could attract drinkers wearing black balaclavas.
After a half an hour of my own company I have finished my pint, Leeds United have scored the only goal of the game and I venture towards the main event, negotiating a bright, new, twenty-first century turnstile. “Very high tech” I tell the bloke who takes my card payment of £7.00 for an over sixty-five, and he tells me I look young for my age. I boast that I’m feeling fit because I just walked here. There is a QR code displayed by the entrance, which apparently is the portal to a match day programme, but I have never really worked out what to do with QR codes and can’t be doing with scrolling through things on my mobile phone, so sadly my only memento of today’s match, apart from the memories, will be the small orange admission ticket that I was handed as I coughed up the entrance money.
The Hawthorns is the sort of ‘homemade’ ground where the stands look like pre-war municipal bus shelters and provided not too many people turn up to watch, is all the better for it. Feeling that I should replenish my fat reserves after the ‘long march’ here I head for the “Scranway Rovers” tea hut where a stack of sausage rolls are displayed on a plate on the counter, I buy one (£2.50). I have just taken the first bite out of the sausage roll when I spot Andy who has emerged from hospitality and is setting down his portable chair and box of cameras, for Andy is also the club photographer.
Andy and I talk and he tells me my sausage roll looks like it came from Greggs, but I don’t think it does. Shortly before kick-off, Gary arrives and explains how it has taken him forty-five minutes to drive here from where he lives, which is about the same distance away as I do; there seem to be road closures. At last, the teams process onto the pitch and go through the hand shaking malarkey before there is a minute’s silence for Remembrance Day, which isn’t until next Wednesday but nowadays is always observed at football matches too.
When the match begins it is Stanway Rovers that get first go with the ball, which they boot towards the goal at the back of the premises of Collier & Catchpole the local builder’s merchants, and the main road beyond from where I will later catch the bus home. Stanway sport their usual yellow or perhaps gold shirts and black shorts looking like Borussia Dortmund on a bad day, whilst Whitehawk are modelling red shirts with white sleeves and white shorts, like a poor man’s Stade de Reims. Whitehawk are soon modelling mild superiority in play as they win an early corner before the game settles down into a state of torpor. “Well done Stanway, well done” calls a bloke a metre or so a way from me as they win a throw-in on the other side of the pitch. He’s soon praising the officials too “Well done ref, well done linesman” he calls, clearly getting his pleasure where he can. Gary gets himself and me a cup of tea each, Andy doesn’t want one but is being kept amused by the starlings perched on the floodlights.
The game is slow to get going, with neither side looking in the slightest bit like they have a plan which will result in scoring a goal. “Leave me alone” shrieks a small child as he is pursued by a larger child somewhere behind us; it’s the most exciting incident in the first fifteen minutes, just outdoing an early substitution for Stanway due to injury, and Gary remarking that the players shirts are numbered 1 to 11. Whitehawk are probably having, if not enjoying more possession, but their main tactic seems to be to over hit the ball beyond the Stanway left-back to give their opponents a goal-kick. As the half proceeds however, Stanway gain more of a presence and at about twenty-five past three they have a header which is directed at the Whitehawk goal, but also directly at the Whitehawk goalkeeper Hugo Fisher. As Andy remarks, you don’t see many footballers called Hugo.
It’s twenty-five to four when Whitehawk elicit the first save from the Stanway goalkeeper, Khiani Shombe who has to dive low to stop an ‘over-the-wall’ free-kick by Whitehawk’s number six Matty Jones, a man who Andy tells us once played for Swindon Town. A minute later the excitement builds as referee Mr Alfie Finch-Critchley airs his yellow card for the first time this afternoon, waving it in the direction of Whitehawk’s number seven, Beaux Booth. Andy asks if I can think of anyone else called Beaux, but I can only come up with the early nineteenth century dandy ‘Beau’ Brummell, and I’m not sure that counts because his real name was George. Meanwhile, behind me, a man who giggles when he says things, a bit like Dr Hibberd in The Simpsons, says that today’s attendance is one-hundred and nine. The Isthmian league website will later show that by over three-hundred this is the lowest Premier division attendance of the day, as befits the clash between the teams bottom and second from bottom in the league table.
Thoughts of smallest attendances are suddenly chased from my mind by the exclamation “Fuckin’ ‘ell!” as somewhere on the pitch, someone, a Whitehawk player I think, is fouled. A passing move results soon after, at the end of which Stanway’s number nine George Presley Smith shoots wide of the Whitehawk goal. As half-time looms Whitehawk win a couple of corners in quick succession and Stanway get one too after a shot from number eight Luka Chalwell and a necessary save by Hugo. There are about four minutes of added on time, which are made memorable by the soft yellow light of the lowering sun playing on the squinting faces of spectators in the Brook Family Stand and I wonder who are the Brook Family and are they anything to do with Brook Advisory Centres?
With half-time I buy more tea for me and Gary (£3.00) but Andy still doesn’t want any. Football returns after the half-time break at seven minutes past four and Andy has moved up the touchline to be level with the penalty area that Stanway are defending, hoping to capture the joyful aftermath of a Whitehawk goal no doubt. There is very soon a substitution for Whitehawk as Lee Seok-Jae, who Andy confirms is Korean replaces Jamie Watson, who isn’t. The standard of entertainment remains much as it was in the first half, but Stanway have probably improved. and we speculate that the Stanway manager’s half-time team talk consisted of him telling his team to just ‘have a go’. Stanway win a couple of corners as evidence and shortly after Mr Finch-Critchley asks for the fourth of the four floodlights sets to be switched on, Stanway score from a rebound after a save by Hugo, but it is quickly disallowed for offside.
Time heads for half past four and Rhys Murphy wellies the ball past the post for Whitehawk and Stanway have a shot cleared off the line as the sun sets behind the clouds and the substitutes warm up in front of us, one of whom, Imran Kayani, Andy tells us, has seven international caps for Pakistan. At twenty-eight minutes past four a mass substitution (well, three) occurs with Ola Belo replacing Joe Paxman for Stanway and Victor Aiye and Yannis Drais usurping Matty Jones and Luke Cook for Whitehawk. A minute later and Murphy is again shooting at goal for Whitehawk, on target this time, but Shombe holds on to it at head height as the gang of four Whitehawk fans behind the goal, who include a cheerful, bearded man who this morning arrived by plane at Stanstead from Madrid having been to watch Brighton and Hove Albion play at Getafe in the European Conference League, applaud. Then Murphy is through again on the left but shoots past the far post. At twenty-four minutes to five all the floodlights go out.
It is five past five when the match resumes and in the interim we had learnt from a Stanway substitute that there had been a floodlight failure only a week or so before and that that game had been abandoned. We had been expecting this game to be abandoned too but given that Whitehawk is over 160 kilometres away it’s as well for them that it hasn’t been. Only three of the four floodlight sets have come back on but the managers have agreed to finish the game with one quarter of the pitch in a somewhat dimmer half-light than the other three.
The final spasms of life from this awkward, interrupted game kick mostly in Whitehawk’s favour, although Andy gloomily foresees a late goal for Stanway, he’s “seen it all before” he says, but I’m sure so have Stanway, who nevertheless survive shots from Kamarni Ryan, and Victor Aiye who shoots over the cross bar with a host of Whitehawk players all lined up just beyond him to either score or more likely miss as badly as he has. Stanway manage a single corner, but Whitehawk manage two and as the second one fizzles out like a soggy, faulty firework Mr Finch-Critchley thankfully blows the final whistle and as if sharing our relief that it’s all over, the floodlights go out again too.
It’s been a pretty terrible match, as the cheerful, bearded man who’s just got back from Madrid calls it, a “shit show”, but I’ve enjoyed it, finding it strangely gripping. Furthermore, players, supporters and officials of both clubs can rest safe in the knowledge that their respective teams are deservedly at the bottom of the Isthmian Premier table and there has been no injustice. The fixture has also given me the opportunity to catch up with an old friend, and I’ve still got the bus ride home to enjoy too.
