The snappily titled Thurlow Nunn Eastern Counties League Division One South has in the last year been shorn of two Suffolk clubs in the shape of Whitton United and Debenham Leisure Centre, who voluntarily dropped into the Suffolk and Ipswich League. But as if by magic, two replacements have immediately filled the gaps left, one in the shape of the venerable Halesworth Town (founded 1887) and the other in the form of the altogether less venerable King’s Park Rangers, who sprang suddenly from the Essex and Suffolk Border League after a brief two-season gestation, a bit like The Alien did from John Hurt’s stomach.
It is the final chapter of my two-part quest to be able to boast idly that I have seen every senior team in Suffolk play a home game. Today I am making the brief 19.2-kilometre road trip across the border from Essex to Backhouse Lane, Little Cornard where I hope to see King’s Park Rangers play another team of recent graduates from the Border League, Stanway Pegasus. If I was a younger man for whom the concept of time on this planet running out was less of an immediate concern, I might have caught the train to Colchester, or from Marks Tey to Bures, and then the number 44 bus to Great Cornard, but in truth I couldn’t really be bothered with the palaver, and in any case I have an electric car, so I am doing my bit to save the planet and reduce global warming. It is therefore a little after two o’clock when I set off from my front drive towards Sudbury.
Being in Little Cornard, it is no surprise that Backhouse Lane is the longstanding home of Cornard United, but more intriguing is why is it now also the home of Kings Park Rangers, who are they, why are they, and where is Kings Park? These questions have been niggling me all week in my idle moments, and fancifully I had postulated that they are perhaps a team from Kings Park, Suffolk County, Long Island, New York, a team of South African ex-pats who have named their club after Kings Park Stadium in Durban, or even that they are an incel’s bitter and twisted response to the existence of Queens Park Rangers. Eventually, there was nothing for it but to consult the interweb and hope I could find some information that was believable and not merely ‘content’ designed to enrage, influence or peddle consumer goods. It turns out, so it seems, that Kings Park Rangers are a sort of works team for Kings Park Fulfilment Ltd of Pebmarsh, Essex, a company that works for Amazon, aiding Jeff Bezos’s bid for world domination. According to ‘Suffolk News’, the club was set up in 2023 by “former Cornard resident” Josh Pollard “…as a way of connecting his family- including famous cousin Olly Murs – and work colleagues through their shared love of football.” I can’t decide if this is philanthropy, megalomania or just weird but it probably makes Kings Park Rangers a Pebmarsh team, an Essex team, that just plays in Suffolk.
Looking out from the drizzle flecked windows of my planet saving Citroen e-C4 it’s a miserable, depressingly grey November day, the aftermath of an even more depressingly miserable, wet, November day, the day before. The only thing to raise one’s spirits a little is the fact that today the moisture in the air is just occasional fine drizzle, not the persistent rain and occasional monsoon that hit yesterday. Nevertheless, there’s no denying that the dripping trees, puddles, mud and soggy leaves are all rather glorious in their own way and provide a characterful backdrop to the twisting, turning, undulating B1508 as it makes its way along the north bank of the River Stour from Bures towards Sudbury.
Suddenly, out of the gloom I reach Great Cornard and quickly identify the need to brake and turn right into Backhouse Lane, a very narrow road which in places has a deep water-filled ditch on one side; it is not wide enough for two cars to pass. Fortunately, I meet only one car coming in the opposite direction and that is at one of the few passing places. I am therefore soon parking up my planet saving Citroen in the mostly full car park, next to a white Ford Transit van. The entrance to the football ground is off to my right, through the mist and back towards the B1508 along a concrete path strewn with fallen, brown leaves that have the consistency of wet papier mache. Two men stand talking each other by the entrance, which seems to marked by a collection of beer kegs, and as I approach they end their conversation and one of them nips into the turnstile booth. When I last came to Cornard, back in January 2019, the ‘turnstile’ was just a wooden hut but at some time in the intervening six years and ten months this has been replaced by a very neat structure that looks something like a cross between a very small domestic conservatory and one of the old toll booths at the Dartford tunnel. I tender my £5 concessionary entry fee by means of my bank card. There is no printed programme, but the window of the toll booth displays a QR code for a programme which is free. Pretending to be completely familiar with QR codes I point my mobile phone at it, because I think I know that is what you do. I have succeeded in accessing on-line programmes in the past, but not today, but at least I will have a nice photo of a QR code. The young man at the turnstile then strangely tells me that there are plenty of people in the club house, perhaps he thinks I look lonely.
There are indeed plenty of people in the clubhouse as the young man in the toll booth said, but I only talk to the barman who, when I ask if there is a bitter available, tells me there isn’t the call for it nowadays but helpfully adds that a pub nearby wins awards for its beer. Sadly, there’s no danger of that here and I settle for a bottle of alcohol-free St Austell Brewery Proper Job (£4.90). The barman apologises for not letting me have the bottle to pour the beer myself and explains that whilst he doesn’t think I look like I would cause any trouble, he’s not allowed to. Avoiding eye-contact with anyone else in the bar, I worry a little for my safety and take my beer outside where I watch the players, the referee and his assistants warm up, and a player in a track suit top walks a small brown dog. I notice that the two dugouts are almost at opposite ends of the pitch, when I was here in 2019, they were next to one another.
The referee is a young man with impossibly short hair who looks very keen and serious as he turns and sprints along the touchline and then does the same again. His assistants, two much older men, follow him for all of a few seconds, by which time he is almost out of sight. “Five minutes. Do your stretches”, says the referee and one of the assistants a portly, grey-haired man wearing an open knee support stretches down to his knee once or twice and the expression on his face says “that’ll do”.
The game begins at a minute past three and it’s Kings Park who get first go with ball, which they rapidly boot towards Sudbury and the Thomas Gainsborough school, which is just over the fence from the ground. Kings Park sport an all-blue kit with a wide, white, slightly blurry diagonal stripe across the front, and I think to myself what kit would I choose if I was inventing my own football club, probably not this one. Stanway Pegasus meanwhile are in all-green with a blurry white stripe down their left side and black socks, like an unhappy man’s Plymouth Argyle.
The most notable thing about this game from the start is the shouting on the pitch and from the dugouts. “You gotta work”, “Chase”, come the early, more polite commands extolling effort over skill. “Away” shouts the Kings Park goalkeeper and for some reason I think of the Teletubbies. Kings Park win an early corner. “Seconds, seconds” is another shout, appropriately twice. On the pitch, both teams seem wound up already and the Pegasus number nine screams at the referee’s assistant as he strides towards him intimidatingly over the trivial matter of a throw in. “Mental” he says to himself after being told to calm down by referee Mr Glasson-Cox, who coincidentally also refereed the match I saw at Halesworth last week.
The half is half over. “Fuckin’ ‘ell ref” says someone about possibly anything but soon the initial intensity of the match seems to have thankfully subsided a bit. I move into the main stand, a utilitarian, boxy looking structure but with a bit more character than most of the prefabricated metal stands erected nowadays. In a quiet moment I reflect upon the referee’s assistant stood in front of me, a wiry man with a large beard, which he looks as if he might have grown having been told by his doctor that he needs to put on a bit of weight. Between me and the referee’s assistant raindrops cling to the white painted rail around the pitch. The slightly calmer mood continues into a short delay in which the referee speaks to his assistant on the far side, the portly, grey-haired one with the dodgy knee who it seems has noticed that following a goal mouth scramble the goal at the Sudbury end of the ground, which is on wheels, has moved a little. Mr Gasson-Cox takes a look and gives the goal a little shove.
After the calm, there follows a short storm as Kings Park’s number eight and captain Noah Collard scythes down an unidentified Pegasus player who proceeds to writhe on the ground screaming. Once the Pegasus player has cried wolf for long enough Collard becomes the first player to see Mr Gasson-Cox’s yellow card, but discussion in the crowd is more about the girlish screaming than the booking. “Does he have to go off with the screaming?” asks a spectator not unreasonably. But as if to quickly even things up, a Pegasus player also gets to view the yellow card before half-time, although there is no further screaming from either side and the half ends goalless.
With half-time I drain-off some of the Proper Job and eat a Polish Grzeski chocolate bar from the World food aisle in Sainsbury’s. I peer through the window of the club house where a man and a woman, presumably club officials from Stanway Pegasus, and two men in large black coats featuring the crest of the Suffolk County Football Association drink tea with an array of what look like shop bought sausage rolls and homemade bread pudding wrapped in tin foil laid out before them. Only the man from Stanway Pegasus seems to be eating anything. I wonder to myself where the Battenburg and Swiss Roll are. Outside, next to the window I look at today’s team sheet, which looks like whoever wrote it might have been eating an orange at the same time. Beyond the club house the small brown dog is being walked by a different man, possibly a player, who is evidently not playing today; I hear him say he doesn’t know the dog’s name. “Come on you” he says. Two other small dogs are present in the crowd today too, one in a coat and one not.
At three minutes past four the match resumes and the Kings Park coach is immediately barking instructions to Georgie, Zammo and Hughsie as if his very existence depended on it, whilst also sounding like the games teacher from tv’s Grange Hill, but only because he said ‘Zammo’. His shouting works however and six minutes later a ball from left to right finds number twenty-two Daniel Cousens inside the penalty area. Cousens calmly places the ball wide of the Pegasus goalkeeper, and Kings Park lead one-nil.
Ten minutes later and Kings Park lead two-nil when a low cross from the right travels across the face of the goal, past the flailing limbs of a couple of Pegasus players until it reaches Kings Park number ten Harry Willoughby, who bundles it into the goal from close range before running off madly. “Whatever ‘appens, don’t let ‘em fucking score again” bawls a rough voice, presumably of a Pegasus supporter.
It’s getting on for half past four and the game seems over. Pegasus don’t offer much else but for a goal mouth scramble which leaves the Pegasus coach feeling hard done by and asking rhetorically “ ‘ow’s your luck?” and then asking it again. For Kings Park the goalscorer Willoughby is substituted for the 50-year-old former Norwich City, Colchester United, Reading, Queens Park Rangers, Swindon Town, Shrewsbury Town, Bristol Rovers, Leyton Orient, Bournemouth, Barnsley and umpteen other clubs’ player Jamie Cureton. As Willoughby heads for the changing room, he emits a sort of howl.
Back on the pitch, Pegasus number five Jordan Robertson is booked after Kings Park’s number ninety-nine Oliver Sims is not given offside, and Robertson seemingly exorcises his disappointment by hacking Sims down. “Fucking embarrassing” says the Pegasus coach, but only about the presumed offside. Time runs down, on into the ninetieth minute. Pegasus can’t decide whether to just boot the ball forward as quickly as possible or pass it. “Just kick the fuckin’ thing” shouts an elderly spectator summarising a century and a half of tactics from the country that apparently invented the game. “Darren, time” shouts a player. “Darren, man on” shouts the same player a moment later. The final action sees another booking for Kings Park. “Fuck me, it’s getting boring now” say the Pegasus coach and happily at 16:52 Mr Gasson-Cox, who I think has had a good game calls time.
I wait as the players leave the field to no applause, just the blokey clasping of fists with a few spectators and shouts from inside the changing rooms. It’s been a good game in terms of the ability shown, but it’s not been a particularly enjoyable one. There’s been too much trying to pressure the referee, too much needless swearing and too much of a sense of needing to win above all else. I think I’ll just try to remember the afternoon for the miserable weather, the soggy leaves and the small dogs.
and neatly cut into a modernist architectural shape; behind the hedge a close-board wooden fence is in places nailed to its thick trunks. In its neatness the hedge is only matched by the Newmarket goalkeeper’s haircut, but is less contrived. There is more noise on this side of the pitch as the coaches of both team teams shout and urge their teams on.
the touchline are visibly tense. The Melford number ten Scott Sloots is hurt and is substituted; as he hobbles off the pitch one or two of his own players seem to be complaining that he is taking his time. “Come on ref, make him get off quicker” I hear. I hadn’t previously realised that there was a point where team togetherness and the will to win would clash. But nevertheless, Melford continue to push forward and in the final minute of injury time there is a run down the left, the ball’s in the box, a shot is blocked and Hassan Ally is in the right place to score from the rebound. Rarely have I seen such elation from a team sixteenth in the league to a winning goal; both coaches burst onto the pitch to celebrate with the team as if this was a most crucial victory. I’m all in favour of making your own fun but this seems to be going a bit far.
trippingovertheball 