The joy of non-league football

On a cold Tuesday night, as the wind whipped in from the North Sea, I joined 220 hardy souls to watch a game of football. Less than a mile away from the Sizewell nuclear plant on the Suffolk coast but light years away from the lurid lights of the Premiership, Leiston FC were playing Ilkeston Town in the Pitching In Southern League – Premier Division Central. As the old joke goes, the attendance was so small it would have been easier to name the crowd changes than the team changes.

Welcome to non-league football – in this case the seventh tier of the game’s pyramid system of promotion and relegation. A win for Leiston on this night would see them go second in the division – the highest position they have been since the formation of the club in 1880, according to one local who looked old enough to have seen them when they started. That makes this tiny club two years older than Spurs, around a decade older than Liverpool and more than a century older than Chelsea if, like the majority of their supporters, you only count the years following Roman Abramovich’s purchase of the club. 

The stadium capacity is given as 2,250 including 250 seats, most of which were not taken up by supporters who preferred to stand around the metal fence that surrounds the pitch at the optimistically named Victory Road ground. I left home half an hour before kick-off and was in the ground ten minutes before the match started. Ilkeston had brought a coachload down and they were a noisy bunch. But then 221 supporters are never going to be deafening and every individual shout could be heard easily – so much so that when one home fan near the halfway line berated the referee for not sending off a Town player, you could quite easily hear what an Ilkeston supporter from the far end of the ground thought of the intervention.

It’s good to know that the language remains as fruity all the way down the football line, although at this level, every individual insult, comment or encouragement can be heard by the player, official or manager that it is aimed at. I suspect it’s harder for a player to blot out a single fan ranting at him just yards away than, perhaps, the barracking of tens of thousands way up in the stands.

There are also some welcome differences. It costs £11 to get in, a programme is £2 and you can buy raffle tickets for £1 where the winner gets half of all the money from those sales – in this case £90 from 180 tickets sold.

The game itself started at a fast and furious pace, both teams charging en masse from one end to the other. Chances went begging, tackles flew in, there were a lot of misplaced passes and quite a few players were guilty of feigning injury before half-time came with the score 0-0.

The home and away supporters switched ends, joking as they mingled in the bar in the middle. There were few stewards and not a single police officer in sight and it is unlikely they are ever needed to sort out trouble. The half-time scores from other games were announced over the stadium PA, before a reminder to followers there were still a couple of places left on the minibus to Bedford Town at the weekend.

During the interval, the Leiston subs came on to kick a few balls into the goal (something the others had failed to do in the first 45 minutes) and one or two younger fans went on the pitch to kick the ball around with them. Again, no one batted an eyelid. This was a crowd where everybody seemed to know everybody. As one woman wandered round the perimeter of the pitch, a supporter shouted hello and told her how well her son had played in the first half.

By the start of the second half, the pace had slowed and the skill level seemed to have dipped too, with both teams employing the long ball game. Within five minutes Ilkeston got a penalty. It was clearly a foul and thankfully there was no VAR to spend ten minutes deciding this (though the home supporters had made their minds up that it was definitely not a foul, of course). The spot kick was faultless and so Ilkeston went one up, prompting a variety of chants about rubbish keepers and the like. 

The game became tired, players lumped the ball aimlessly forward and it looked like Leiston’s chance to create a little bit of their own history was disappearing. But with 15 minutes left, a free kick into the box was turned in – apparently by top scorer Will Davies though it looked more like an own goal to me. 

A draw was on the cards: disappointing, but kept up hopes of remaining in touch of the top spot as their nearest rival, Nuneaton Borough, were losing. And then, in the fourth minute of injury time, it all changed. Joe Marsden’s free kick that looked like a cross deceived everyone and curled in off the far post. A victory at Victory Road after all. Home supporters departed happy, the announcer wished Ilkeston’s fans a safe trip back up north and I was home in 15 minutes.

There is an innocent joy about non-league football that I’d pretty much forgotten. Fans mingle with players and with each other, expectations are never too high and money doesn’t rule the game. Many of us who regularly attend Premiership games did our football supporting apprenticeships at this level. My first matches were watching Ilford play because, at the age of 11, my friend Andrew and I were allowed to walk to the ground unaccompanied as there was only one road to cross and there was never any trouble.

We even got to see Ilford play at Wembley in the last-ever Amateur FA Cup Final in 1974 (we lost 4-1). A few years later the ground was sold off to developers and the club folded as its own entity and formed a succession of mergers with other local teams until, eventually, they all joined up and became Dagenham and Redbridge.

Well before that, though, Andrew and I had progressed to professional football. By the time we were 14 we could go on our own to see our ‘real’ teams play. Today I’ve had a season ticket at Spurs for 40 years and he has had the same at Arsenal. Despite that obvious cultural divide, we’re still friends.

But now we cheer for teams whose fans come from all over the world, where individual supporters are less important than corporate box holders, where players earn more in a week than Leiston’s fans earn in a year – and where it is easy to forget the grassroots level and its small, local teams that not only rely on their small, local community, but are an intrinsic part of it.