Meet The New Defence, Same As The Old Defence
Horley Town and Hassocks on a (eventually) sunny afternoon is as good way to spend a late September afternoon.
Ah, the British weather, we meet again. I'd half forgotten, the extent to which it could exert such a malign influence over a weekend's football festivities last season, and if nothing else this Saturday morning is reminder of the tiny gnaw of angst that hits the pit of your stomach when you look out of the window and see it hammering down. Oh, do we have to?
Mercifully, it stops in the end. It's about a mile or so's walk from my sister's house on a big, quiet, executive estate on the northernmost side of Horsham, to my dad's, and we’ve borrowed it for the weekend. My partner on this monsoon-like morning has an umbrella but I only have an ineffectually large hood on my jacket. You all know what's coming next, don't you? A hundred yards up the road the heavens open again, and by the time we get to his house I look as though I've just stepped out of a shower that I'd stepped into fully clothed. Which in a very literal sense, I have.
Regular readers of these weekly pieces will already be aware that once a month I dadsit near the line at which West Sussex meets Surrey, taking a tiny bit of the weight of lifting that comes with ensuring that an 87 year-old man can get through his day from my sister for a couple of days. My sister moved here in the early 1990s, and my parents followed suit in the early 2000s. It's home to them for decades now but it never has been to me, even though the number of visits I've made up here can now be comfortably counted in the hundreds. For years, I couldn't even really get the geography of the area straight in my head.
We arrived here at six o’ Friday evening for fish and chips and—for him at least—one tiny glass of rose but no more than that because more that will, according to my sister's extremely detailed instructions, make him “a little wobbly on his feet”. He's bright and happy. If anything, he looks better than he did the last time I saw him. There are occasional moments when you see the sparkle go from his eyes, as though the part of his brain that wants to remember something has short circuited, but broadly speaking he's still in the room, and I'm immensely grateful for that.
Saturday afternoon's destination is Horley. It wasn't going to be. It was going to be Three Bridges FC, a football club with a ground next to a railway station which I've seen dozens of times but have never entered. They're due to be playing Herne Bay in the FA Trophy, but then my brother-in-law, who has over the years become quite the sage on the local non-league scene in this neck of the woods, points out something somewhat surprising.
Three Bridges FC aren't playing at Three Bridges at the moment. There's nothing that surprising about that. They're having an artificial pitch installed at the moment. What is surprising is that until the start of December they'll be playing their home matches almost fifty miles away, at Chatham Town FC. It's an hour's drive or two hours by train. It's in Kent, a county that doesn't even border West Sussex.
I note with interest that their ‘home’ attendance for their last game there was 38, and I'm not in the least bit surprised. I'll take the optimistic view that the financial hits and costs of playing home matches so far away has been factored in. Match days revenues are extremely important at this level of the game, and rent is unlikely to be cheap. Get through this, and the benefits of having an artificial playing surface can be immense. Hopefully it will all work out for them.
But they're no use to me this weekend, and an alternative location has to be found for some Saturday afternoon entertainment. Horley is a town that I know to be reasonably close to Horsham, though I wouldn't have stuck a pin in a map had anything been resting on it. It's also a town that will be hosting a football match on this particular Saturday afternoon. It's a direct train from Horsham and the walk doesn't look insurmountable. It ticks enough boxes.
Their opponents, we have seen before. Hassocks were on the brink of a promotion race when I visited earlier this year, but that never quite materialised, and they ended up getting beaten in the playoffs. But they've started this season very much with their sleeves rolled up, six wins and two draws from their first eight league matches in the Southern Combination Football League Premier Division. Horley, meanwhile, play in the Combined Counties League Premier Division South, the same level of the game, but sit lower down the table. Cross league comparisons are distinctly limited in their usefulness, but Hassocks should be the favourites to win this one.
The journey from Horsham to Horley is pleasingly uneventful. The sun is coming out and my clothes are more or less dry by the time we alight the train. Horley is another one of these tiny settlements that fall some way between being a very large village and a very small town.
There's an artisan bakery and a slew of charity shops. Everything feels as middle-class as so much else in this neck of the woods. We stop for a pint in a pub a short walk through the centre, and the barman gives us an ever so slight look. I'm not sure quite what it means, but I'm not the only one to have picked up upon it. No sir, we ain't from round these parts. Still, at least I didn't make anyone miss. And that's the best that can be said for it. I might have been something else.
The ground itself is a mile or so from the station, on the other side of the town centre. Of course, with no build up of supporters increasingly crowding the pavements as you get closer to it there's no way of knowing that you're near it until you chance upon it, but I am aware that it's built into the back of a leisure centre, so when comes into view at least I know that we're in the right place.
They've only played here for just over twenty years but it does already feel worn in and like home. Like many other Sussex grounds, such as The Pilot Field in Hastings, The Dripping Pan in Lewes or indeed The Beacon in Hassocks, it has an excellent name, in this case “The New Defence”, although I can see how managers may have reason to curse this name when things aren't going so well on the pitch.
And they're not going so well on the pitch. They ended last season in 14th place in the table and have lost seven of their first ten games of this season too, sitting a couple of places lower. After six minutes they're a goal behind again, when Farrell—first names for the players, they weren’t even listed on the traditional non-league team whiteboard (were blackboards used beforehand? I suspect we are decades past the transitional stage over that, now) were not available—stabs the ball precisely into the top corner with the Horley defence half-asleep, having almost scored themselves a minute earlier.
We've barely sat down when the murmuring ups a level. The main stand is the back of the leisure centre. A hundred or so seats are arranged in three lines underneath it, but above is a long plate glass window, behind which is the bar. We sit at a table, watching the game play out as though playing out on Match of the Day, only with the sound turned off by what I can only presume to be extremely reinforced glass.
We’re still there by half-time, the second pint of the afternoon coming to its completion. In contrast to the biblical weather conditions fifteen miles away and three hours earlier, there’s bright sunshine in Horley by the early afternoon, so we watch a little from the near side and then meander—it is most definitely a meandering type of day—round to the far side to stand between the two teams’ dugouts.
There is something special about watching the game from behind the dugouts. If you want to take a deep spoonful of what non-league football actually is, watch it from behind the dugout. The sparseness of the crowd—there can’t be that many more than a hundred here for this—means that you can, of course, hear every word, all while watching exactly what they’re watching (the exact size and position of the dug out matters, in this respect), and their actual reactions to things in real time. It’s not something I do often, and I am disappointed a little at myself that I don’t do it more often than I do.
On this occasion, we are in a near-ideal position. The gap between the two dugouts is not particularly large, to the extent that even though there are no more than ten or fifteen of us, it feels at points like an atmosphere. The linesman on the near side cops a particular earful—not particularly for anything he’d done, one throw-in decision besides—but is equally good at giving it back. Upon one particularly egregious foul claimed but not given, one of the benches—I'll not name names—particularly harangues him. His reply of, “I didn’t see anything” distilled about a thousand words into four.
Hassocks reclaim the lead early in the second half. If I’m urging Horley forward throughout the second half, it’s because since this is the FA Vase, this match will go straight to a penalty shootout on ninety minutes should the match finish level. But they haven’t got much. A couple of half-chances, one of which is more like a three-quarters chance, but while they dominate possession they don’t really do a great deal with it, though we are treated to the never unentertaining sight of the slightly rotund goalkeeper, dressed from head to toe in luminous orange, going up for a corner to little avail.
At the final whistle, the home bench appear less than happy with the referee, but… the Hassocks win was a fair enough result. They took their chances, while Horley were ponderous at times, getting to thirty or forty yards out before running out of juice. The grumbling ebbs away in the end, as the players trudge back to the dressing room.
The FA Vase is a strange sort of a competition. Although 596 clubs are taking part, the idea of the ‘qualifying rounds’ is slightly different. This is the last of them, and there are just 54 to join in the first two rounds proper, based—I think, this is remarkably difficult to definitively say—upon previous performance in the competition. These (PDF) are the exemptions, but the rules of the competition are frustratingly vague (also a PDF; proceed with care for excess football administrator speak) over this.
We meander back to Horley station, just as we’ve meandered all afternoon, through a large estate which resembles a maze made of houses but from which we finally emerge to find a way back. The sky is the brightest of blues and the sun is setting away to the west. The evenings are really starting to set in now, autumn will soon be upon us. And for hundreds of clubs the length and breadth of the country, dreams of an appointment in North West London next May are already over. Wembley will have to wait for another year. But not for Hassocks, not for now. They’re in the competition proper now. Just the seven rounds to go.