Beautiful Idiots & Brilliant Lunatics: Fisher vs Redhill - No time to catch your breath
Fisher FC offer a stunning view of London, but their supporters will be less than happy with the start to the season that they made in the FA Cup against Redhill.
Fenchurch Street was quiet, but Tower Bridge is heaving with tourists. Some stop and look along the river, presumably aware that they’re already standing on by some distance its most striking landmark. Others take selfies. I find myself starting to bristle at being constantly blocked off but hold it in. My inner Londoner exerting itself upon me, whether I like it or not. By the time I get to the other side of the bridge, I’m fairly pleased to be back on terra firma.
It’s the first weekend in August and somehow or other the new football season has started. It’s the Extra Preliminary Round of the FA Cup, and on this warm, balmy Saturday lunchtime there is a fairly peaceful air about this particular corner of London. It’s swimming with tourists, of course. But there are plenty of pubs and they all seem to be doing a reasonable trade. Amid all the news of violence from elsewhere, this part of Central London is at least peaceful.
Left onto Tooley Street and then just keep following the road. It’s a warm and humid afternoon and I, because I am an idiot, am wearing a long-sleeved shirt. It should be noted that there was a reason for this. A shirt allowed me the privilege of leaving my jacket at home while also acting as a sunblocker for somebody whose skin is so pale that it’s effectively translucent in places. It’s not an uncomfortable walk up the Rotherhithe peninsula, but my ambling pace means that the referee’s whistle is just blowing to kick off the new season as I push through the turnstile at Fisher FC.
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Originally formed in 1908 to promote exercise for the underprivileged children of East London’s Bermondsey, Fisher Athletic were named after the Catholic Saint John Fisher. Their existence was fairly humdrum until the early 1980s, when they won three back to back Spartan League championships and moved into a new stadium in nearby Surrey Docks. Promoted into the Southern League in 1983 and then they went up again, this time as runners-up, and in 1987 to the Conference.
There was something extremely of the 1980s about all of this. The Surrey Docks Stadium was a rarity of a new build ground in the early 1980s and was very much of its time. The club’s success coincided with the redevelopment of the Docklands area of East London. Squint and it could look like the Thatcherite dream manifest. Meritocracy in action. But it couldn’t last, either; not for Fisher Athletic, at least. Their four-year stay in the National League ended with relegation in 1991, and the following year they were relegated for a second year in a row. In 1993, the club changed its name to Fisher FC.
Somewhere between that first relegation and the name change, something fundamental had changed. The final game of Fisher’s stay in the Conference had been their highest-profile of their time there. Barnet had been among the favourites to win the league the previous couple of years but had blown it. On the final day of the 1990/91 season they made the relatively short trip to Surrey Docks needing a win to lift the title. Fisher were already down and had the opportunity to thumb their nose one last time, but on this occasion Barnet finally did get it right, securing promotion to the Football League with a 4-1 win. Fisher haven’t returned to that level of the game since.
There are certain tropes of non-league football clubs which hint at problems building to an unmanageable level. One of those is when that club starts changing its name. In 1993 Fisher Athletic changed their name to Fisher FC. Two years later they became Fisher Athletic London FC. Another such trope comes when a club leaves its ground to share elsewhere while making grandiose plans about what they’re going to do with their former home. Fisher moved to Dulwich Hamlet’s Champion Hill in 2004, a decision which coincided with the arrival of the Muduroglus at the club.
Brothers Eren and Sami Muduroglu bought Fisher in 2004. Eren was the chairman, but Sami was ultimately running the show on a day-to-day basis. Sami was disqualified from acting as a company director for a period of 5 years in February 2005, but a lack of regulation that the level of the game Fisher played at that time meant that no action was taken to remove him from his position.
At first, all went well for the club. With the Muduroglous throwing money at the team, two promotions took them from the Southern league Eastern Division, through the Isthmian League Premier League, and up to the Conference South. They finished as high as fourth in 2008, but the club’s world would soon come crashing round its ears.
The Muduroglus produced plans for a new stadium, with three possible options, one of which would have resulted in a 10,000 seater stadium with hopes of being used for the 2012 Olympic Games in London. The plans may have been ambitious, but they were also hopelessly unsustainable for a club of this size—despite still being in the Conference South, their average attendance remained in the mid-200s—which was only being sustained at this level by money being put in by the owners.
In November 2008 Eren Muduroglu suspended any further financial backing and the collapse began. Players started to leave, and there were reports of the wages being late, and then stopping altogether. In January HMRC sought a winding-up order over unpaid taxes, reported to be for £250,000 The Muduroglus initially disputed the amount owed, but by the end of the 2008/09 season it was clear that the game was up. An effectively amateur side since December 2008, the team was relegated from the Conference South with just 22 points. A couple of weeks later, the club were wound up at the high court.
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Fisher were immediately reformed, of course, and whether the club has been successful or not over the last fourteen years really depends on what your definition of ‘success’ is. On the pitch, it’s reasonable to say that progress has been modest. The club’s highest position since reforming was a third placed-finish in the Southern Counties East League Premier Division; Step 5, or to put it another way, the ninth tier of the game, but that came in 2019, and in the three seasons since the two successive abandonments caused by the pandemic performances have been spent in the middle of the table.
But hold on a minute there, because how are we defining ‘success’? On the walk up Salter Road to the ground, I walk past a jumble of football cages. The Ballers Academy are based here, offering youth football opportunities from the age of five up. And the newly-reformed, fan-owned Fisher FC did perhaps the most impressive thing that a club of this type can do; they got themselves into a new ground, just a couple of hundred metres from the site of the former Surrey Docks stadium.
After originally continuing to play at Champion Hill, they moved in here in 2016, and it’s a beautifully-appointed little ground, with a sculpted hedge running the length of one side of the ground, a small seated stand, a bar, and even a little cover behind one end. Behind the other is a stunning view of Canary Wharf. It’s both pretty and petite. And they’re certainly friendly. Twice in the opening five minutes—once upon entering and then almost immediately upon finding somewhere to watch from—I’m greeted as though I’m a regular. It feels like both the first and second times that this has happened since I’ve been writing these.
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There are bad starts to the season, and then there are bad starts to the season. We all have hopes. We all have dreams. And one can only wonder at what Fisher supporters might have been hoping for this week. A solid showing to the start of the season. Dreams of a winding journey to the competition proper, and perhaps a live television appearance on BBC1. Some much-needed money to boost the club’s coffers and maybe move them some way back towards those days of the late 1980s. Hopes and dreams are a common currency, at this time of the year.
Instead, Fisher are a goal down within thirty seconds. After two minutes, it’s two. After six, it’s three. I’ve been watching football live for something like 45 years now, and I don’t recall having ever seen anything quite like it before, and that’s before I even move onto the subject of how self-inflicted it all is. I’m not going to lie to you, reader. I miss the first goal. I’ve only just walked through the turnstile when there’s a tiny cheer from the small number of travelling Redhill supporters. Elsewhere, palms rise to freshly-wrinkled faces. Extra large sups of beer are taken from plastic containers. Uh, and indeed, oh.
Two minutes later, things go from bad to worse. A Fisher defender absolutely clatters into a Redhill forward inside his own penalty area. He gets the ball…kinda, but this is the sort of tackle for which that matter becomes something of an irrelevance. A Redhill player steps up and it’s an atrocious penalty—think Pat Nevin for Chelsea against Manchester City in 1987—but instead of being a routine save, the ball bobbles a little, and seems to almost pass through the Fisher goalkeeper, rolling apologetically into the corner of the net.
And then barely four minutes after this, it happens again. This time, the Fisher goalkeeper’s punch from a cross is poor. A low shot is superbly blocked on the line by a defender, but the ball bounces out off his leg and back off another defender’s leg, rolling in for a third. The groans from the sidelines turn to laughter, a little. I mean, what the hell else can you do, in such a situation?
Even to say that things improve for Fisher would be something of an overstatement. I mean, they do, but… they’re still 5-0 down by the time we’ve played 25 minutes. On 21, a low shot in off the post makes it four. A couple of minutes later, another shot deflects off a defender and bounces in for a fifth. It’s the same defender, a second own goal in the first quarter of the first match of the season. There’s a reason why I’m not naming names, here.
There are mitigations. Fisher’s manager is away on a pre-arranged family holiday—feel free to amuse yourself at his reaction at the slew of messages being pinged his way as he tries to relax on a sun lounger with an oversized Negroni—and their goalkeeper is a reserve. And at this precise point in the afternoon, at 3.25 in the afternoon on the first Saturday of the new season, at home in the FA Cup against a team who play at the same level of the game as they, what is going through the heads of the players? Double-figures? The Guinness Book of Records? Historians from Lancashire may be starting to look on with interest.
And it’s fair to say that Fisher do make a game of it. By half-time, the lead has been reduced to 5-2, and within twenty seconds of the start of the second they’ve pinged a shot against the Redhill crossbar. For a brief moment, it feels as though something could be possible. Throughout the closing minutes of the first half and the opening seconds of the second, Redhill have looked frit.
But it does feel as though that was the moment. Reducing the deficit to two with practically the whole second half still to play in front of a front growing increasingly boisterous thanks to a combination of some booze and a sunny afternoon, maybe had that shot dropped five or ten centimetres lower we would really have had a game on our hands.
There is still a little cause for excitement when, midway through the second half, Redhill have a player sent off for a spectacularly mis-timed tackle which leads to a bout of early season pushing and shoving. But it’s extremely humid, and the players are starting to tire. It’s the start of August. No-one is at full fitness just yet. Fisher don’t really have much more to give—a couple of decent half-chances but nothing game-changing—and at the end of the match they do at least get a decent round of applause from those in attendance.
It’s saying something, but 25 minutes into the first half, when you’re 5-0 down and with the footballing Gods not so much laughing at you rolling around hysterically, sobbing as they try to think what they could try next, would they have taken 5-2 and a little pride restored? Probably. This has been a bad afternoon at the office, but walking back past the academy next door gets you thinking again about how we define success, especially at this level of the game.
116 years on from him forming the club for the under-privileged children of Bermondsey in the first place, Saint John Fisher would surely be happy with this current arrangement, an asset of value to its local community, even if their FA Cup exploits for this season will end up largely being remembered for the comical way in which they both began and ended.
I walk back towards Tower Bridge along the Thames Path, the bridge itself occasionally popping into view like a long-shot from the opening of a 1960s film comedy. It’s a handsome part of the world, this; clean and tidy, with keen and obvious awareness of its own history and houses that presumably have a value that would make you leak blood from your nostrils. The Bridge itself is still heaving with people. I resist the temptation to start complaining about the tourists and push on, back to Fenchurch Street. Again, deserted. Perhaps the good people of Shoeburyness have better things to do than days and nights out on the razz in That London, these days.
Meanwhile, the Fisher manager will surely be spotted upon his return, shopping around for the best prices for removing the Negroni that he sprayed everywhere between three and ten past three on Saturday afternoon. You just know it.