Billericay is a long way from Kansas
Essex is the county next to the one that I grew up in, and that makes it more familiar to me than I probably realised.
It's probably a result of my chronic inability to prioritise properly more than anything else this Saturday morning, but my stomach is tied in a knot today. This shit is complicated. I'm away until Tuesday, so my kids' mum will be here at 9.30. I then have a journey to Essex which involves a replacement bus, a train, a walk, a tube train, another train and another walk. ETA in Billericay, the heart of Essex, is something like two o'clock.
It is a four minute walk from my house to the nearest railway station, and it sets the tone for the remainder of the journey that the bus turns up there at almost exactly the same moment that I do. It says something for the condition of the railways these days when you're surprised to see the buses that replace them turn up roughly on time.
The timetable for it looks a little optimistic—whoever deigned that ten minutes would be plenty of time to get from Hove railway station to Brighton railway station on a Saturday morning by road has clearly never been anywhere near the centre of Brighton at that particular time of the week—but I've given myself an array of train options to get to where I need to be, so there's no need to panic. By midday we're trundling through the South Downs on the way to the big city.
Not for nothing is City Thameslink known as Britain's worst railway station. A lot of them used to look like this. Too many of the night time hours of my twenties were spent either asleep or in an irredeemably mind-altered condition on the platform at King's Cross Thameslink, the now thankfully abandoned station that was the main London terminal for trains cutting through the capital from Bedfordshire in one direction and Sussex in the other. As I step off the train I almost impulsively check how close to five in the morning it is.
City Thameslink doesn't have its own tube station, either. The nearest is St Paul's, and that's a ten minute walk east along Ludgate Hill and up past the cathedral itself. It's a pleasant enough late November day. The clouds are thick and grey but there's barely a hint of rain in the air. And the walk is a pleasant enough way to break up the journey. From St Paul's it's two stops west on the Central Line to Liverpool Street for the final leg of the journey.
Billericay Town FC sit somewhere close to the top of the list of “football grounds that I feel I should have visited but haven't”. But this weekend there's a reason. After almost thirty years, my girlfriend is moving out of London today thanks to a conflation of circumstances that are categorically not her fault. I am not required for moving duties today, but she is staying the next couple of months in Shenfield, which is about five or six miles from where I'm headed. My journey to this match may be taking more than four hours, but the return trip is only seven minutes.
There is one added complication. On Monday night in London it's the annual Football Supporters Association awards, and somebody has seen fit to nominate me for one of them. There is no point in travelling back from Essex on the Sunday only to have to come back to London the following day, so instead we're staying in Shenfield until Monday and have a hotel booked for that night in the city before I somehow pour my way back to the Costa Del Seagulls at some point on Tuesday.
And the upshot of this is that I have two bags with me, one containing a freshly dry-cleaned suit. For most people this would only be a mild inconvenience, but for me this is another thing to leave on the train. And if you think I can't do that, let's all pause to recall the time that I once went on holiday while leaving my suitcase on the platform at Worthing railway station, necessitating a lengthy return journey back to get it as soon as I realised (fortunately before I got to Gatwick Airport) and considerable embarrassment on my part when I picked it up.
There are a couple of pubs just outside the railway station. I've barely sat down with a pint when a twentysomething guy walks in wearing a Peaky Blinders-style hat and is greeted by a raucous “OYYY OYYYYYYYY!” by his friends. At least, I ponder to myself a few minutes later as I walk the mile or so down to the ground, I know for sure that I'm in Essex, though I would have paid good money to hear him and his mates attempting a Birmingham accent to welcome him. Sadly, that aspect of a television series that has left an outsized footprint on our culture, seems to have been overlooked.
I like The New Lodge almost immediately upon arrival. The entrance is grand and uncompromising. There's no escaping the fact that you are at Billericay Town Football Club from that alone. The crowd is a little lower than normal for a Saturday fixture—it's payday Christmas shopping day, I assume—but the atmosphere is convivial to the point that even though it's still not even December until tomorrow there's a smattering of santa hats being worn on the terracing behind the goal.
The bar is big, bustling and—thankfully— the staff are happy to mind my suit bag for a couple of hours so that my left arm can get a little rest. I'm glad they didn't check my rucksack upon entry, and not because I’m carrying a brick of ketamine, a blunderbuss, or anything like that. I've got four days worth of stuff in this bag; it's packed so tightly that light cannot escape its surface. Should I have been asked to open it, if we hadn't all been sucked into this black hole then at the very least there's no way on earth that I'd have been able to get everything back in it.
But The New Lodge is unexpected. For one thing, it calls to mind nothing so much as those pictures you occasionally see of non-league grounds in the north of England with splendid backdrops of some dales or other. There's covered terracing at both ends and seating on both sides. It's open enough to allow space to move around, but still intimate enough to generate an atmosphere.
And much of this redevelopment is down to the involvement of the man for whom this club is probably best known. I wrote a lot about Glenn Tamplin, back in the day, not very much of it kind. But the benefit of a little distance from it all allows time for a bit of a reassessment. He shot to fame by hiring a bunch of former Premier League pros to play for the club, leading to accusations of seeking to ‘buy the league’, installing himself as the manager, sacking himself, and then rehiring himself again two days later.
But that only tells part of the story. The majority of the money that Tamplin spent seems to have gone on the ground itself and this is, we all have to concede, the sort of infrastructural spending that owners should be putting into clubs. He may have been unctuous at times, but he did leave this club with the facilities to be able to progress in the future.
Tamplin also knew when to get out. He didn't outstay his welcome and drag the club down with him. He himself was declared bankrupt in 2023, but the club never suffered a similar fate, and that's something. There's a stand named after him here and it's not difficult to see why. The infamous lions mural painted in the home dressing room—in a just world it have been listed—has gone, but there is a another one on the back of The Glenn Tamplin Stand which is somewhat less gauche.
There is a period when this would have been one of the biggest non league fixtures in the country. Billericay Town won the FA Vase at Wembley three times in four years in the late 1970s, while their opponents Hendon reached five FA Amateur Cup finals there between 1955 and 1972, winning three of them. As if to pander to my annoyance at clubs wearing their change kits away from home for no good reason, Hendon have opted for their usual home kit of green shirts and white shorts. With Billericay in all-blue, both teams start the match in the colours that they should be wearing. It's not a hill that I'll ever want to die on, but these aesthetics do still matter to me.
This is certainly something of an emotional occasion for the travelling supporters. The word ‘legend’ is bandied about too frequently these days, but it does apply in the case of Hendon and their former manager Gary McCann. McCann joined the club in 1997 as a player and ended up staying for 21 years, eight as a player and thirteen as manager, before leaving in 2018. He's been the Billericay manager since 2023, but this is the first time he's come up against his former club in a competitive match since he left six and a half years ago.
The two teams are fourth and sixth in the league respectively at three o'clock, but it's Billericay who come out with a greater air of purpose, bringing out two outstanding saves from the home goalkeeper in the first fifteen minutes, a shot headed towards the top corner tipped acrobatically over the crossbar and a daisycutter shoved round the post, but Hendon settle and by half-time we're goalless and without a great deal between the teams, although it's been a diverting 45 minutes of football nevertheless.
Barely a couple of minutes into the second half Billericay have the ball in the Hendon goal, and it comes at the end of a scramble which, if VAR existed at this level, might have resulted in three penalties for Billericay and three free kicks for Hendon. Eventually, the referee consults with his assistant and it looks for all the world as though they've given it, only for play to restart with a free-kick instead. It looked more to me as though it might have been a penalty kick, but then I do often feel as though my understanding of the laws of the game remains very much as it was forty years ago.
With a little under twenty minutes to play, the deadlock is finally broken. It's scrappy, the ball forced over the line by Moses Emmanuel, but they all count and on the balance of play Billericay deserve it. Hendon have had a reasonable amount of possession but created few chances. The home side hang on fairly comfortably through that final twenty minutes plus seven minutes of stoppage-time. They're up to 3rd place in the table with the win. Hendon drop a place to 7th. There are only five points between Folkestone Invicta in 6th place and Hashtag United in 16th. It remains tight, even if the top two—Dover Athletic and Cray Valley (PM)—could be at the point of starting to pull clear in the top two places.
By the closing minutes, I'm edging towards the exit. I've been up since 5 in the morning, travelling since just before ten, and I think I've seen enough. I do, however, stay until the final whistle. That short train journey isn't until 5.35 and it's not a long walk back, and I'm not the sort of pervert who leaves a match early without an extremely good reason. I have plenty of time to get back there at a more meandering pace than I arrived. She's waiting for me at the barriers at Shenfield station. We've not seen each other in almost a fortnight, and although I'm 80 miles from where I live, her hug feels like coming home.
Essex is a long way from Kansas. They do things differently here. But it's also deeply admirable; there's something unashamed about it all, an agreement to be unreservedly themselves. There are things to dislike in that. Nearby Basildon recently returned a Reform MP. Along with Clacton, 40% of their scumbag MPs are held in this county alone.
But there's also something else going on, just as there always has been. There was a palpable joie de vivre about the young people stepping off the train pulling into Liverpool Street at lunchtime, a spirit that has felt missing from some of the places that I've lived in throughout my life. Billericay Town came out of the Glenn Tamplin experience arguably stronger than they were before, and just as he could only ever have come from this county, so could they. And with another win under their belt, a return to the National League South definitely isn't out of the question. Bring back the lion mural, and they'll be set fair.
