Brentwood Town and woodpecker notifications
We're coming to the end of this brief sojourn to Essex, and it's time to be awoken by a sound that you don't hear in my neck of the woods
Dr-rr-rr-rr-rr-drt
Dr-rr-rr-rr-rr-drt
Dr-rr-rr-rr-rr-drt
I don't have an IPhone. Never have had, so I don't really know what they sound like. Is that the alarm on hers? Is it the notifications sound? Why is this happening over and over again at seven in the morning? She awakens and half-rolls over. “It's a woodpecker, babe.”
Well, obviously.
I'm in Hutton for the first half of this weekend, on the easternmost side of Brentwood in Essex, and I was really in two minds over whether I could even justify a game this afternoon. We're due in Chafford Hundred this evening, a village adjacent to the vast Lakeside Temple to Mammon, about fifteen miles away, for another round of meeting a lot of people I've never met before and being extremely apologetic over the fact that I'm not going to be able to remember anybody's name for longer than around thirty seconds.
But there is one fixture available. Brentwood Town are at home against Sporting Bengal United in the Isthmian League Division One North. It's a long walk—at least three miles—but she has important work to be getting on with this afternoon and it's probably preferable that I'm not there distracting her with boy noises, boy smells and all the other barely noticeable irritants that come with sharing a space with another human being.
When we reach half-time in the Orient vs Manchester City game on the television at lunchtime, it's time to go. Google Maps is telling me it's an hour and twenty minute walk to the ground, but Google Maps is wrong. Its suggested journey doesn't take into account private roads and there is a private road that I can use to shave a chunk of time off my walk, so off I go.
I've noted before how much money there is around here, and as I trudge down a hill and then back up it I'm pondering whether any of these houses may even belong to professional footballers. It wouldn't surprise me. Most of them—many of which have been built to incorporate a wattle and daub look, even though that actual way of building houses stopped centuries ago—are gated, and we’re in easy reach of North and East London.
I've come to have a considerable amount of sympathy for Brentwood Town over the last few days after reading of what happened to them in 1970. After turning professional four years earlier, the club had a couple of decent FA Cup runs, won a league title and looked set to continue their progress before the directors of the club suddenly folded it and moved lock, stock and barrel to nearby Chelmsford City. Had I been born forty years earlier, I'd have been writing about them.
In the here and now, though, they're doing okay. There are three teams bunched together at the top of the Isthmian League Division One North table with a point between them. Brentwood are third at the start of the day, but this could all look very different by five o'clock this afternoon. Top of the table Felixstowe are away to Redbridge and Bury Town are at home against Grays Athletic. If the two above them fail to win, they could even be top of the table by the end of the afternoon.
The walk, as things turn out, takes exactly an hour. It's a grey, misty afternoon, cold but with no hint of rain in the air. The walk takes me round the edge of the town and into its centre, past an expensive looking private prep school and a private hospital that have been built next to each other. Shenfield station looks particularly chaotic because there are no trains running from there this weekend, but it's a straightforward walk that only takes in three roads, through the town centre and its perfectly positioned signpost for the ‘Secret Nuclear Bunker’ up the road at Kelvedon Hatch.
The ground is adjacent to the A12, which is convenient as a marker for my GPS position, if nothing else. There seems to be some sort of protest against new housing going on nearby. "Horses not Houses", reads one placard almost opposite the ground. Well okay, but let's all be reasonable here for a moment and stop pretending that this is about animal welfare when it all looks, smells and sounds so distinctly like nimbyism. The adjacency of the this main road means that the entire match is accompanied by the rumble of traffic. To be fair, it does allow me to forget my tinnitus for a couple of hours.
Their opponents this afternoon are Sporting Bengal United, who occupy a unique position in the London sporting firmament. Formed in 1996 to promote football in the city's Asian community, they play their home matches at the Mile End Stadium in Tower Hamlets, a convenient location for a visit before the end of the season, as it happens. But they're struggling on the pitch this season after a remarkable three seasons since the end of the pandemic restrictions.
In the first place they returned to life in the Essex Senior League finishing bottom, running up just 13 points and conceding 140 goals in 38 games. This was enough to persuade the club to transfer to the Southern Counties East League Division One, where they went up through the playoffs before transferring back to the Essex Senior League to go up again through the playoffs at the end of last season. But the Isthmian League Division One is a step up, and not an insignificant one. They're one place off the bottom of the table and staring a return to the Essex Senior League full in the face.
Brentwood Town's home is part of the Brentwood Leisure Centre complex. It's a little tatty round the edges, but homely if nothing else. Behind the near end goal are two small stands, one seated and the other a covered terrace with two very large flags hanging from the back of them.
There are a couple of mildly eyebrow-raising other adornments. Five flags hang from the inside of the fence around the pitch reminding all assembled not to forget remembering, one of which features the silhouette of a sombre horse. A little further round there's a red hand of Northern Ireland flag, something that I don't think I've seen at a non-league ground and which makes me briefly wonder how any Irish visitors may feel about the place.
The main stand also seems to have been built in two halves, and has a tidy bar built into the back of it. With forty minutes still to go until kick off, I have plenty of time to grab a pint and take everything in. A poster at the end of the bar is advertising £5 pina coladas, just in case there's any doubt whatsoever which county I'm in.
I'm not going to have one—though I'm about certain that I'd have been persuaded had madamski been with me this afternoon—but I have at least now got an earworm stuck in my head which will last the rest of the afternoon. At least, despite the lack of sunshine, I'm not going to get caught in the rain this afternoon.
Right here, right now, here come the teams, Brentwood in all-baby blue and Sporting in a reverse Portugal kit of green shirts and dark red shorts. One thing that does give me a jolt is a female PA announcer, another first for me. And not only this, she's engaging and funny, too. We're barely a couple of minutes in when Sporting Bengal bundle the ball into the Brentwood goal, and she's happy to admit that she was still getting herself settled and hadn't spotted the scorer.
For those of us over the age of about thirty who want to feel old, it turns out that his name is Keanu Hill. The Brentwood goalkeeper Melvyn Minter, meanwhile, is absolutely hopping mad over a perceived slight, but there's no VAR in the Isthmian League so no recall is even possible. The goal stands. The strugglers have the first goal of the afternoon.
When these two met in November Sporting won 2-0, and for most of the next half hour Brentwood are huffing and puffing a little. It takes until the 35th minute for Lyle Della-Verde to bring Brentwood level, a tidy enough move down the right hand side. At the end of the half a somewhat surprising six minutes is added on, and this proves to be very much to the benefit of the home side when, in that sixth minute, Sporting fail to clear after a shot from outside the penalty area and Connor Witherspoon bundles the ball over the line from close range.
Both home goals are greeted with as much a sigh of relief as anything else. Sporting Bengal have matched them all the way this half and have created opportunities, though it does feel as though their chance of winning this match has probably come and gone.
Yet they hang on. There are only thirteen minutes left to play when Daniel Ogunleye added a third goal of the afternoon. Five minutes later, with Sporting by this time looking just about out on their feet, Jesse Olukolu adds a fourth and that's just about that. They've been keeping us updated with the scores from the Felixstowe and Bury games over the PA all afternoon. Bury are winning comfortably against Grays, but Felixstowe are labouring at Redbridge and the score remains goalless.
Were it to stay that way, Brentwood would be back to second place in the table, but seven minutes into stoppage-time Felxistowe score a winning goal and the top of the league table looks very much as it did at three o'clock. Spotting Bengal, meanwhile, are a point further adrift in the relegation places following a win for Haringey Borough at Maldon & Tiptree.
We're due in Chafford Hundred at 7.30, but walking all the way back won't, I don’t think, get me back in enough time and I already know that the chaotic scenes from Shenfield station earlier in the afternoon could be a portent for a difficult journey ahead, so I walk back into Brentwood town centre and find a taxi office to get me back a little quicker. It's dark by this time, I’ve had a light ale, and I don't much fancy the long trudge back.
And sure enough, our journey to Chafford Hundred is an expensive disaster. It's supposed to be two buses and a train but ends up being one bus and an Uber after the second bus just doesn't turn up. Still, at least we’re on time. There are further fun and frolics to be found later in the evening when—having decided to have a phone free evening—I pop upstairs to check the score of the Brighton FA Cup match only to find that my phone is nowhere to be seen. We manage to get in touch with the Uber driver who confirms that yes, someone did leave a lime green Pixel 8 in her car earlier that evening. For the first time in the 28 years that I’ve had a mobile phone, I’ve left it in the back of a cab.
But my record of never having lost a mobile phone remains undefeated. We arrange to meet the Uber driver at Harold Wood Station near Romford the following morning to pick it up. Having not got to bed until almost 2am, I'm a little frazzled round the edges by the time I collect it, but ithe whole episode does at least afford me a fairly straightforward journey back to the coast. I'm back in Sussex by the record-breakingly early time of 2.30.
I'm not sure how many more of these trips up to Essex there will be following this recent stint. It will become an occasional outpost to me again, rather than the semi-permanent fixture of my life that it has been over the last couple of months. And that is a shame, because while you can like bits of it and dislike others, you can’t deny that’s an interesting place.
There are bits of it that I love and bits that I hate. I hate a certain amount of the politics. I talked on these pages just last week about the Reform UK vote in Basildon, and I'm not going to lie here, I was irked by that Northern Ireland flag at this match. I've been English for long enough to know to give the old side-eye to that particular flag. The red hand of Ulster has always given me the ick.
But it should be added that all I’ve actually seen there has been considerable kindness, from the people I’ve stayed with, their de facto families, and even the Uber driver who didn’t hack my phone or sell it on Ebay. Such traits are never universal in any society, so perhaps that’s more a reflection on the company that I’ve kept than the population at large to have found this. It’s reassuring to know that it’s there, though.
And this little sojourn has been fun. We went to Billericay, where the legacy of Glenn Tamplin had actually turned out to be… decent, and to Chelmsford City for an Essex derby against Hornchurch, in which I attempted to make a case for football pitches with athletic tracks around them. It is possible that there may be one more; it is also likely that they will come again in the future, at some point. These title races will continue, but it’s likely to be back to London and my own locale for us from next week on. Regrettably, I’m not aware that are woodpeckers down here.