Brighton Electricity cut off by Hailsham storm

It's been a dozen years since Brighton moved into the Amex, but whatever happened to the stadium they left behind?

It had been the first match that anybody had checked the date for, as soon as the draw was made. Ajax away. The stuff of which, in about as literal a sense as possible, dreams are made, all the more so for a 2-0 win in the Johan Cruyff Arena. There will have been many sore heads at Schiphol Airport the following morning, as Brighton & Hove Albion supporters wended their way back to Gatwick. Totally worth it, though.

Yes, yes, yes, everybody knows that this season’s Ajax team is a strangely pale facsimile of previous years. And yes, we all know that the scales of European club football have tilted enormously with the Premier League’s domination of television markets. But the story of Brighton & Hove Albion is the story that bucks a trend. This was a football club rendered homeless, staring liquidation full in the face, but which survived and somehow rebuilt itself into one of England’s most successful and progressive clubs; the envy of much of the Premier League.

Robbie Reinelt’s goal against Hereford United on the 3rd May 1997, the goal which kept Brighton in the Football League, was the turning of a chapter, but while there was huge celebration at staying up—a look at the ultimate fate of Hereford, who were relegated that day, offers a long-form version of Brighton’s likely fate—the future was still to be met with trepidation. Staying in the Football League had kept them viable for another year, but it didn’t render them any less homeless.

Gillingham was more than 70 miles away, but it was home for the next two years. Crowds fell by 60% with the move and their first season back resulted in just three home wins. They were spared any major concerns over relegation by Doncaster Rovers, who were—in one sense quite literally—conflagrating a couple of hundred miles to the north. The following season they finished 17th. Crowds rose to over 3,000, but by this time the club was making arrangements to return home. Well, in a sense.

The Withdean Stadium was far from ideal, and everybody knew it. But the council-owned athletics track, tucked into the corner of one of the town’s more well-to-do areas, was what was available. Heavy restrictions were put in place in order to placate local residents. No music was allowed, apart from the traditional pre-match parping of local anthem Sussex By The Sea, and no parking was allowed within a mile of the ground.

Once inside, things were little better. Three sides of the ground were taken up with temporary stands, with no cover and an away end which left supporters peering through a hammer net at a match that was being alleged to be played half a mile away. No-one really liked it. No-one really wanted to be there. But it was what was available, and it was better than every match being an away match. Without it, the club would almost certainly have withered on the vine, but it’s now been more than a decade since the club moved into The Amex and it’s unthinkable that anyone misses it.

But the Withdean persists. The temporary stands were taken down, but it continues in use, not only as an all-purpose leisure centre, with a gym, tennis courts and other amenities, but also as a venue for football, as the home of two clubs playing in the nether regions of the Southern Combination Football League, AFC Varndean and Brighton Electricity.

It’s the name of the latter that really grabs the attention, all the more so when a little further digging reveals a natty kit in brown and pale blue, as well as a club badge featuring electricity pylons. What’s not to like? Well, there’s their league form, for one thing. Going into their home match against Hailsham Town they’re bottom of the pile, with three points from their first eight games of the season, that coming with a 1-0 win at Rottingdean Village, who have also lost all their games bar one this season, at the end of August. They’ve already conceded nine goals twice, and they haven’t had a home match since the 16th September, a 7-1 home defeat to Ferring; attendance: 20.

Longer-term form hasn’t been great either. The Leccy—an obvious nickname, all things considered—transferred into the SCFL in 2018 after years playing in the Brighton, Worthing & District League Division One. This is intermediate league football, played on park pitches on Saturday afternoons at such a time that daylight will allow, and since moving up into what is considered ‘senior’ football they have struggled.

Since joining the SCFL, they’ve finished 14th, 12th and 14th, which doesn't sound so bad until you note that there were only 15, 13 and 14 teams in the division in each of those seasons respectively. Their record was no better in the two seasons abandoned due to Covid, either. In total, they’ve won 13 league games in the last five years, scoring 120 goals and conceding 407.

It’s a 2.00 kick-off. Matches are routinely scheduled earlier at this point of the season because no-one really wants to be switching the floodlights on. We’re dropped at the main entrance to the complex half an hour before kick-off, but Withdean is nothing if not a rabbit warren and getting to the entrance starts to feel like a treasure hunt, with semi-cryptic signs taped to pillars pointing us vaguely in the direction of where we’re supposed to go. At one point, we climb a set of stairs only to find ourselves at an emergency exit for the gym, a glass door through which we definitely look like a pair of perverts to those who happen to spot our momentary cameo appearance there.

We make it in, finally. It’s a beautiful sunny afternoon in Brighton, and that’s bad news for people who want to watch football in a southward facing direction because we're almost blinded from being able to see the pitch.

I suspect that you’re supposed to watch matches from the North Stand here—the only part of the Withdean Stadium remaining from the Albion years—but there are no officials about to stop you from wandering wherever you like. The teams are warming up, and m’podcast co-host swears blind that he can hear the Electricity team getting to know each other’s names, which doesn’t seem like an entirely positive development for their chances either.

As for the state of the stadium itself, well, I’ve been watching football live for something like 45 years now, and I can say with a reasonable degree of certainty that I’ve never seen so much guano in a football ground before. They could easily rename The Withdean Stadium as The Birdshit Stadium and nobody would bat an eyelid. Behind the stand, The Sportsman pub is still open, albeit behind a considerable amount of scaffolding and fencing through which its ornate clock peers, but there’s no way to get to it from inside the ground, all of which is all the more surprising when you consider that there’s no food or drink inside the stadium, which is somewhat less than surprising when you look at their attendance figures for the season.

By kick-off time, there are about 30 people dotted about the main stand. Hailsham Town might be forgiven wondering how it came to all this. They were relegated into this division at the end of last season and haven’t exactly been tearing up trees this time around. But even though they’re now they’re at a level of the game at which one of their substitutes has to run the line, they still manage to bring half a dozen ultras, elderly gentlemen in yellow and green club scarves, men for whom Saturday afternoon is a ritual that they would no more miss than they would miss getting up in the morning.

There’s a minute’s silence for remembrance before kick-off. On the one hand, this isn’t difficult to administer. But on the other, it seems that a couple of people who weren’t paying attention—there’s no PA guy to announce any of this—and continue nattering away through the first twenty seconds or so of the minute before realising that they were supposed to be honouring those who gave their lives for our freedoms. It is, to be fair, an easy mistake to make.

The Leccy give it a go. They even have the first really clear chance of the game, when one of their forwards breaks through and has his shot blocked by the Hailsham goalkeeper. And it even feels as though luck may be on their side when their goalkeeper completely cleans out a Hailsham forward who’s running through on goal and then saves the resulting penalty.

But we soon revert to the mean. Hailsham take twenty minutes to take the lead, and by half-time they’re 3-0 up and cruising. Our attention is particularly drawn to the Leccy number six, who moves at a gentleman’s pace around the centre of the pitch, occasionally getting involved. We’re just wondering why he’s playing when the Leccy get a free-kick about 35 yards from goal. “Ah”, notes m’podcast co-host, “he must be a set-piece specialist”. He balloons the free-kick about twenty foot over the crossbar. “Did that laughter come from the pitch?”, I ask m’podcast co-host. “I think it was the guy that took the free-kick”, he replies.

Half-time offers the opportunity for a bit of a wander, not that anyone would have stopped us anyway. I take the opportunity to confirm just how far the away end used to be from the pitch when the Albion played here, and end up on top of a pathway overlooking the pitch from the far side. Drawing the lens back slightly, you can see how this all still works. The athletics track itself is still in excellent condition, as are the hammer nets behind the goal.

The bird shit is in the back of the North Stand because, essentially, no-one ever goes there. But the rest of the complex is still in full use, a valuable facility for a community in which land for such things is, as Albion themselves found out to their cost for some years, both valuable and hard to come by. And not only is Withdean offering this wealth of facility to its local community, but it’s also offering a home of sorts to two football clubs.

Because it’s the middle of November, the light starts to fade during the second half despite the 2.00 kick-off. Brighton Electricity’s light had already all but flickered out by half-time, but they continue to fight on even though Hailsham add another two goals to bring their final tally for the afternoon to five. The Leccy remain bottom of the table and still only on goal difference from Rottingdean Village, whose game at St Francis Rangers was one of just two matches postponed across the entire SCFL this Saturday, a tribute in itself to the groundsfolk who ensured that pitches were ready despite another week of largely dismal weather on the south coast. Their goal difference is now -44, with nine league games played.

And by full-time, we’re grateful for the early kick-off time. The lack of cloud cover means that temperatures are dropping as the sun fades. Even the hope of keeping the floodlights off is put to one side. They flicker to life with about ten minutes to play, and are just starting to crank up to full luminescence by the time the referee calls a halt on proceedings. Hailsham have an important three points. It’s their fifth win in their last six games after a poor start to the season and it’s moved them up to 5th place in the table, four points off the top.

There’s no officially recorded attendance on the SCFL website. My earlier headcount put it at about 30, and if that’s the case, it represents a marked upswing on their last home match, even if a proportion of that increase was two gawkers from West Sussex who turned up at this match because that’s the sort of thing they do together. It’s all a long way from the Johan Cruyff Arena, from beating Ajax away in front of 52,000-odd people, even from the Amex, which is barely four miles away but might as well inhabit a different universe. But that’s been the trajectory of Brighton & Hove Albion this last dozen years. Per ardua ad astra.

Brighton Electricity, meanwhile, continue to bump along at the botttom. But perhaps that’s okay. A bunch of people are getting a game of football on a Saturday afternoon and others can turn up to watch it, should they wish. And should that corner ever be turned, it will surely be all the sweeter for afternoons like this, when the scent of perpetual defeat hung heavy in the air with no apparent end in sight. Even those of us laying in the gutter are staring at the same stars. The Leccy may be down, but they're not quite out.