Bugger, Bognor; Hornchurch leave it late to take another giant step towards the Isthmian League title

Bognor Regis Town led for 87 minutes of their game against the league leaders but still lost, which may explain why they're on the fringe of the play-off race and Hornchurch are probably going up.

It’s going to be a strange end of season in much of the non-league game. In the National League, Chesterfield are twenty points clear of second-placed Barnet. In the National Leagues North and South, Tamworth and Yeovil Town are twelve and nine points clear, while Chesham United lead the Southern League Premier Divison South by twelve and Hornchurch lead the Isthmian League Premier Division by eleven.

In the top three steps of the non-league game, only in the Southern League Premier Division Central do we find a gap as small as the five points between leaders Needham Market and second-placed Mickleover. If you’re looking for a title race, you really have to head down to Step Four. where four of the eight divisions have leaders by three points or less. In the top seven divisions, most of the title races are already decided.

Or are they? Might a crisis of a severe case of the yips catch up with one of these contenders, allowing one of the chasing pack a chance to come up on the rails? Is it still possible that one of these runaway leaders could go full Devon Loch at the last. It is possible, though it says something for how regularly it happens that a reasonable number of the people reading this will know to what I’m referring there, even though that particular race took place in 1956.

Hornchurch are going to win the Isthmian League Premier Division this season. They haven’t lost since going down to Chatham Town in the middle of December, and that was their only league defeat of the season so far. And not only are they eleven points clear at the top of the table with three-quarters of the season played, but they’ve got three games in hand on second-placed Chatham. They only have one game in hand on third-placed Wingate & Finchley, but there are twenty points between first and third. Like I say, Hornchurch are going to win the Isthmian League Premier Division this season.

Everyone pretty much already knows this, but the race for play-off places remains real. There are only two promotion places at this level; the champions and the play-off winners, so for that chasing pack what matters is staying position and remaining in the pack. Where you finish in the final table does matter. These matches are one-offs played at the home ground of the top-placed team. Finish second, and you’ll be playing all your matches at home. But if you were chasing the champions, it’s important not to let a feeling of drift slip in as they disappear over the horizon.

And in the case of the chase for play-off places, things could yet become chaotic in this particular division. Second-placed Chatham are more or less there, but below them there are only two points between third-placed Wingate & Finchley and sixth-placed Enfield Town, while there are only six points between fifth-placed Horsham and mid-table. If three of these places are up for grabs, it could yet be anyone occupying them come the end of the season.

Bognor Regis Town are on the fringes of this chase. They’ve lost a couple of games to the weather so have those in hand on a few of the teams above them, but a win from this game would leave them five points off the play-off places and with games in on the majority of the teams above them. It’s still on, but the same could be said for a whole clutch of other clubs in the top half of this particular table.

My train rolls into Bognor Regis railway station at 12.30. There’s been practically no rain over the previous four or five days, so even though Bognor Regis Town play on a grass pitch, there’s little question that this match will be going ahead. And inspecting a map has left me feeling pretty certain that I’ll have seen what I needed to see of the town centre with plenty of time to make the shortish walk up to their ground.

The oversized presence of Butlins in the town centre means that Bognor has retained a slightly more ‘seasidey’ air than some of the others on this particular stretch of the south coast. It’s not even 1.00 in the afternoon, and there are already soe folks taking a cigarette break outside the CA$$INO near The Esplanade. Butlins itself is at the other end of The Esplanade, half the funnest place on earth, half Stalag Luft III. A bear in a suit welcomes ‘day visitors’, (not completely implausibly for conjugal visits) while the metal bars suggest that once in, getting back out again may require the use of some cunningly sourced shovels and a gymnastic horse.

Behind the entrance sit the minaret-esque peaks of the Skyline Pavilion. You half-expect Tommy Robinson to march over and demand that the whole edifice is pulled down. Who knows, perhaps Butlins were the extremists that the government has started banging on about over the last couple of weeks. From the angle of the beach, it looks as though the Pavilion has pushed upwards out of the ground. See, Tommy? This is what happens, isn’t it? They just tunnel under the English Channel and BOOM! A mosque just appears on the beach and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Bognor retains something of the olde worlde that other towns down here have lost, a dedication to that distinctive combination of a dedication to the taste of older holidaymakers and mild gaudiness. It has a Poppins, but at just after one on a Saturday lunchtime, it appears to be closed. There’s a shop dedicated to selling seaside rock alone, in which I am certain that I would, if I wanted one, be able to buy a stick in the shape of a penis. A market stall in the town centre, meanwhile, is selling the best t-shirt ever made.

The beach is practically deserted. A small number of people gamely face the biting wind on the mini-golf course, one of the few in the world—I presume—to have its own on-site palm reader. The Cockle Hut is shuttered, as is the merry-go-round, though the horses seem well. On the pier, the compressed, bassy sound of another amusement arcade is clearly audible, even to my tinnitus-riven ears, but the ice cream bar next door to it is closed. There stands a woman, gamely wearing a matching figure-hugging maroon PVC top and trousers, and wearing such bright orange face make-up that you half expect Marty Feldman to appear behind her wearing a top hat and singing Pure Imagination.

My walk up Nyewood Lane to the ground is straightforward enough. I’ve been here before a few times, and continue to surprise myself at the extent to which I’ve previously managed to get lost when visiting. But this ground is pretty much what I imagine when I think of non-league football grounds. One side and the far end have a low, curved, prefabricated concrete cover (though the ancient electronic scoreboard used to sit in one corner has now gone, replaced by something more modern; alas, alas).

The main stand sits on the near side, while the near end houses the bar and a high plastic cover that you half-fancy won’t offer much protection from the rain, should it blow in from the Channel. The goals, I am particularly pleased to note, aren’t of the box-type which the vast majority of clubs use these days. The overall impression given of the ground is of the archetypal non-league football ground, one which hasn’t changed that much in the last thirty years or so and which is all the better for it. I even get the chance of high fiving the mascot, who appears to the enjoy the moment almost as much as I do.

The teams take the field to ‘We Will Rock You’ by Queen, which I can allow only because Bognor’s nickname is The Rocks. There’s a large contingent down from Hornchurch, which is on the fuzzy dividing line between London and Essex and they are, unsurprisingly considering their record, largely here in expectation rather than hope. Those who’ve followed their team home and away this season have only seen their team lose once in thirty games. What could possibly go wrong?

The answer to that question turns out to be ‘eventually nothing but almost everything’. It only takes eight minutes for Alfie Bridgman to flash a shot across the face of goal and in to give Bognor the lead, and the runaway leaders have got a game on their hands. There’s little doubt that Hornchurch are huffing and puffing a bit and a Bognor team with one or two ‘big lads’ in their midfield and defence have a fairly straightforward job of keeping them at arm’s length. The score remains 1-0 at half-time after 45 minutes of few chances.

The second half continues much as the first ended, with Bognor controlling possession but unable to create much in the way of clear chances, and Hornchurch not making the best of what they are able to create. The clock starts to tick down and the tension inside the ground starts to build. Hornchurch are on top and the remainder of the match will quite clearly come down to a matter of whether that home defence can hold on against opponents who seem to have to have taken until the 70 minute mark to remember how to play.

As the clock ticks over ninety minutes, the PA announcer confirms to a collective groan from the home supporters that there will be an additional eight minutes of stoppage-time added onto the end. Those who groaned have little idea of how prescient their pessimism turns out to be. Two minutes in, Bognor’s Craig Robson clatters ill-advisedly into a challenge when already on a yellow card and is sent off for his troubles. Two minutes later, Scott Scannells scampers down the left and pulls the ball across goal for Liam Nash to tap in and bring Hornchurch level. In the eighth minute of stoppage-time, after a succession of corners, Lewis Manor turns the ball over the line to win the game for Hornchurch.

Perhaps this sort of determination is what guides teams to title wins over the course of a season. Hornchurch were not especially impressive around 90 and a half minutes of this match, but for that eight minutes of stoppage-time at the end they absolutely did, and that’s all that really mattered. The red card was a moment of foreshadowing for what was to follow, and certainly from the moment that they brought the scores level there was something inevitable about them going on to find a second goal as well.

Bognor Regis Town, meanwhile, are not out of the play-off race yet. Indeed, their next two consecutive games—at home on Tuesday night and then away the following Saturday—are both against third-placed Wingate & Finchley (they’re nine points behind them as of today, but less than a week that gap could be down to just three), while they play fellow play-off chasers Enfield Town and Horsham in the space of three days over the Easter weekend at the end of March. They’re 12th in the table, but it’s not over yet.

At the top of the table, Hornchurch aren’t quite over the line yet, but if they’re scrambling results in this manner and at this stage of the season, it’s difficult to see how they’ll be caught. They’ve only lost one of their 31 league matches so far this season; it seems highly improbable that they’ll lose four or five of their last eleven, even if they did cut it a little close on this occasion. Like many of the other divisions at the top of the non-league game, the Isthmian League title may well be decided with a little room to spare, this season.