Eastbourne Town's penalty woes result in Haywards Heath adding to their ledger

You wait forty years for a penalty shootout to turn up, and then two come round the corner in three weeks.

It’s a weekend of football jeopardy, in the south of England. Both “MATCH OFF” and “MATCH POSTPONED” are trending on Twitter on Saturday morning, as optimistic messages encouraging people to pay their establishment a visit are followed, as the morning progresses, by follow-up messages confirming that local referees had deemed that actually no, the game could not proceed with the players wearing snorkels and flippers, and that they’d have to try again some other time.

The original plan was to go where the action specifically wasn’t. My localest local team, Worthing, have arguably their biggest ever league match at home against Yeovil Town, but I was there last week and I’m primarily interested in what’s happening on the other side of town. Worthing United are at home against Godalming Town, and I’m attracted to the idea of being at the other place on this of all days, but at 11.30 comes the confirmation that I’d been half-expecting, that the pitch at Lyons Way hasn’t survived the downpours that have been further saturating the ground round here for the last week or so. Time for the back-up plan to kick in.

Haywards Heath it is, for the FA Vase First Round match between Haywards Heath Town and Eastbourne Town. It’s not the most convenient journey in the world, and despite repeated checks I still feel as though I’m putting a bet on when I buy a train ticket on my phone app. But it is also a ground I haven’t visited before and they seem pretty confident that it’ll be going ahead, so off we go, a convenient change of train at Hove, and then north to the midway point between London and the south coast.

The club website’s description of their ground being “a 10 minute walk from Haywards Heath Station” turns out to be extremely optimistic unless you happen to be Usain Bolt or Robert Pershing Wadlow. At least it’s well-signposted. Yet again, I’m walking to the football through a most un-football-like environment. Haywards Heath, which is otherwise probably best known as the childhood home of Brett Anderson and Matt Osman from Suede, is straight out of the comfortable southern towns cookie-cutter. The houses are large and well-appointed, many seeming to date from the 1960s or 1970s. There are ferns everywhere, to the point that the walk from station to ground smells a little like it’s being scented by a car air freshener.

Hanbury Park is in a somewhat peculiar location, at the end of a residential street which bulges at its bottom like a thermometer. The ground, situated between some new-build houses which definitely haven’t been here as long as it has, is brightly painted in blue and white, difficult to miss once you get within a couple of hundred yards of it. And once inside, the ground has one obvious stand-out attraction; a large, handsome stand on one side of the ground with a bar and changing rooms built into it, the sort of construction that used to be commonplace across the non-league game but which has largely been replaced over the years by metal huts which are more practical and cheaper to build, but with a tenth of the presence of the presence or charm.

This is an FA Vase match, but it’s being played between two teams without much to separate them in the league. Haywards Heath Town and Eastbourne Town both play in the Southern Combination Football League Division One, Heath in 7th place and Eastbourne in 4th. Eastbourne Town aren’t the most senior club in their neck of the woods—that honour belongs to Eastbourne Borough of the National League South—but they are its oldest club, having been formed in 1886.

Notably, they’ve played their home games at the same place, The Ferns, since their formation. Like many other clubs in this neck of the woods, they’ve had a go at a higher levels—in their case, seven years in the Isthmian League without any conspicuous success—but the club dealt with the return to this level quite comfortably, and bring a few supporters with them for this match. Of the three clubs in the town—there’s also Eastbourne United, who also play in this division and are one place below Haywards Heath at the time of writing—Borough, if anything, are the parvenus.

The appeal of Hanbury Park doesn’t end with that main stand, either. It is otherwise quite a basic venue, but the other detail is still interesting. There’s a small wooden cover in one corner of the ground—this sort of cover is popular at this level of the game—and a small apartment block with windows overlooking the pitch (no-one is watching from those windows on this occasion) while the side opposite the main stand has another one of those enjoyably rickety-looking camera gantries that are commonplace nowadays and, somewhat more surprisingly, a road running the length of it with parking and double yellow lines. And behind the other goal is as big a collection of storage containers as I’ve ever seen inside a football ground, all painted blue. From a distance, it looks like a car park for Tardises.

By half-time, Haywards Heath are 2-0 up and apparently cruising. They’re given a helping hand when an Eastbourne defender momentarily forgets which way is north and turns a cross into his own goal, and a second goal five minutes from half-time seems to have put the result beyond much doubt. As this plays out, further drama is taking place at the tea bar, where chips are in short supply, taking a long time to fry, and generally causing disruption and unhappiness. By the half-time break this is reaching crisis levels, a huddle of nervous-looking men standing around, wondering whether their orders will materialise. They do, but it may well be at the expense of the mental health of the woman behind the counter.

To be 2-0 down at half-time was a little harsh on Eastbourne, even if they did hand one of the opposition’s goals to them, themselves. They pull a goal back amid shouts of handball from the home defenders, and with the pitch really starting to cut up and the visitors hurriedly carrying the ball back to the halfway line to get back on with things, it really does feel as though we’ve got a match on our hands. And with the momentum now behind them, Eastbourne find a late equaliser to force the match, on account of FA rules which do make some degree of sense at this level of the game, straight into a penalty shootout.

Replays, it would appear, are going out of fashion. But while the decision to scrap them from the Third and Fourth Rounds of the FA Cup is cowardly kowtowing towards big clubs who already get everything going their own way, in these early stages of the FA Vase it makes considerably more sense. It’s possible for almost every week to get consumed by cup matches at this level of the game; causing fixture congestion before the weather even turns inclement. At this stage of this competition, replays don’t make much sense. The space created by abolishing them can be filled by other matches which have to be played, well, some time.

And even though they’re already extremely regular on account of the sheer volume of cup matches being played at this time of year, there is a frisson of excitement among the supporters when the final whistle blows, followed by a large number of them having to quickly walk from one end of the pitch to the other when the toss confirms that the shootout is to be taken at The Tardis End. Fortunately, there’s so much fannying about in the preparations for such a shootout that there turns out to be that much of a rush to get down there. The only people in the ground feeling slightly nervous about the tie going to such a shootout are probably me—my train back is at 5.35 and making that train is going to be tight—and whoever makes the final decision over whether the floodlights should be switched on. It is, after all, the end of October and the light is already starting to fade, just a little.

There’s plenty of space along the two sides of the pitch, but it’s a bit tight behind each end and you get the feeling that any shot on target could stretch the goal net back and still smack some poor unfortunate in the face, but this isn’t an issue with Eastbourne’s first penalty, which sails harmlessly over the crossbar. For the last couple of seasons before this, Haywards Heath Town were in the Isthmian League and consequently playing in the FA Trophy rather than the Vase, and in each of the previous two seasons they were eliminated from that competition on penalty kicks. Third time lucky, then.

And it turns out that I needn’t have worried about this shootout ending up 99-98 and with my attention turning to whether I’ll be able to make the last train back that night or whether I should be trying to book a hotel room for the night. This shootout doesn’t make the full ten initial kicks. Eastbourne’s second kick is saved and, with Haywards Heath converting all of theirs, when they hit the post with their fourth kick it’s over, and the home side are through to the next round.

I get back to Haywards Heath station with about three minutes to spare, sweating like a pig after a twenty minute walk at a pace that, by my own ambling standards, could be best described as 'bracing’. It’s almost dark by the time I get home, just after 6.30, and my feet and legs are aching in a way that has started to feel increasingly familiar since the start of this season. The evenings are drawing in. Time management expert that I am, I fire out a quick Bobby Charlton obituary on the way.

On this day of jeopardy, then, I got a match in. The dread scenario of arriving at the ground only to find a handful of people standing around trying to work out whether they could get to another match in ten minutes or less can be put off for another day. This has been an awful week of weather across much of the country, and I am yet again incredibly grateful that the weather held out again. This was not, as every match I’ve been to previously this season has been, a shirt-sleeves kind of afternoon, but it didn’t rain at all and the pitch, which did churn up a little and required some prodding with a garden fork at half-time, held out.

It was worth it. A nice ground with a lovely main stand, friendly people and a game of football is all I really ask of a Saturday afternoon, and when so many other people are stuck at home watching the results come in and wishing they were at one themselves, I’m lucky to have been able to fit this game in. Haywards Heath Town will continue their march towards Wembley in the next round. They’ve only got past the Second Round once before, in 1991, though of course things will continue to get more difficult with each passing round. And they deserved the win, really. Eastbourne’s late comeback might have been stirring, but it was a little harsh on the home team. At least the game was on and there’s still all to play for in the league this season. With 272 years of football between them, these two clubs are still waiting for their first Wembley trip. Eastbourne will have to wait, but Haywards Heath Town can continue to dream, for now.