Easter comes early for Leatherhead as South Park's play-off hopes come crashing to a halt
Down in the Isthmian League Division One South-Central, a very well-known non-league name may be stirring again. May be.
Easter weekend. A four-day weekend, as much chocolate as you can eat, and a football calendar which suddenly becomes more complex than at any time since Christmas. The EFL and the National League on the Good Friday. The Premier League and the leagues below the top two in the non-league game on the Saturday, a couple of choice Premier League matches on the Sunday, and then everybody apart from the Premier League on the Monday. And as if that wasn’t enough, the clocks also go forward by an hour early on the Sunday morning.
At the top of the leagues further down the pyramid, champions are starting to be crowned. Chesterfield have already won the National League. In the National League South, Yeovil Town are almost home and hosed. The same goes for Tamworth in that division’s northern equivalent. When a division has a runaway leader, it has an effect on the clubs below them, as well. Realistic chances of winning a league title may have gone, but none of this means that there isn’t still a possibility of promotion through promotion, so long as you can maintain concentration over the course of those final weeks.
They’re having a 40 game season in the Isthmian League Division One South Central this season, and with five games to play Chertsey Town are ten points clear and starting to prepare for their victory lap. Below them, it looks like being four from six to make the play-offs on Saturday morning, with Marlow and Leatherhead looking just about there and Raynes Park Vale, Southall, Westfield and South Park (Reigate) chasing the two final spots. But we’ll have a better idea of which way this all ends up by the end of this chaotic weekend.
Leatherhead, of course, have their own place in the history of the non-league game. It’s almost been half a century since their first ever run to the FA Cup’s competition proper resulted in wins against Colchester United and Brighton, before frightening the life out of Leicester City by taking a 2-0 lead at Filbert Street before losing 3-2.
The 1970s were, by a substantial margin, the club’s golden era. They’d started the decade by gaining a place in the Isthmian League. Over the next four years after the 1975 run, they’d beat Cambridge United and Northampton Town, while taking Swansea City and Colchester to a replay. In 1978 they did make it to Wembley, but lost the FA Trophy final there to Altrincham.
They couldn’t last forever. Since losing to Exeter City in the First Round in November 1980, they’ve only reached that stage of the competition twice. And following relegation from the Premier Division of the Isthmian League at the end of the 1982/83 season—which, it should be pointed out, they managed in quite a spectacular manner, winning four out of 42 league games all season and conceding 121 goals—they didn’t return to that level of the game again for almost thirty years.
So here we are, on Easter Weekend. Leatherhead are almost in the play-off places, but they’re not quite there yet and others are still chasing. One of those still in the chase by fingernails are South Park Reigate, and they’re the visitors on a bright Easter Saturday afternoon. They’re six points off the play-off places themselves and time is starting to run short if they’re to grab a place themselves. They need a positive result from this game if they’re to have a realistic chance of staying in the race.
And here am I, on Easter Weekend, arriving in Leatherhead at the something approaching sensible time of ten to two in the afternoon for the first time. Considering that I’ve been watching non-league football for more than forty years and that most of that non-league football has come in the Isthmian League, it even comes as something of a surprise to me that I’ve not been here before.
We’re back in the Mole Valley—Dorking, destination of our Saturday afternoon journey just a few weeks ago, is less than ten minutes away by train—and this week the weather has been less of a concern than usual. With only light showers predicted in the days building up to the match, it seems unlikely that there will be much risk of cancellation. Elsewhere, for the record, matches are tumbling like dominoes. The decision to end the non-league season as early as the 20th April seems dafter and dafter as we progress through this saturated season.
When you step out of the railway station and look at a map, the first thing that catches your eye is a large… squareabout (is that a thing? Let’s say that’s a thing). Were I in a hurry, the ground is only about a fifteen minute walk in a straight line from the station, but as I’ve got more than an hour to kill there’s plenty of time to take the long way round and head out of town by another route, cutting past a town centre which was in 2002 described as Britain’s fifth worst high street (it looks fine from where I’m standing, but this was almost two full decades ago) to wander down in a somewhat more general direction of the ground, down a country lane, past houses that taper off into fields.
After about half a mile, I have to veer across through a park along a muddy, pock-marked, puddle-filled stretch of what may or may not once have been asphalt. Horses grazing in a field seems troublingly close to the shooting club. You’re not really expected to get to Fetcham Grove this way around, of course. What I’ve essentially done here is take a circuitous 45 minutes to walk what should have 15.
Entrance to the ground comes on a corner, and immediately through this entrance is a journey back in time. Fetcham Grove is what non-league grounds higher up the pyramid used to look like, united by their disjointedness, a ramshackle assortment of constructions. The very first thing you see upon entering is a cabin which apparently used to be a Club Shop but which looks as though it may have done business about the same time that British Home Stores did.
Three sides of Fetcham Grove are fairly basic. There’s some cover at each end—a good thing, since the sun shining down on the pitch from behind the main stand is extremely bright—and a combination of grass banks and terraces. The near end offers a combination of both. And the side opposite the main stand is uncovered and features dugouts which are a strangely wide distance apart as well as floodlights which are inside the perimeter fence and, on account of their near proximity to the pitch, are wrapped in bright cladding, like rugby goalposts.
But the star of the show here is the main stand, which extends the entire length of the pitch, with seats in the middle, terracing at each end, and a grille in the middle through which those who don’t want to stray too far from the bar can watch, even if they do look a little like inhabitants of a cage at a particularly dissolute zoo as they do so. It is a gloriously ramshackle construction, and it feels like the heart and soul of the ground.
There are still seven minutes to kick off when The Boys Are Back in Town comes on over the public address system, but I’m delighted anyway (Thin Lizzy have become an integral part of this season for me), and the teams eventually take to the pitch to what sounds like a loop of a cover of Kashmir, by Led Zeppelin. (Jimmy Page was brought up in nearby Epsom, though that may be a coincidence.)
With only a handful of places between the two teams in the league you might expect a tight game full of tension and nerves, but while that is how things feel for the first ten or fifteen minutes, this ends up not being a reflection on the match as a whole. The opening goal falls to South Park after eight minutes, and it is a comedy of errors, a long thump down the middle which is meeted by the South Park goalkeeper and a central defender at the same time. Both leave the ball for each other, but even after it rolls through to Craig McGee, his shot into the open goal is scuffed and bounces somewhat forlornly into the goal.
The half dozen or so travelling supporters celebrate their stroke of good fortune, but it only lasts for two minutes. Another defensive slip lets in Leatherhead’s Ibrahim Olutade, who cuts inside a defender and rolls the ball past the goalkeeper to bring the home side level. That slip, it rather turns out, serves as something of a summation of the rest of South Park’s first half. They fall apart, outplayed by a Leatherhead side who are hungrier, better organised and certainly more effective in front of goal.
By the break the home side team lead 4-1 and Olutade has scored a hat-trick. After 19 minutes it’s 2-1, the South Park defence opening up for a cross from the right to allow Fikayo Atewologun a free shot from about four yards out which the goalkeeper almost gets to before it spills over the line. Three minutes later, as the midway point in the first half arrives, Olutade grabs the best of the lot after Jamie Splatt pirouettes on the touchline before lifting the ball back with the outside of his foot for Olutade to drive the ball into the top corner.
There’s a brief moment when it feels as though South Park could get into things when the Leatherhead goalkeeper Amadou Tangara makes a superb save from McGee with his legs to keep the score at 3-1, and with three minutes of the half to play Olutade completes his hat-trick from close range after Trevan Robinson cuts in from the left and his shot blocked on the goal-line. By half-time, the game feels as though it’s just about all over. 3-2 may have set up a rip-roaring second half. At 4-1 and with the sun shining and a couple of pints inside me, I almost feel as though I could do with a doze.
The second half rather glides by. Robinson adds a fifth goal with a nicely-placed 25-yard daisycutter nine minutes in, and from there on it’s all rather a matter of running down the clock until the final whistle. This particular Easter goose is cooked. South Park Reigate’s chances of making the play-offs for this season are now more or less over. Leatherhead now have 77 points. Mathematically, they still need a point to guarantee a place in the top five, but they’re more or less there. Just shy of 500 people have turned out for this one, a decent crowd for the fourth tier of the non-league game.
Perhaps it’s just a sign of my age that I can hold something of a soft spot for Leatherhead Football Club, despite never having even visited before. And the Premier Division of the Isthmian League feels like the right environment for a club of this size. They have a long way to go before they get there yet. They remain in third place in the league table behind Chertsey and Marlow, with the leaders almost crowned with the league title and level on points with the team in second place in the table. But this was their fifth consecutive wins and, after a faltering start against South Park, they came back the maximum efficiency to record their second-biggest league win of the season.
There may be a lot of runaway leaders, but there are plenty of stories still to be told, as this season reaches its final straits. Easter weekend has a lengthy history in the game here as being the point at which shit, which might not have been feeling particularly real for the previous few months, starts to turn extremely real indeed, as South Park found to their cost from their short trip across Surrey. But for Leatherhead, who were for a few years probably the most famous club in non-league football, an ascent may be beginning. They probably can’t recreate the glory years—that spell was almost certainly a once in a lifetime experience—but it’s a start.
