Electricity meets 'Water with (just about) predictable consequences
I was here this time last year, and Brighton Electricity lived down to expectations. Twelve months on, has there been an improvement?
When I tell her about the matches that I’m eyeing up on any given weekend, there are, it’s fair to say, points at which she responds to me with greater forbearance than I frankly deserve. “But they’ve got two for £12 cocktails in the pub next door AND A CARVERY!”, I implore, even though I already know that, as ever, she’s cool with whatever. I’ve been reading the reviews of this pub and it’s possible that I’m unaware of just how insane I’m sounding.
It says something for the level of football that we’re attending that a carvery in a pub next door is the nearest we’ll get to ‘footy scran’ on this particular afternoon. This is the eleventh division of the English game, the Southern Combination Football League Division Two, the line between what may in some loose sense be described as ‘senior’ football and the (sometimes not even) roped-off park pitches of the intermediate leagues, a level at which they kick-off at 2pm to save on having to switch the floodlights on and the liners are not wearing a referee’s kit.
But our venue this afternoon has a past. Withdean Stadium was the home of Brighton & Hove Albion from 1999 to 2011. Nobody ever really even pretended that it was a good facility. Three sides of the ground were made up of temporary stands which were completely left open to the elements, and from one end—presumably not uncoincidentally the away end—you had to peer through a hammer-throwing net to see the pitch.
The neighbours didn’t want them there, and as part of the original deal to get the club back to Brighton, pre-match music beyond the traditional “Sussex By The Sea” was banned. That particular silly ban was eventually lifted and still it was they had, and it was certainly preferable to a 140-mile round trip to Gillingham every other week, which the club had been undertaking for the previous two years and which it had come damn close to killing it altogether.
In 2011, Brighton left the Withdean for the final time to move to Falmer and a new future. It’s fair to say that the club is almost unrecognisable now, and on this day that we’re at Withdean watching what may be the lowest level of football that we see all season, the Albion are hosting Manchester City in the Premier League in front of 30,000 people and a global television audience. With the club now having been in the Premier League for seven years this all feels very normal, nowadays. I can assure you all that, in terms of the entire history of this football club, it is not.
On this weekend last year, I was at this very venue watching this very home team. Brighton Electricity may have conceded nine goals on three separate occasions (and 102 overall) from just 22 league matches last season, but they somehow didn’t finish bottom of the table and have started this season very much as, well, their entire history as a senior club to this point, by losing football matches. They’ve lost nine out of nine in the league so far, and although they haven’t conceded nine yet this time around, they have conceded ten once already.
Brighton isn’t as spectacularly busy as it might be on this grey and overcast Saturday lunchtime. On the seafront, a couple with their whole lives stretched out in front of them, get little cheers and ‘Well dones” from passers-by as they get their photograph taken together. Because I am 52, of course, they look about twelve. And in another sign of the passing of the years, it now costs a pound just to walk on Brighton pier, an amount of money that I will doubtless pay at some point in the future but baulk at today.
We have brunch in a cafe tucked into the North Laines and a wander up to The Level and St Peter’s Church, then up, through Withdean and down to the ground, a journey probably best described as ‘picturesque but somewhat overwrought’. The familiar bridge on Tongdean Lane is adorned with a tribute to the concept of “TOAST”, which I don’t recall having seen there on previous visits, though you can never say for certain.
The Withdean Complex sure does put the complex into complex. You arrive on a corner, the athletics track straight ahead of you but with no direct way through. A sheet of paper with semi-cryptic instructions is taped to a pillar outside the gymnasium. We follow a path out and round, through a car park, and down a driveway towards the entrance at the rear of the stadium.
An older man in a hi-vis coat is acting as the turnstile. “Are you sure you want to pay?”, he asks as she shoves a tenner into his hand. He thanks us, and tells us that it costs £245 per match to hire this stadium, but that their gate receipts for their last match were £75, which certainly puts Manchester City’s current ‘crisis’ into some degree of perspective.
“It’s 2-1 to Southwater”, is his answer to the question of what the score is, and it turns out to be incorrect. It’s actually 1-1, which, considering that Brighton Electricity have scored seven and conceded 41 in their nine games leading up to this one, is most definitely a surprise. I’d already heard something like a muffled cheer from this vague direction earlier.
There is, of course, no PA system in use, no programme available, no food and no drink. The Sportsman is the pub stuck behind the main stand, and it’s a carvery, so that and a 2 for £12 cocktail is our most obvious source of refreshment on this cold November afternoon. But it’s also a walk right the way back round the way we came in, and that doesn’t appeal.
The stadium itself remains half-covered in guano, as it was a year earlier, but also recognisable as the one which hosted a League Cup game between Brighton and Manchester City in 2008, which Albion won on penalty kicks following a 2-2 draw. The athletics track gives it a little scale, and it’s certainly of a different order to anything else you see at this level of the game. The referee spends a few minutes talking to one of the other 23 or so here. He looks a little like Martin O’Neill and Frank Lampard have decided to have a baby. Mind bleach in aisle three, sir.
The second half sees Southwater do everything possible apart from score. They hit both posts, the crossbar, and even the stanchion behind the goal. There’s an acrobatic off-the-line clearance by an Electricity defender and their goalkeeper makes three or four decent saves. Shots fly narrowly wide or over. Frustration grows, and tempers start to fray a little. One player, a particularly tall and hairy specimen, seems to particularly delight in acting as a bit of a wind-up merchant.
Brighton Electricity’s stout rearguard action comes to a sudden and entirely self-inflicted end when one of their defenders absolutely clears out a Southwater forward for a penalty kick, which is gleefully driven into the bottom corner. The celebrations following the goal are catharsis more than anything else, and even then there’s a chance for the home side to grab a point when one of their forwards finds some space and shoots barely a foot over. The final whistle is greeted with relief, rather than any other specific emotion.
A carvery is out of the question, but two for £12 cocktails aren’t, and we need a pitstop anyway, while I think it would probably be best to not get back into Brighton until fans going to the City game have got there. The Sportsman is at least close and warm, with something called ‘rugby union’ playing away to itself on its television. A corner of the pub is cordoned off for the teams. The cocktails are the sugariest thing I’ve ever tasted, and as we walk back into town on the London Road I’m sure whether I’m a little drunk or merely experiencing my biggest sugar rush in more than forty years.
There’s no train from Brighton to where we need to get to for 55 minutes, so we decamp to The Queens Head and watch the second half of their match against Manchester City. It is, I have to say, extremely enjoyable to sit in the warm and watch the Premier League’s big story of the weekend unfold, especially with the home side coming from behind to beat the current champions and every single person in that pub supporting them.
Real talk. Compared to the same weekend last year, this season’s Brighton Electricity seem to be a stronger team. I noted before the match that Southwater’s recent results against them hadn’t been particularly incredible—they only beat them 2-1 when they met at the end of August, for example—and considering their position in the league (this win took them up to third place; they’ve only lost once in eleven) I’d like to think that they can pick up a few points this season.
Because to lose every week is demoralising, and to a point it’s almost a surprise that these guys are still here every week, giving it everything and on afternoons such as this coming close to snatching a point. In their previous six years in this division, Brighton Electricity have won a total of fifteen games, and six of those came in their first season. But at this level of football it remains the case that the game is the majority of the point and in that respect, while Brighton Electricity’s lights may be perpetually flickering, they haven’t quite gone out yet.