Enfield on the up, or when promotion feels like validation of a set of principles
On paper, it took twelve years for Enfield Town to get promoted into the National League South. In reality it's more complicated than that, but let's just bask in the good guys winning for once.
In all honesty, I didn’t think it was going to happen. When Enfield Town played Chatham Town in their final Isthmian League Premier Division game of the season just over a week ago a win for the home team would have put them in second place in the table, but a 2-2 draw didn’t feel like a cast iron assurance of play-off glory. The result meant that if the two teams met in the play-off final, Chatham would be the home team. Considering how even this match had been and Chatham’s plastic pitch, it felt as though any meeting between the two teams in Kent could only really end one way.
First of all, there was a semi-final to get through. Midweek in North London when you live on the Sussex coast with two small children was always going to be a non-starter, but evidently there were plenty of others for whom this match had grabbed the imagination. A record crowd of 2,225 turned out at The Dave Bryant Stadium for their semi-final local derby match against Wingate & Finchley on Tuesday night.
Coupled with finishing in third place in the league and a European tour, regardless of the result this would have marked an impressive end to an excellent season, but there was more to come. It was a scruffy, nervy match, settled by a goal bundled in at the near post from a long throw which required views from several angles to confirm as an own goal off a Finchley defender. But if there was a sign of optimism for the match to come, it came from Kent, where Chatham required a penalty shoot-out to reach the final themselves against Horsham.
In the end, the final itself was a fairly one-sided affair. Played in front of another capacity crowd. Such have been the crowds for many of these play-off games that, despite the natural advantage given to higher-placed teams under the current system, it wouldn’t be that surprising to see these matches being moved to bigger (and therefore more lucrative) neutral grounds in the future.
It was goalless at half-time, but by full-time it felt as though Enfield had learned more about their opponents from their meeting a couple of weeks earlier than Chatham had. Enfield came away from their play-off final as deserved 3-0 winners, thanks to three second half goals. A place in the National League South (or, considering the uneven spread of clubs at this level of the game, quite possibly even the National League North) was their prize.
And I felt it. More than I was expecting, to be honest. Perhaps it was those long-suppressed childhood memories. It may have been because it was so unexpected. By early on the Bank Holiday Monday afternoon, I had more or less persuaded myself that Enfield were only really there to make up the numbers.
It had only been two years since Chatham were getting promoted back into the Isthmian League by finishing their Southern Counties East League season as runners-up to Sheppey United. They followed that last season up by getting a second successive promotion, this time as champions of the Isthmian League Division One South-East. Momentum was on their side.
Or so I thought.
I was watching the National League South play-off final between Worthing and Braintree Town as the score filtered through. Goalless at half-time. Perhaps the occasion was getting to the home team. The number of away teams winning play-off matches this season makes you wonder whether home advantage in these fixtures is really that much of an ‘advantage’ all. But then the goal reports started filtering through. A first, a second and then a third. And then after the match the well-wishing, the celebrations, and a chance to give a bit of a pause for thought over what this all actually meant.
It turned out to mean quite a lot. I’m not really the sort of person who expresses much pride in what they’ve achieved at that club, but as the messages started to come in from the friends they’ve made along the way, from AFC Wimbledon and FC United of Manchester, and elsewhere, it start to feel like an extremely emotional occasion, considerably more than I’d expected it to feel.
Enfield Town were formed in 2001, at the end of almost two years of broken promises on the part of the owner of Enfield FC after selling their Southbury Road home. The old ground was demolished in 1999 after a final home match against Basingstoke Town, whereupon the team just went on tour. A couple of months later, having already beaten Chesterfield away from home in the First Round, they held a Preston North End team managed by David Moyes to a goalless draw.
With a place in the Third Round and a home match against Oldham Athletic at stake, the replay was held at Clarence Park in St Albans. Preston won 3-0, but the most notable aspect of the evening was the paucity of the crowd. Just 1,800 turned out to watch. It was a painful reminder of how diminished Enfield FC had become in the previous decade.
Promises of a new ground to replace the old one turned out not to be worth the paper they were written on, and the following summer drastic action was required. The club’s Supporters Trust—another relative innovation for the time—polled supporters on something that had never been attempted before, to break away and form a new club. Almost 300 people voted, and by a margin of 263 to 34 they opted to walk away from this shell of a club and to form something of their own. Enfield Town started playing in the Essex Senior League in 2001, sharing the home of nearby Brimsdown Rovers.
The first decade was difficult at times, there’s no doubt about that. This wasn’t really the case on the pitch. It remains a notable statistic that, in their 23 years of playing football, Town have only finished below halfway in whichever division they were playing in five times, with two of those seeing them finishing 12th in a 22 team division. They won the Essex Senior League in 2003 and 2005, and landed in the Isthmian League in 2006.
Meanwhile, Enfield FC’s last remaining reason for existing, the fans themselves, had almost entirely disappeared altogether. They folded in 2007, reforming as the somewhat misleading Enfield 1893, reverting their name back to Enfield FC at the earliest available opportunity. Attempts at olive branches were ignored, and with former players seeming to congregate around Town, of the two, it was obvious which was the real Enfield.
The big issue for Town was finding a ground of their own. Land is at a premium in North London, and the club simply didn’t have the wherewithal to buy a plot of land and build a new one upon it, while its structure made huge amounts of debt practically an impossibility. But a glimmer of light sat on the other side of the playing fields onto which the old ground had stood.
The QE2 Stadium had been built as an athletics track in 1953, but by the late 2000s the council-owned facility had fallen into disrepair. The QE2 was an imperfect answer to a deeply imperfect question (football grounds with athletics tracks are never perfect), but it was the solution that was available. If the club could get the stadium out of its state of disrepair, a new pitch would be laid, a new athletics track installed, and the club could have a new home just a few hundred yards from the old one.
There was one final sting in the tail. By 2010, the Goldsdown Road ground at Brimsdown had been brought up to Isthmian League standards… by Town. But with the redevelopment of the QE2 (by this time nicknamed “The Donkeydome” on account of its postal address on Donkey Lane) pressing ahead, those fixtures and fittings would be going to the Dome with Town.
In April 2010 Brimsdown Rovers merged with Enfield 1893. They continued at Goldsdown Road until 2014, but after having been denuded of fixtures and fittings, the ground was no longer up to standard and in 2014 they decamped to Harlow and have been playing a nomadic life since then. Senior football hasn’t been played at Goldsdown Road since, though Zombie Enfield struggle on. This season, after having won the Essex Senior League the year before, they finished second from bottom in the Isthmian League Division One North, kept off bottom place by Stowmarket Town, who could only manage six points from their 36 league matches.
But enough about them, because I cannot stress enough the extent to which they don’t matter in terms of this story from this point on. Town moved into the QE2 in November 2011, and were promoted at the end of that season. They’d been involved in a title tussle with Leiston all season and missed out by a point, despite running up 90 themselves. But the play-offs were kind. After beating Grays Athletic on penalty kicks in the semi-finals, they beat Needham Market 1-0 at their new home to return to the Premier Division of the Isthmian League, a level at which Enfield FC had played from 1963 until 1981 and then again from 1990 to 2003.
***
A familiar face was missing, as Enfield’s players, staff and supporters celebrated on the pitch following their win at Chatham. There are many people to thank for the club having been in this particular position on this particular day, but few will have been missed more than Dave Bryant. A supporter since the late 1960s, Dave was one of the most potent voices against the sale of the old ground and one of the driving forces behind the formation of the new club and their move into their home, and to say that he is missed would be just about the understatement of the season.
Many of the messages sent out congratulating the team on their promotion also mentioned him, and the extent to which this one was ‘for you, Dave.’ There’s every possibility that he would have hated this—a former employee at Unison, his values were based on collective ownership of the club—but, well, the only way I can put this is that you couldn’t stop people saying this from up there, Dave. Everybody knows how important his work was, and this was the perfect time to express that gratitude. The stadium has also been renamed for him, an appropriate tribute to somebody who gave so much for this club.
***
Supporting a non-league club is very different to supporting a Premier League club, so different that many thousands manage both without feeling any cognitive dissonance, and one of the biggest differences is that vista of things still to be achieved. When you support a non-league club, there are always fresh mountains to climb and fresh pastures to survey. As Enfield FC could be such a pain in the arse to bigger clubs in the FA Cup, it remains somewhat surprising that Town have never reached the First Round Proper of the FA Cup or done much in the FA Trophy.
It’s a matter of age, really. In four months time I’ll turn 52 years old, meaning that my formative football years from eight to eighteen were spent in the presence of some of the club’s greatest days. In 1982, I made my first trip to Wembley to see a late goal from Paul Taylor beat Altrincham 1-0. It was the only time in my life that all four of us—me, my dad, my sister and even my mum, who died in 2019—went to a football match together. I can still remember my first sight of Wembley, so vast on a warm, muggy Saturday afternoon in May, and the party in the Percival Road social club that evening.
The following year, they won what is now the National League for the first time. Three years later in 1986, they did it again. That’s a strong emotional pull, all the more so because of what happened long after I moved away from the area. So when I speak of or write about this football club, I do write about them differently because I’m not just writing about a football club. I’m writing about my childhood and my family. It hits differently.
When I think of Enfield FC, my memories are granular; the floodlight pylons poking out from behind the trees as you turned the corner to get to the ground, the Starlight Rooms and its regular advertisement for none-more-1970s cabaret acts in match programmes, the blast of Herb Alpert that used to greet the team as they took to the pitch, the bases of the goal posts being painted in royal blue, and a pitch that would turn to pudding at the first hint of rain.
But these memories are also the past, and a past which absolutely, definitely won’t be coming back. I’m proud of this club, for the values that they adopted, for what they’ve achieved and their unique place in the history of football in this country. They blazed a trail with no guarantees of success, and took a leap into the unknown which provided inspiration to others. Now that’s what success looks like.
(Though I’ll gladly accept winning on the pitch too.)