In the shadows, at the other end of White Hart Lane
A mile away from The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, Haringey Borough are having a tough start to the season.
It's the Bank Holiday weekend, so of course the level of rain is biblical. At 6.00 this morning, I'd felt extremely blithe about it all after looking out of the living room window and seeing it overcast but dry. Incorrectly overruling the Met Office over the weather has become my version of believing I could beat a emu in a fight, in recent years.
The feeling doesn't last long. Within an hour it’s coming down in sheets. My initial optimism about the weather was precisely because it can be so changeable down here on the south coast. Not trusting the weather forecasts is a learned behaviour, where I live.
And boy does it change. Good grief, does it change. It starts before seven. I have a cup of coffee and what already feels like will be a completely futile shower. By time I'm ready to step out of the front door it's been going for more than two hours and it still feels as though it's still getting worse.
As inevitable as this weather on a Bank Holiday weekend is the British bloodymindedness to see it through regardless. The train is standing room only. It's a journey that I've made regularly this year - including this exact time of the morning - and I've never seen it this busy before. There's a mixture of sogginess and grumpiness hanging heavy in the air, but goddammit this is the last Bank Holiday before Christmas and we're going to damn well enjoy ourselves.
My mind turns to last season's ongoing game of cat and mouse with the weather, which went on throughout the entirety of the autumn, winter and even into the spring. I only got truly foiled twice, once by a last minute postponement (which still gnaws away at me; I couldn't have done anything more!) and once by a weekend that simply wiped out every single available game to me.
There are pitch inspections going on all over the place, and the state of things might be helped by the time of year. The ground underneath pitches should be dry, which aids with drainage. Part of the problem last winter was the relentlessness of the rain, which didn't give ground the chance to dry. But that said it was absolutely hammering down in Sussex and the forecast is that it will head north and east.
The train journey also throws up one small surprise, a five minute delay between Gatwick and East Croydon because of “defective track”. Hang on a minute. HANG ON A MINUTE? WHAT? PART OF MY JOURNEY IS ON TRACK THAT IS… it's one of those moments where my first instinct is to go and check the dictionary for the definition of the word “defective”. Have I just been using it differently to the entire rest of the planet for decades? Have people been laughing at me behind my back about this all these years while calling me “The Defective Guy”?
I have further questions. What was the maximum speed before this track was found to be - your words - “defective”, and what is it now? Is it affected by the weight of the train? Because there's a lot of fucking people on this train. And why is it only slowing our journey by five minutes? That doesn't sound like much of a speed reduction, to me. In case you were wondering, I was watching a documentary about the Moorgate tube disaster of 1975 the other night.
It certainly feels surprising that I've never been to Haringey Borough before. I lived my first five years in Edmonton, and until 1973 they were partly Edmonton FC. My sister, who's just over eight years older than me, could have gone to see them play.
Brightlingsea Regent, meanwhile, are a club about whom I know next to nothing beyond more or less their geographical location. They're based at the mouth of the Essex version of the River Colne, which flows into a tributary towards the North Sea. (For the record, this is not the same River Colne that runs through Hertfordshire from Thames and lends its name to both London Colney, home of the Arsenal training ground, and Colney Heath, home of my own personal training ground, the junior school I went to from ten years old.)
Like Haringey, Brightlingsea made a go at the Premier Division of this league and found that they didn't like it and are now back in Division One North. And there is something very much of their part of the world about their club name. One of the nearer big towns to Brightlingsea is Clacton, which has had quite a year, while it's also close to the traditional home of the demure British seaside weekend, Frinton-on-Sea, town which banned fish and chip shops until 1992 (and still only has two) and pubs until 2000.
Both teams have had mixed starts to the season. Brightlingsea are still in the FA Cup, but lost their opening game of the season at 3-0 home to Witham Town. Haringey had the luxury of entering the FA Cup a round later and are safely through that, but like Brightlingsea they also lost their first league game of the season, 1-0 at Basildon United. Neither Brightlingsea nor Haringey have exactly leapt from the traps, this season.
The rain isn't quite as horrendous in Central London as it was in Worthing, and by the time I get to Seven Sisters tube station I'm almost dry again. But it's a long walk up to Edmonton Green, and the overground trains aren't running northbound because they can't get any power to them.
There's a smattering of people around the stadium, even though there are still three hours to kick off. Tourists pose for photos and hawkers flog individual player scarves; my advice would be to not buy one until the transfer window has closed. If anything, considering that they levelled the stadium and built a completely new one, it's surprising how unchanged the locality feels. On the way through, I even manage to find the exact flat that I lived in for the first five years of my life, tucked just behind the Angel Edmonton.
Half a mile or so up the road, Edmonton Green Shopping Centre is a wonderful building, albeit very much one of its time. It is very much a victim of its architecture. Built in the 1960s, it's aged like gold top and the council's reaction to this seems to have simply been to build marginally better looking buildings in front of it to obscure it from the main road. But among the magnificent array of…. stuff they have for sale is remarkable. Items of jewellery at a pound each or six for a fiver? Sold! And there is a community to be found in here. It's bustling with people, certainly busier than I recall having seen it in years.
The Railway Tavern, the pub inside the Green, feels as though it should be narrated by Telly Savalas as part of a promotional documentary. On the inside, it's empty other than five old boys standing at the bar discussing them Spurs, but I still feel as though it's unlikely that I won't get out of here without getting whacked over the head with a pool cue as I sit in the corner and take in a vibe that I suspect hasn't changed in at least thirty years, if not longer.
Problems with the power supply to overground trains are northbound only, so it barely takes five minutes to get back to White Hart Lane, and by the time I do The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium is in full pre-match mode. Time, therefore, to walk away from it all. As you walk in the opposite direction out from the railway station to the Spurs Stadium, everything gets leafier.
My first experience of Everton's travelling support comes from a guy walking past me singing, “you Jewish bastards, you know what you are”. Of course, he's too much of a coward to sing it at a volume at which anyone else could hear it (I have no idea whether it's targeted at me personally; bit weird if it was, since I was walking away from the ground, but there really wasn't anyone else around), but I heard you, mate. I know what you really think.
Coles Park is the only football ground on White Hart Lane, of course. It takes you by surprise, a bit. It's a bit of a walk from the station and I'm just starting to wonder whether I've not been paying close enough attention to my surroundings and walked straight past it when the tall, yellow and green stand hones into view.
Once in, it's fairly typical for this level of the game, a ground in which most of the effort has gone into one side, with a large main stand and a strip of covered terracing along one side and only one step of extremely slippery wooden decking behind each goal. Such are the conditions by kick-off, though, that only one person in the ground isn't under cover with the rest of us. Instead, he stands behind the goal with his yellow and blue umbrella.
It doesn't take long for the mood in the stand to turn sullen, when Brightlingsea score after a quarter of an hour from free-kick. They're wearing a very striking kit of white shirts with a purple cross across the middle which looks a little like an airline pilot's seat belt. The goal does quieten those in the top corner of the stand who've singing since the start of the game.
There's huff and there's puff, but there aren't many chances. Haringey blaze one over the crossbar from a good position shortly before the break, and that really is about as good as their afternoon gets. Brightlingsea rattle the crossbar early in the second half, but this 45 minutes is broadly more sedate than the first, punctuated most significantly when Brightlingsea add a second goal with ten minutes to play.
The grumbling switches up a level and a few head off in the direction of the bar. A desultory round of applause greets the final whistle. They're going to be doing this all again next weekend too next weekend in the FA Cup, this time at the mouth of the River Colne. By the time the full-time whistle blows even the sun has come out, though it doesn't really feel as though it was doing so for the home time.
Back at White Hart Lane railway station, the mood is ebullient. Spurs have eased their way past a dismal Everton team with 4-0 win and the angst which followed their opening weekend draw at Leicester. I hope the “Jewish Bastards” guy has a miserable journey home to Merseyside and I'd prefer it if he didn't bother again next time, if there is one. For the couple of hundred souls ploughing their trade a mile or so up the road at Haringey Borough, the early signs are that this might be a difficult season ahead.
It's a strange feeling, being part of a support act so tiny as to be actually invisible. There were 60,000-odd people at The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium this afternoon and just over 200 at Coles Park. Part of the ritual of attending a match is the walk there, with crowds joining you as you go, all headed in the same direction. At the lower end of the non-league game this isn't as noticeable but it does still exist.
But on this Saturday, everything in this part of the world is set up for this one gargantuan leviathan of a football club. Roads are shut off and people come in from all over the world. The guys sitting next to me on the train - a middle-aged man and a teenager - have flown from New York to be in this grubby corner of North London watching this football team that usually lets them down. But on this occasion they didn't, and their excitement at having seen them live is palpable. We watch the same game and even support the same team, but we inhabit different universes, us three.