Licensed to Ilford
Ilford Football Club were one of the great non-league names of the amateur era, but in the 21st century they're struggling to find a place.
There are helicopters circling overhead as we walk along the road to Shenfield railway station. Outside one house is stationed a police car with a copper standing next to it, arms folded, pulling that face that they pull when something serious is going on. Another couple of patrol cars are parked nearby. Twice, dark, unmarked cars shoot past us with blue lights going off in their rear windows. One of them almost clips me, thanks to the lack of a pavement along stretches of this road. Something is afoot, but we have no idea what.
This is our last weekend in Essex. She’s been here since the back end of November, waiting for things to settle in London so that she can move back there. It’s nice, around here, it’s lovely, but it’s not home. There are no pubs, there’s no gym nearby, no swimming pool. It’s funny, really. You don’t even notice as they fall by the wayside, but there are just things that she hasn’t been able to do over this last couple of months, and it’s taken a toll. Her life has been work, home, sleep, and little else. She may have grown up in this county, but it’s clearly and evidently not home any more.
My trip this afternoon is a solo one. She likes the sound of an afternoon of drawing, snoozing, and making biscuits. So with that in mind, I am deposited at Shenfield railway station for the relatively short and pain-free trip to Ilford shortly before two o'clock. It’s twenty minutes on the Lizzy line to Seven Kings—to clarify, this is more Kings than there are in my entire family, including extended—and then an allegedly short walk to Cricklefield Stadium for the match between Ilford and Benfleet in the Essex Senior League. There seems to be, in principle at least, no reason whatsoever why getting to Cricklefield should be any issue for a three o’clock kick-off.
Or so I thought. The stadium leaves a particularly large footprint on Google Maps because it’s really an athletics stadium, but that’s the overhead view. From ground level, it’s a different matter. I walk the way that I assume will somehow let me in. Floodlights keep popping in and out of view in that way that the Eiffel Tower does when you turn a corner in Paris or The Fernsehturm does in Berlin. But there’s no way in. I estimate that by the time I do find the entrance—which requires passing through a leisure centre and approaching a turnstile which looks for all the world to be boarded up but isn’t—I’ve covered 350 of the 360 degrees that would have been a full circle of it.
The guy on the turnstile is, in that way that turnstile operators often seem to be at this level of the game, almost startled to see an unfamiliar face. He points me in the direction of the bar, which is in a temporary building which seems to be about half a mile from where we’re standing, at the far end of the ground. A tiny number of people are dotted about the place. The official attendance is reported the following day as 52, but I don’t count more than 32 or 33 people in the ground, so presumably the club has twenty-odd season-ticket holders who just couldn’t be bothered with it this afternoon.
The athletics track, of course, makes it unlike most other football grounds. There’s a large semi-circle of terracing at one end, though it’s difficult to imagine more than couple of dozen people having ever stood on it at the same time. Along one side is a small, seated stand. The opposite side is closed and fenced off, and although I can see how easy it would be to clamber through, I feel as though it would be a bit rude to do so. But otherwise, the ground feels tatty and perhaps a little unloved. Behind one goal is a skip full of rubbish and some metal containers. There is, of course, a hammer net. The goal nets at the far end look as though they wouldn’t be able to cope with a ball hitting them at any velocity worthy of the name.
I’d been told before travelling that the club has a museum of sorts, and it’s hardly as though there isn’t history to be found here. Ilford reached the final of the FA Amateur Cup five times, winning it twice. But those days are long gone. A tax miscalculation over the sale of their Lynn Road ground in 1977 left them homeless and pushed into a merger with nearby Leytonstone FC. That club eventually ended up as part of Dagenham & Redbridge, who are currently sliding towards the National League relegation places. This Ilford FC was formed in 1987, and it’s been a struggle. They’ve finished in a single-digit position in the League twice inthe last 19 seasons. Crowds have collapsed. This is a very different club to that which preceded it.
By comparison, Benfleet FC have little such history behind them. They were founded in 1922 but played intermediate level football until relatively recently. They’ve brought a dozen or so supporters with them this afternoon. It won’t have been an exceptionally long journey. Benfleet sits on the very southern side of the county, tucked between Basildon and Southend-on-Sea. If anything, it may be ‘best-known’ as being home to the railway station at which you have to alight to get to Canvey Island, which doesn’t have one of its own. Its ‘notable’ people section on Wikipedia has the former Southend United scumbag Ron Martin at the top of a list of three people, the other two of whom I’ve never heard of.
There has indeed been an attempt to make a museum out of this clubhouse. There are posters for long-forgotten matches, news reports, old England amateur caps and photographs, and at one end the old wooden honours board hangs as a reminder of what this club used to be. A array of old replica shirts are shoved into one corner. And there is definitely something poignant about it all, this small collection of memories of considerably better times, of Cup finals and trips to League clubs. The bar is empty, apart from me and the two servers.
Outside, a football match is going on. It is not a particularly good football match, being played between two not very good football teams, on a pitch that can't possibly have not seen better days. Behind one goal is an older man wearing a blue and white bar scarf. He'll be able to remember at least the last of Ilford's trips to Wembley in the mid-1970s. He'll be able to remember Lynn Road. I wonder what he makes of it all. It's certainly not difficult to believe that this wasn't the deal that he signed up for when he started following this team, all those years ago. Benfleet take the lead after half an hour, a diagonal cross into the penalty area and a header which loops over the goalkeeper and into the corner. They still hold it by the time the half-time whistle goes.
As the second half begins, so does the golden hour. The pitch, stands and track are bathed in beautiful sunlight as the teams continue to scrap away on the pitch. I did rather lose interest during the first half, my mind wandering back to the night before and the evening ahead. But as the second half proceeds of the game does start to become more engrossing, and with 17 minutes to play the home team are awarded a penalty. It's a real double-whammy of definitely not a penalty. Not only was it not a foul, but it wasn't inside the penalty area, either. The Benfleet players are incandescent, but my lifetime record of never having seen a referee change their mind on account of being surrounded by aggrieved players and shouted at remains undefeated. Greg Akpele converts the kick.
Nine minutes later, another penalty is given, and from the angle at which I'm standing I can't see why, though that is primarily due to the unfortunate position of a high jump landing mat. There's more squawking, because of course there is. Akpele steps up to take the penalty; this time it's saved, but the goalkeeper can't hold onto the rebound and he manages to force the rebound over the line to give Ilford a 2-1 lead. Benfleet pour players forward in search of an equaliser. As the clock ticks over ninety minutes they win a corner and their goalkeeper goes up for it. There's nothing unusual about this; what is unusual is that he spends more or less the whole of the rest of the match inside the home team's half of the pitch.
And then it *all* goes off.
It starts when Ilford's Mohamed Habib absolutely clatters into a Benfleet player, cleaning him out and sending him flying across the athletics track before landing in a crumpled heap. Temperatures have only just been short of boiling point for much of the afternoon, and this is enough to kick it off. It's difficult to see what exactly is occurring because it's all happening in front of that spectacular sunset. To me, it's essentially a bunch of silhouettes pushing and shoving each other. It's happening right in front of the small number of Benfleet supporters and one Ilford supporter has got involved, jumping over the perimeter fence and onto the track. Among the supporters is a mother and child. The child is clearly distressed and is crying. I don't usually get involved at such a moment, but I have kids of a similar age to this one, and even I can't stop myself from saying, “Jesus man, your behaviour is making a kid cry; have a think on that, eh?” His response is cry-arsing about the referee.
The comedic thing about all this is that none of it makes any difference to anything. Ilford were 12th the start of play and remain there, regardless of having picked up three points. Benfleet drop a couple of places to 15th, but they're 15 points above the relegation places and are highly unlikely to get sucked into a scramble to stay up. Quite asides from anything else, they've got five or six games in hand on most of the teams around them in the table. Win all of those and they'd be on the fringes of a chase for a playoff place. The way in which they failed to hold onto their lead in this match doesn't indicate that this will happen, though.
The walk back to Seven Kings Station takes the five minutes that it should have on the way here. Having told her that I'll be back by about six, I'm WhatsApping her to let her knowim at the front door at exactly six o'clock, which pleases me, even if the strong likelihood is that she won't even have noticed herself. I'll say one thing for this part of the world; it smells amazing. Right next to the entrance is an Indian takeaway called Lahore Spice which floods the entrance to the station with incredible aromas. Walking along the high street is the same. I've never seen such a vast conglomeration of fast food places in one area before in my life.
It's a quiet Saturday evening in front of the tele, the first two parts of a thriller starring Robert De Niro in which it's presented that his character may have dementia. It's confusing enough for me to start wondering whether I have it too. A little melancholy settles over me as the evening progresses. Everything has felt so uncertain for the last few months, and change is coming again. In the morning I'll be facing down this journey for the last time for the foreseeable future, and Thameslink have thrown in an extra hour to the journey time with their weekly engineering works. One day I'll be able to get a train without the lingering thought in the back of my head that this could turn into a bus journey at any moment. But don't mistake this for annoyance. When the journey you're making is to be with the person who makes you feel as special as this one can make me feel, it doesn't feel onerous in the slightest.
Life certainly feels onerous for Ilford Football Club. Attendances are low—whether we're taking about 52 or 32—and although the team is more successful now than it has been for most of the last two decades, that's not really saying much. As the years pass by, the number of people who can remember the glory years or anything like them is dwindling. It won't be so long until there are none left. And as a supporter of a club that something very similar happened to, I have sympathy. Enfield lost their ground to redevelopment. It's been lucky that Enfield Town have flourished, rising as far as the National League South. Perhaps Ilford can take heart from that. The Towners were once in the Essex Senior League too.
And that's it for Essex, for now. There's so much of this county to explore, I may try to get round to it some time, and there may be trips up here in the future to visit friends or family in the unforeseeable future. But we've been here so frequently because we had to be here, because life doesn't always turn out the way you hope it will. Hopefully being back in London will give her some more of her life back, and hopefully we'll be able to get some feeling of normality back after almost three months of shuttling diagonally across the South-East of England every weekend. And just because it didn't feel onerous, doesn't mean that it hasn't been hard work. Next weekend I'll be back on the Surrey-Sussex border, dadsitting and trying to find another little bolt hole for a Saturday afternoon. To be frank, I wouldn't have been able to withstand the train prices much longer anyway.
