The Weekend Match: Clapton CFC - a safe space to watch football
Ten divisions down from the Premier League can be found a fan-owned football club who are very much doing things their own way.
Platform Two at East Worthing Station is busy, this morning. It's Brighton Pride today, and it's packed with partygoers; hordes of young women with glitter on their faces, wearing so little that they may as well be wearing nothing at all, already chucking back cans of Bacardi and Coke as though last orders are about to be called; a pair of middle-aged men with matching blue t-shirts and rainbow flags painted on their cheeks; a shaven-headed man wearing tiny denim shorts and, in a move that might be considered unsubtle, a white sleeveless muscle vest with a print of a bottle of poppers emblazoned across the middle of it.
The train is delayed by ten minutes due to, somewhat ominously, “Overcrowding in the Angmering area.” This is, I have to admit to myself, the first time I've ever seen or heard this particular warning. That delay is going to cost me. I'm going to miss my connecting train, but I've built in a redundancy for this scenario which still allows me to catch the next one into London and still be at my destination well before three.
A mermaid gets on the train at Portslade, just as I receive a notification that my London train is also delayed by a few minutes, which gives me the false hope of being able to catch it. It's not particularly surprising that it's not so busy. If you know Pride, you know that you really start drinking at ten in the morning, because the parade passes through the town and up towards Preston Circus well before midday. When the train pulls up between Hove and Brighton and stops for a few minutes, and then, once in the station, I'm funnelled on a half-mile walk to get from one platform to the other, I know for sure that I'll be catching that later train instead.
Today's destination is not Brighton. There's a part of me that wouldn't mind going to Pride today, though my days of going out drinking for twelve hours, even if only once a year, are long gone. Instead, my destination this afternoon is somewhere that I definitely should have visited before but haven't. The story of Clapton CFC is one of a community reclaiming its football club after years of neglect at the hands of an owner who treated its predecessor as a means to an end, and not a great deal of success before that, either.
The story of Vincent McBean and Clapton FC is an extremely lengthy and complicated one. Just as happened at my club, Enfield, the fans got sick of the owner's bullshit, walked away, and formed a new club of their own. The twist to the story here was that, when the lease for the old club's ground, The Old Spotted Dog, came up for renewal through Heineken, the brewery that owns it, it was given to Clapton CFC and the old club, by this time in a state of ruin, was turfed out. A combination of vandalism and severe neglect left a lot of work to do, but that work was done.
Clapton FC's last season was 2023-24, in the same division as the new club. They'd been groundsharing as far away as Southend before giving up the ghost altogether. While they were a well-established non-league club, they weren't very successful for a very long time. They've managed the singular achievement of conceding at least 100 goals in a league season on 17 occasions, which surely takes some beating. They once lost 14-0 to Nottingham Forest in the FA Cup.
Their complete league record really is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. They were five times winners of the FA Amateur Cup, but the last of those came exactly a century ago, and from the time that football resumed after the Second World War, they finished above 10th place in whatever division they happened to be in seven times in 79 years. It's a lack of success so striking that it's tempting to wonder whether it was deliberate.
Clapton CFC are, of course, the ‘leftie’ club. They're fan-owned, and inclusivity is central to their identity. Their away shirt based on a Spanish Civil War flag went viral, and their goalkeepers kit is in trans rights colours of pink, white and baby blue. And there'll be a crowd, this afternoon. This match is being played in Division One South of the Eastern Counties League, where two-figure attendances are more common, but this one will have hundreds in attendance. Just over 400, as things turn out.
Their opponents are Dunmow Town, from up in the gap between Bishops Stortford and Braintree, in Essex. It's the home town of Liam out of The Prodigy and celebrity builder Tommy Walsh, and, given that the nearest railway station is more than eight miles away in Braintree, it's not a place I'm going to be visiting any time soon unless it's absolutely necessary.
It would be a bit of a waste of time though go there on a Saturday afternoon anyway, since Dunmow have never had their own ground. Formed as recently as 2020, they've previously shared at Braintree Town and Heybridge Swifts, and currently play their home matches at Saffron Walden Town.
The train into London is blessedly empty. This is the third time I've been to Farringdon in the last seven days. This time last week I was en route to Barking for a match which was not worth travelling all that way for. On Thursday night, I was on a second date there with an actual woman, a lovely woman, who I’m seeing again, hopefully.
And now here I am again, willing myself to not get too confused as I find the Lizzy Line train to Forest Gate. Opposite me, a confused young Saudi guy is asking whether this train, in fairly central London, is going to London. It is, though where he should get to will really depend on where he wants to go. Based on his answer of “Big Ben”, I recommend Blackfriars - the station on the bridge - and a lovely walk along the Thames until he gets to it.
It is one of the curiosities of the Lizzy Line that the very point at which it decides to convert from underground to overground, it's passing through one of London's ugliest areas. Stratford loves your money but it hates you. From a train passing through, it's a series of raised middle-finger tower blocks. From ground level, it's warehouses, storage centres, retail culture in its final form, dual carriageways and, for some reason, West Ham United. It hates people and it especially hates people without cars.
I emerge from the station at 2.15. Forest Gate is what you expect to find in East London. The smell of South Asian and African food hangs heavy in the air, and every single shop is a small, independent business that offers a thousand different services at the same time. But it's a straightforward walk, south for ten minutes and then a dog-leg to the right for another five. I wander straight past the ground to West Ham Park, which is vast and bustling. Out in the middle of the grass, an extremely earnest game of cricket is taking place. These must be the streets that you can't walk that I've been reading so much about.
The Old Spotted Dog is hidden away, as though sent to the corner for getting at a leg of mutton. There's been a lot of work done here to make this place habitable again. The bar has been refitted. There's a small seated stand on one side and “The Scaffold”, a terrace made of corrugated iron, scaffolding and concrete, which contains most of the noise. The bar is at one end, and at the other is a curious couple of steps of very old concrete that barely stretch as wide as the goal they're behind.
And it's cheap. Good god, it's cheap. It's £5 to get in, and in the bar a can of Red Stripe is £2.50. Furthermore, this is by some distance the most diverse crowd I've ever seen at a match in this country. As a white, middle-aged man, of course, there are few grounds, if any, at which I wouldn't feel safe, but that's not the same for a lot of other people, and it's good to know that this corner of the football map, however small it might be, has a zero-discrimination policy that bears teeth. There isn't, of course, a hint of trouble all afternoon.
Clapton finished 7th in this division last season, while Dunmow finished 12th. But Clapton have already started their season by losing at home on Tuesday night, while Dunmow won. If Clapton are to kick on, they can't afford to lose too many more home matches. But regardless, if anything this just feels like a completely normal football match. True, there are more references to freeing Palestine than you would find at most football grounds. But the home fans are singing their songs, people are watching the match while enjoying a drink and catching up with people they might not have spoken to all summer. It's a very typical early season Saturday afternoon.
The teams come out from one corner of the pitch, in front of the cutest little wooden scoreboard you ever did see. The pitch slopes quite sharply from one end to the other and Clapton, in red, black and white, kick off shooting up it. Dunmow look good in possession but don't really create much by way of chances. Clapton seem happy to sit back and attack on the counter, and every time they do they look more likely to score than their opponents.
By half-time they're 2-0 up and cruising, though it takes them a while to get going. They've been playing for almost half an hour before a low ball across goal finds Fred Taylor sliding in to touch it over the line, and shortly afterwards Andre Odeku reacts first to a bouncing ball and lifts it into the top corner. It's a little flattering, this two-goal lead, though it does look as though the second goal really does knock some stuffing out of the Dunmow players.
Half time allows the opportunity for a bit of a wander. There are ghosts around this place, piles of broken wood and unkempt bushes. The newest building is a toilet block in front of which no one is standing, presumably because it would feel too weird.
The second half is a pretty torpid affair. League games at this time of the season usually are. The singing continues non-stop but the two teams are cancelling each other out in the middle of the pitch, before it all goes off in the closing few minutes.
He may have already scored in the first half, but when Taylor scores three times in four minutes - the 88th, 91st and 92nd, to be precise - he scores probably the fastest hat-trick I've seen in almost 50 years of watching live football. There's a definite collapse in the home defence - he looks half-surprised when simply allowed to run through and round the goalkeeper for the fourth of Clapton's five. There's a big whooping cheer at the end of the game, a generous show of appreciation for the opponents, and then the Clapton players go over to celebrate with the Scaffold.
There don't appear to be any youngsters on their way out, on the train back to Brighton. Anybody out drinking for the day will have been doing so since the morning. The station and its immediate surroundings are packed with early casualties, though; there are already young women walking onto trains with their shoes tucked under their arms and mildly glazed looks on their faces. In Brighton, Pride is now something big and gaudy, a celebration of diversity which is just as much about being completely bacchanalian as anything else, nowadays.
60-odd miles to the north in this little corner of East London, a different take on pride can be found; a little football club has been rebuilt as something new. More than anything else, it feels like a safe space, where the supporters come before the club, where all are welcome, and all can feel at home. It's too early to say whether Clapton have got any chance of doing much of significance on the pitch this season, but they've already built something of greater significance, completely unique, and, more importantly than anything else, it's theirs. They own it, and they should be proud of what they've built. No pasaran, indeed.
