Words and pictures to follow: Brighton Electricity vs Southwater
The Leccy is back on. Exactly a year on from our visit there last year, I'm back to see whether anything has changed over the last twelve months.
On this exact weekend last year, m'former podcast host and I were dropped off at the entrance to a familiar-looking athletics track, roughly twelve miles from where I lived then and still live for, for now. It was the start of one of the more memorable matches of my last season, an afternoon in the bright sunshine at the Withdean Stadium, former home of Brighton & Hove Albion, watching the lowest level of football I saw all season. Hello Brighton Electricity, it's nice to see you again.
They lost 5-0 to Hailsham Town that afternoon, and it could have been far worse. Indeed, it was far worse at other points throughout the season. A quick look at the record books shows that they lost 9-0 twice and 9-1 once. It's the first time I've ever seen a team have two entries in the ‘record defeat’ section of a league for a season, as well as being listed for the highest aggregate result over a third match which they lost 9-1. It's also worth noting that both of those 9-0 defeats came at home. Fortress Withdean, indeed.
Brighton Electricity are not a very good football team. They play in Division Two of the Southern Combination Football League, the absolute bottom of the pile before you step into intermediate football and its roped-off park pitches. They ended last season having conceded 102 goals in 22 league games, an average of 4.6 a game. But there's a punchline to all of this because come the end of the season they didn't even finish bottom of the table. That honour went to Rottingdean Village, who managed just six points all season. Brighton Electricity held them to a 2-2 draw at Withdean and won 2-1 away from home.
So we go again, and this season has started very much in the same way that the last one ended. They conceded five on the opening weekend of the season and a week later went one better than anything they managed last time around, losing 10-1 to Jarvis Brook. Whether things have ‘improved’ or not since then depends very much on your definition of the word ‘improved’.
They've lost all nine of the league games they've played so far, and with Rottingdean having left the league at the end of last season they're four points adrift at the bottom of the table. But they haven't conceded more than six in a game since then and that's only happened once. Like I say, it depends very much on your definition of the word ‘improvement’.
When things are going this badly (and this consistently badly - there's nothing particularly new about Brighton Electricity being at or near the bottom of a league table) you have to cling onto whatever hope you can find. Last season, their only other league win apart from that one against Rottingdean came with 2-1 win against Southwater, and while they lost the return match 4-2, they made a game of it (you'll be unsurprised to read that they didn't score more than two goals in a match throughout their entire league season). And when the two sides met at the end of August this season, Southwater won 2-1.
Southwater is the village in which we find the neat and tidy home of Horsham FC, 25 miles up the road, but the team named for the village play at the local recreation ground rather than there. But their league form so far this season has been decent. They've only lost once in the ten league games they've played so far this season and sit in fourth place in the table, seven points behind the leaders Rustington.
That 2-1 win against Brighton Electricity might have been narrow, but this isn't a team in poor form or anything like that. A couple of weeks ago they drew 2-2 with Jarvis Brook, the team that put ten goals past Brighton Electricity earlier in the season. For all the tightness of previous encounters between these two teams, you're never that far from a reminder of how bad this could get for the home team tomorrow.
It should go without saying that no-one follows this team for the purposes of glory hunting. Indeed, not that many people follow them at all. Their average attendance so far this season is 24 (down two on last season), the lowest in the division, by five. Astonishingly, there aren’t throngs of people desperate to rubberneck this sort of thing.
But as an aesthetic choice, there are few better at anything like this level of the game. Their kit is brown and pale blue. They have a goddam electricity pylon on their club badge. Their nickname is ‘The Leccy’. They play at a ground with an athletics track around it, meaning that if you squint when the flights are on you could—so long as you don't pay enough attention to the actual football itself—almost convince yourself that you're watching a European match from the 1980s featuring some “crack Eastern European outfit” or similar.
Except, of course, you're not. It would be a stretch to describe Brighton Electricity ‘The Worst Senior Football Team in England’ (come back to me on that if they don't win a single point all season, preferably with a points deduction for only having seven players a couple of times chucked in for good measure), but they're pretty bad, the worst team in a division eleven levels below the Premier League, and that makes them a curio worth keeping an eye on. Quite what in the world my co-traveller, a relative ingénue to this world of tiny crowds and men of dubious fitness kicking a ball very high in the air to a soundtrack of largely nonsensical shouting, will make of it all is just about anybody's guess.
Adjustments will have to be made. It's a two o'clock kick-off—and for those unfamiliar with this practice, in the social media age I can't begin to tell you how truly weird it is when the full-time whistle blows at the match you're at, just as the half-time whistle is sounding at just about every other ground in the country—and it'll be cash only on the turnstile. Well, the bloke standing there with a clipboard that passes for a turnstile, anyway.
And if we want a drink, we'll have to take our own unless we want to leave the ground altogether and go for a carvery or a two for £12 cocktail at the adjacent pub. There seemed to be no way to get from one to another this time last year, but I'm minded to think that we weren't trying hard enough. If it’s cold, tomorrow afternoon, some mild fence-climbing may be required. But a year on, has anything changed at Brighton Electricity? Let’s find out!
Words and pictures to follow, on Sunday.