Words and Pictures to follow: Haringey Borough vs Brightlingsea Regent
Your preview piece ahead of this week's match, which is taking place very close to, well, home.
Non-league football sure does a merger. It makes sense, in a way. Much as we might treasure our own little clubs and their histories, there is a truth to the fact that sometimes an area just has… too many clubs. Now there have been many bastardisations of the idea of two football clubs coming together in sweet harmony. Mergers can occasionally even look like a parasite consuming its host. But sometimes there are just too many clubs.
A new club was formed in 1973 as a merger of Edmonton FC and Wood Green Town FC under the name of Edmonton & Haringey FC, taking Edmonton’s plae in the Athenian League and playing at Wood Green’s Cole Park ground. Three years later they changed their name to Haringey Borough. Edmonton FC had themselves been formed as the result of a merger themselves, this time between Tufnell Park FC - for any watching non-Londoners, Tufnell Park is in London terms nowhere near Edmonton - and Edmonton Borough FC. Fortunately, in the overall scheme of things, none of this is important information, because it sure as hell gets complicated quickly.
More than fifty years on, Haringey Borough still play at Coles Park. This is a ground that is right slap bang in the middle of Spurs territory. There has always been a striking irony to the fact that White Hart Lane was never on White Hart Lane. As any foo knows, the ground is on Tottenham High Road (number 748, to be precise) and that White Hart Lane is the name of the overground railway station that sits almost opposite it. If you go ‘down the Lane’ from the station itself, you certainly won’t get to a Premier League football ground.
They play in Division One North of the Isthmian League following relegation at the end of last season and started last weekend with a 1-0 defeat at Basildon United which, well, was suboptimal. Their opponents have a bit of a journey. The exotically-named Brightlingsea Regent sit at the tributary at which the River Colne flows into the North Sea. As somebody who went to junior school in a village called Colney Heath, through which the other River Colne flows, and who both worked and played football in London Colney (no, I have never had trials for Arsenal, how very dare you?), this is kind of but not really relevant to my interests. It’s also near Clacton, so that’s… something.
And as regular readers of this site will be aware, the location of the ground has a special significance. Edmonton and Enfield are under the same borough council. My parents essentially reassembled their families at the end of the Second World War in Enfield, and my parents married in 1959. They didn’t own a house, and council housing moved them to Edmonton. My sister lived there until she was almost 14. I lived there until I was five, before we were moved into a new estate with more bedrooms that had been built on the site of the avenues in which my parents had grown up after the war.
But Coles Park is a new one for me. My dad had started watching Enfield in 1946, and I joined him at the start of the 1980s. I’ve never been there before, and London can have a strangely expanding effect on distances. Places are often far closer that you might assume them to be. But while we may have lived behind the Angel Edmonton, we always pointed back north towards Enfield Town, where the greenbelt crashes into the outer perimeter of this great, great city. Haringey Borough FC, formed the year after I was born, never came into any of my equations.
So, is this a trip home? Well… kinda? This is a part of the world with which I am extremely familiar, and an extra layer of intrigue is added by the fact that Tip Top Tottenham Hotspur will be kicking off at home against Everton at exactly the same time. There’ll be 60,000-odd people in that neck of the woods on that day, all heading to the slate-grey enorm-o-dome on the High Road. But not so far away there’ll be something else going on, something smaller and more modest. We’ll find out what it looks and feels like tomorrow afternoon, shall we?