HITCHIN A LIFT WITH A CLUB GOING PLACES
BEDWORTH UTD 2 HITCHIN TOWN 2
THE CROCODILE appeared to be selling bottled drinks from an ice bucket but his voice was trapped inside his costume and so it was impossible to know for sure and business looked slow.
Also dressed snappily was the man turned out in evening dress, complete with a bow tie and unfeasibly shiny shoes seeking an audience with North Herts FM about the intricacies of Bedworth.
A proliferation of pre-match ladybirds defied fierce gusts snapping the green- andwhite union flag around on its high pole above the boardroom terrace and settled on the blazers of Hitchin Town club officials.
Ground staff at the Oval, tucked away off the Coventry Road, chased leaves from the artificial surface with a combination of blowers and snow shovels.
This is football in the Evo- Stik League South Premier Central Division, the newly restructured seventh tier of the pyramid, where the welcome was friendly and the football served up four goals and a penalty save.
‘Minds on this game, I’ll know if you’re cheating me,’ growled Hitchin manager Mark Burke once the mystery of the missing shirts had been solved and goalkeeper Michael Johnson had finished cutting up his socks.
The manager feared some might have an eye on Saturday’s FA Cup fourth qualifying round tie against Leatherhead.
It is 23 years since Hitchin made the first round proper, in days when Burke was a stalwart centre half and his then manager Andy Melvin, who now owns the club, was invited to join Tony Gubba in the Match of the Day studio. Victories over Hereford in 1994 and Bristol Rovers a year later are woven into the folklore of this old club, as are the subsequent heavy defeats at the hands of Martin O’Neill’s Wycombe and Tony Pulis’s Gillingham.
Fans reminisced over Black Sheep beer in the clubhouse. Cup fever is brewing again for Hitchin, one of 15 teams to participate in the very first edition of the FA Cup, in 1871-72, when beaten by Royal Engineers in the second round.
Nearly a century and a half later and the competition still has an allure. Beat Leatherhead and into the draw they will go with FA Cup winners such as Portsmouth, Sunderland and Coventry. It might be live on TV.
Chairman Terry Barratt and club treasurer Roy Izzard imagine how such a windfall would transform an amateur club locked in a financial void between trickle down from the top and funding for the grassroots, and reliant upon the goodwill of so many volunteers.
Even the FA’s proposed sale of Wembley would inject no extra funds into this level.
There will always be rivals with wealthier investors and bigger budgets. Kettering Town, who sit top of the league, have a budget of £ 10,000 a week according to the semipro grapevine.
Burke tries to compensate by generating a team spirit and a family bond. On the bus, it is the usual formation: officials at the front with a group of fans creating a watershed to the players who settle at the back and plug in headphones.
They are out for a night in Birmingham after this game which complicates the journey as they make sure they have the correct number of cars and drivers at Bedworth, and dancing shoes, and are in the right vehicle.
An elaborate and imaginative fines list will be inspected by keeper Johnson. Missing a night out will cost £40. Worst dressed on a night out will pay £10. Not travelling to the game on the team bus is a £ 10 fine. Not travelling back is £5.
Proceeds go towards an end- of- season jaunt, ‘usually somewhere messy’.
The bus stops to collect players near Clophill and again at Newport Pagnell services and pit- stops at Watford Gap for pre-match food and caffeine.
Burke orders cappuccino and chats genially about the worklife-football balance of amateur football, although his good humour had disappeared by half-time.
Goals from Luke Rowe and Levi Rowley fired Bedworth into a 2-0 lead and Hitchin’s Josh Bickerstaff missed a penalty. Lewis Ferrell pulled one back but it did not avert Burke’s tirade which rattled the walls of the visitors’ dressing room and escaped down the tunnel.
Passion and commitment are in full force. Bedworth chairman Neill RaysonRandle interrupted his own potted history of the club, its place in this former mining community and ambitious plans for the future, in order to vent his fury at the referee.
Isaac Galliford, having curled a free-kick against the bar in the first half, scored a stylish equaliser in the second and neither team seemed satisfied with a point. Bedworth remain bottom of the table and winless and manager Stuart Storer returned to the dugout with his assistants for an inquest as players collected boxes of chips and curry from the clubhouse. Hitchin, still in the bottom three, dispersed. Some for the bright lights of Birmingham and others on to the bus for the journey back to Top Field as news filtered through that Leatherhead had lost at Wingate and Finchley in the Isthmian League. FA Cup fever is stirring again.