NIGE TASSELL
Our columnist explains why away days are all the more special when the big boys are in town
They’re not used to police vans at Larkhall Athletic, but there are two here today. Something’s going on. And where the club’s medium-sized car park usually absorbs the match-day traffic with ease, today it’s rammed from early on. The school at the bottom of the hill has had to open its tennis courts to provide extra spaces for the swarm of cars heading this way. A marquee has been erected at the club too, a second refreshments concession to satiate this afternoon’s hungry hordes. The mighty Hereford FC are in town… Larkhall are only used to getting around 100 folk to watch home matches here in the Evo-Stik League Southern Division One South and West. But today it seems like there’s that many volunteers on duty – selling raffle tickets, fetching stray balls from the sky-high conifers, or simply offering welcoming blasts of bonhomie and good cheer all along the way.
Summit
In excess of 600 have descended on Plain Ham, this impossibly picturesque ground high on the hills surrounding Bath. So high are the hills – and so narrow the lanes that take you up them – that anything wider than a minibus can’t make the summit. Everyone’s doing those last few hundred metres on foot. And it’s seriously steep. The exercise is sharpening the appetites of Hereford’s ample support. The regular tea-bar, and that extra marquee, are doing a roaring trade with the high numbers of visiting support. Even despite the more-than-walletfriendly prices (there are few other grounds that offer such a generous chips-to-coinage ratio), those volunteers are probably still counting the takings a week later. As well as boosting the coffers of the home team, the travelling support of the better-supported teams are tremendous ambassadors for the semi-pro game – hopelessly devoted and unwaveringly committed. Nowhere was this commitment shown more than a few weeks back when the ever-growing fan base of high-flying South Shields had their devotion tested by the FA Vase draw. They were pitched against Southampton-based Team Solent, but the best part of 500 Shields fans headed south. The distance didn’t faze them. It’s a full 328 miles between Mariners Park and the Test Park sports ground. And the laws of mathematics tell us that it’s a full 328 miles all the way home again. But such trips aren’t seen as an obligation, a duty. Not in Non-League, at least. Here there’s much more of a sense of adventure and excitement attached to them. Whereas the travelling support of Premier League or Championship clubs find increasingly interchangeable experiences awaiting them at increasingly interchangeable stadia, no two Non-League grounds are the same. They’ve all got their own particular character.
Adventure
And if you’re a fan of a club that’s bounding its way up through the divisions – like Hereford or South Shields – you’re unlikely to be revisiting a particular ground for a good long while. Indeed, I suspect South Shields and Team Solent won’t make each other’s acquaintance again for several generations, if ever. Just ask fans of Bristol Rovers for verification. Gasheads look back with great fondness at their one-season-only excursion into the fifth tier (or the first tier, rather) in 2014-15. Here they diligently took their devotion to Alfreton and Telford and Braintree, previously unexplored footballing territory for Bristol’s northern quarter. Admittedly, such fondness may well not have been their over-riding emotion at the time, I suspect these tales took on a rosier hue only after the event, when their escape route out of thethen Conference Premier had been secured. Down in the segregationfree environs of the pyramid where Hereford and South Shields currently call home, there’s a great appeal in taking your love on the road. Again, it’s the sense of adventure, of camaraderie across the motorway network, of being treated properly once you arrive. What’s not to like? No p***-taking prices at the tea bar, no interminable wait while the rest of the ground empties at the end of the game and no jobsworth stewards herding you straight back onto the coach. And at Larkhall, of course, those coaches were all the way back down that hill anyway. Nige Tassell is the author of The Bottom Corner: A Season With The Dreamers Of Non-League Football (Yellow Jersey Press)