Sussex FA chief: ‘Specific guidelines will have to wait’
It’s been a while now since we have bneen able to watch football live, hasn’t it?
Yes, the Premier League is back, but what about local football? The semi-pro clubs of Sussex, ironically, were enjoying a rather good season when COVID-19 screeched it to a halt, although managers from the Pilot Field to Nyewood Lane have all been quite active in the lengthened close season.But what about the grass roots?
The Sussex County FA is the guardian of the game and the provider of a framework that provides football for literally thousands – youth leagues to village clubs to disability football to walking football. Players, referees, coaches, physios, volunteer officials and yes, even sports reporters are desperate to get the action back. Step up please, Ken Benham, chief executive of Sussex FA.
Benham said: “Well, we are all having to be patient. Almost everything is on hold – our headquarters at Culver Road in Lancing is normally alive, 12 months of the year.
“Staff, visitors, courses, matches out on the 3G, telephones ringing in both ears. Fight for a parking space.
“But right now it’s almost empty. We did furlough 19 staff and keep seven staff still working, recently increased to eight, since our stadium manager Adrian Howell is back – encouragingly – to start getting ready for staging games again ‘as and when’.”
And are there any blueprints out there, on how relatively small clubs and grounds would set about staging matches? “We’ve seen various statements from the Government and the FA, and we have done our own assessments of what we believe we would need to do here at Lancing, but official specific guidelines will have to wait, it seems, until we have a clearer indication of a re-start date.
“A presentation is just being sent out to clubs in the leagues in the National League Structure – the pyramid that goes from our senior semipro clubs down through the Isthmian divisions and the Southern Combination. This will give the chance for some thinking ahead.
“No two clubs are identical, but all will share very similar issues around safety and sanitisation, physical distancing, and such issues as safe passages and routes within and around a ground. There was talk at one point of events having a 500-spectator maximum – which ironically might well work for lowerleague football!”
Plenty of challenges, Ken? “Challenges, but not ones that can’t be overcome with good planning, and a good old bit of British resourcefulness.
“What is really positive is that the FA are updating us very frequently indeed – for example there is bound to be a lot of learning from experience, now that the Premier League and EFL are up and running, albeit behind closed doors. We can’t set it all in stone, we need to be adaptable as the situation evolves.”
In a normal season – assuming that we can ever again use a term like normal – Sussex FA would be running dozens of courses: refereeing, sports medicine, coach education, safeguarding and diversity, club administration. What is happening to those?
“Absolutely everything is on the back burner at the moment. Our advice is that the earliest resumption of those activities is January 2021. It’s unavoidable, but it’s a headache on several fronts. Here at the County FA we are training and validating the people who actually run the sport, and in normal circumstances we have a constant flow of courses, and people willing and eager to join them.
“For the short term, we can manage. We might have referees needing to re-register and to apply for higher grading. It’s a little bit like giving six months’ grace on your vehicle MoT – we can put it on hold for a while. But there will certainly be a nice little log-jam to cope with, once normal service can resume.
“There are also some quite major repercussions for the County FA’s own income stream.
“We fund football through sources like club affiliation fees, course fees, not to mention players’ fines! It all goes back into the game, but we cannot run on fresh air.”
“But the most encouraging aspect – pleasingly and very slightly surprisingly – is that the level of interest has actually risen. Whereas you might have expected a bit of a drift away from football, and possibly from other sports, we are getting brand new enquiries from people wanting to start a new team or new club at grassroots level. It’s just waiting to happen.”