The Bromley Boys Page 9

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I’d decided to watch Bromley matches from a different position, beginning with tonight’s game. To start with, I was fed up with loud marching music and the sound of Charlie King at full volume. The other thing was superstition. I’d sat in the same place during Bromley’s recent decline and wondered if a change might benefit the team as well as myself.

  I saw The Grubby sitting alone behind the goal Bromley would be attacking. As always, he had a couple of cups of steaming hot tea on the bench beside him and an Embassy cigarette between his lips.

  I decided to join him.

  The whole move was carried out without words. I got myself a cup of tea and wandered over to the bench where he sat. I then indicated the place next to him with a nod of my head and he nodded slightly, his unspoken way of saying that he had no objection to me sitting there. I sat down and we both gazed out into the night, waiting for an end to the torture our team had been putting us through.

  The committee had sprung a couple of surprises. Gasmask Gaston was making one of his rare excursions outside his printing business and Postman Pat Brown had been pushed up front to play alongside Alan Stonebridge.

  It didn’t seem to make much difference. Bexley, despite being bottom of the Southern League, were much the better side and took an early lead, which resulted in The Grubby angrily throwing his almost-finished cigarette to the concrete floor and grinding it violently with his heel.

  ‘Rubbish,’ he growled.

  I nodded in agreement.

  When Bromley got an unexpected equaliser 15 minutes later The Grubby’s face burst into a broad smile. He got to his feet and, with his arms raised above his head and cigarette hanging from his mouth, applauded the goal scorer, Bobby Lennox. He turned to me and said ‘Beautiful’.

  My new friend’s mood had visibly lifted.

  It didn’t last long, of course. Bexley scored again and held on until the end, despite a great late effort from Ginger Warman. There was also a brief cameo from the other Dave Clark, which demonstrated why he had made the starting line-up of neither team that season.

  As the players walked off, I turned to The Grubby and saw him hunched despondently over his empty cup of tea, taking the final drag of the eighth cigarette he’d smoked since I’d been sitting next to him.

  He looked the way I felt. He was clearly experiencing the same pain that I was. I turned to him, shook my head and said ‘Rubbish’. He shook his head too, looking downcast and got to his feet.

  We then wandered off in different directions, lost in our thoughts.

  •••

  The next day at school I was determined to discuss the match with him. I found him sitting on his own in the canteen and sat down with him. The shocking thing was how talkative he was. It seemed that he got so involved in football, so focused on the game, that he was unable to communicate and watch at the same time.

  I understood this. It was exactly how I felt. But away from Hayes Lane, he was a different person. We found plenty of common ground. We were both goalkeepers, both liked music and both drank a lot of tea.

  Our favourite player was the only area we differed. Mine was Alan Stonebridge, of course. His was Johnny Warman – a man who, like The Grubby himself, was ginger-haired with a fragile temperament.

  The Grubby had just turned 16 and didn’t seem to fit in at school. When everyone else had a number one, two or three crop, he wore his hair parted in the middle and halfway down his back. He complemented this with an unfashionable moustache, which I suspected had been started around the same time as Jeff Bridge’s. The full-back had shaved his off when Bromley’s unbeaten run had come to an end; The Grubby’s remained.

  He was different in other ways, too. While others walked around with Trojan or Motown records tucked ostentatiously under their arms, The Grubby carried a copy of Those Who Are About To Die Salute You by Colosseum, an awful jazz-rock LP, which he played me many times over the next few years. However many times I heard it though, it always sounded as bad as it had the first time.

  His passion, apart from Bromley FC, was drumming. But not in the Dave Clark sense. That was ‘too commercial’. He idolised Colosseum’s drummer, Jon Hiseman, and was in a local band called Monolith, who sounded identical to Colosseum.

  They were not hugely successful, which delighted him as any form of success would have been seen as selling out.

  The Grubby also seemed uninterested in the academic side of school, which was its main purpose. I gathered that his parents had bribed him to stay at school and so he turned up every day and went through the motions. I was shocked to learn that he had eight ‘O’ levels. But the more I found out about him, the less surprising it was to know he was a Bromley supporter. He didn’t seem to fit in.

  I was beginning to see a theme emerging. The big clubs like Arsenal attracted the masses, those with normal social skills who had no problem being accepted by society at large. People at ease in large groups.

  The small amateur clubs like Bromley were for the rest of us. The Grubby, I learnt, was absolutely fanatical about Bromley. But while he would never miss a home game, he resolutely refused to travel to away games for reasons that never became clear.

  •••

  There were mixed omens for the Oxford City away game and I wasn’t sure which one was the more meaningful.

  It was definitely our unlucky ground. In the last nine seasons, Bromley had lost all nine games at the White House Ground, scoring just seven goals and conceding a miserable 38.

  On the other hand, the referee was Mr KA Duff of West Moseley, our lucky ref, who had been in charge when we held Enfield to a draw earlier in the season.

  I decided to go with the talismanic Mr Duff and looked forward to an exciting, close game, despite it being the longest coach trip of the season.

  My confidence was tested by Peter’s news of today’s absences from the Bromley line-up. Gasmask couldn’t make it for reasons that weren’t clear but probably had something to do with printing. Roy Pettet, Colin Owen, Bill Hennessey, Eric Nottage and Phil Amato had all visited hospital for various reasons during the week and were likely to miss the trip to Oxford. Eddie Green was still injured and Alan Bonney was still on holiday. Pat Brown was working, although I wasn’t sure I believed it since there was no post on a Saturday afternoon. Maybe he was just fed up with losing.

  As I had only discovered a week or so ago, Dave Clark had mysteriously left for Bexley without playing a game. If you also included the recently departed John Mears, that there was an entire team of Bromley players who wouldn’t be playing for Bromley today.

  I suddenly wondered if the presence of Mr KA Duff could really make up for the much-weakened team Bromley would be forced to put out.

  My worries were well founded. In the next hour and a half, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Mr KA Duff’s habit of giving dubious penalties continued – except this time it was Bromley on the receiving end. Twice. And twice Oxford scored from the spot. He then booked Doug Head in an act of gross injustice.

  Oxford scored five more goals through a variety of means, ranging from a lob that was completely misjudged by Ian McGuire to a gift-goal donated by Chris Sellens, our latest centre-half who was a former England youth international.

  The final score was Oxford City 7 Bromley 0.

  I later heard that Bromley chairman/ground announcer/ programme seller Charlie King was apoplectic with rage at the result. He conceded that the long coach journey from Bromley had given the Oxford team an advantage, but was deeply unhappy about the lack of effort from the players. At first, I laughed, thinking that these were desperate excuses from an old fogey.

  Then I realised that I agreed with him. The team really didn’t appear to have been trying and that was wrong. Myself and a coach-load of supporters had made a six-hour round journey to support them and they had simply gone through the motions.

  At least I had learnt that an unlucky ground easily outweighed a lucky referee.


  By now I was starting to sense that this was a bit more than an unlucky run where results were going against us.

  Games were taking on a predictable pattern. The Grubby and I would sit with perhaps a dozen other spectators behind the goal at the Norman Park end of the ground.

  We would go through anguish as the team continued to plumb new depths. One game blended into another. The opposition was different but the result was always the same. Another defeat.

  The contest was generally over by the half-hour mark. Tonight’s Kent Floodlit Cup game against Grays was the perfect example. Grays, who were third from bottom of the Athenian League, were completely dominating their supposedly more illustrious opponents.

  Within 30 minutes, they were 3–0 up and that was the way it stayed.

  None of the Bromley players seemed to be making any effort. They just looked relieved to get through 90 minutes.

  The sense of feeling let down, that had started at the Oxford game, was now growing. It was Bromley’s ninth successive defeat and my programme notes consisted of just one sentence:

  9. P. Brown 8.30 PM consolation goal

  The next game for Bromley was another one that hadn’t attracted enough interest for the Supporters’ Club to run a coach.

  It was easy to see why. Sutton were league leaders and were also in the middle of a brilliant FA Cup run. Bromley were second from bottom and had already been knocked out of the FA Cup.

  The odds were stacked against Bromley.

  Despite this, Derek, Roy and I were in high spirits as we made the short journey from Derek’s maisonette to Sutton’s ground in Gander Green Lane. We all believed an upset was possible. When top teams played bottom teams, the scores were often closer than people thought they’d be. The top teams relaxed a bit too much and the bottom team lifted their game.

  And that’s what looked like happening in this match, until something happened that typified Bromley’s tendency to be architects of their own misfortune.

  The seeds for the inevitable defeat had been planted the week before, when the Isthmian League had voted to introduce Bromley’s suggested rule change, with immediate effect.

  This meant that substitutes could now be used for any reason, instead of just for injuries – a rule that had been used in the Football League since the 1967/1968 season and had inexplicably taken two years to drift down to the lower leagues.

  It made me feel good that my team had been responsible for such a radical piece of legislation. It had all come about because of the incompetence of previous manager Dave Ellis, who hadn’t been aware of the existing ‘injuries only’ law and had substituted Graham Farmer for tactical reasons in the opening game of the season at Wycombe. The club received a formal warning and this prompted them to lobby for change.

  The first team to take advantage of the new law was Sutton United in tonight’s game at their Gander Green Lane ground, my third-favourite ground to visit after Walthamstow Avenue and Clapton.

  They were a goal down to Bromley well into the second half, after Ginger Warman had put us ahead with a glorious effort just before half-time and a real shock result was on the cards.

  Or at least it was until Sutton brought on their history-making substitute, Ken Grose, to replace former Bromley forward Ray Hutchings, who was having a nightmare against his old club.

  There was an air of inevitability amongst the more seasoned Bromley supporters about what was about to happen next.

  Grose scored a quickfire hat-trick and Sutton ran out easy 3–1 winners. If only Bromley hadn’t proposed the rule change, they probably would have won.

  Charlie King was surely close to breaking point. He’d seen his team lose because of inferior floodlighting, incompetent refereeing, bumpy pitches and now through a rule change that he himself had forced through.

  The stress must have been enormous.

  And it was.

  Charlie King announced that he would be taking a two and a half month cruise around the world, starting in early January.

  His trip would take in South Africa, Australia and America and he would be returning in time for the final six games of the season – but, and this was probably a good thing for his health – he would miss at least ten games.

  Several lower-profile committee members would share his workload.

  According to Peter, Mr King would be receiving telegrams with the results and goal scorers while he was away.

  I wished someone had done that for me when I was at Sevenoaks. It would have saved me a small fortune in phone calls.

  •••

  The crisis at Hayes Lane was building.

  Apart from the massive amount of injuries, players were regularly walking out, sometimes without bothering to notify anyone.

  At a time like this, the last team you’d want to play would be St Albans, a strong, attacking side who were currently second in the table and were the form team.

  In contrast, Bromley were second from bottom and had the worst defensive record in the league. A loss today would be their eleventh in a row. Even Crystal Palace, who were being held up by the press and boys at school as an example of a team in crisis, were doing better. And they hadn’t won any of their last nine league games.

  Bromley had made some new signings to cover all the injuries and resignations, but none fired the imagination. There was Ray Ransom, the General Manager’s son, John Sullivan, described in unexciting terms as ‘a midfield player from Crawley,’ and John Somerville, who ‘played for Southborough on Sundays and West Wickham on Saturdays’.

  There was also a rumour that Jim Roberts, one of our better centre-forwards in recent years, was rejoining the club. If it was true, this was good news. But I was also a bit scared of being found out about my claim that he was my uncle. I’d told Peter this in my early days of following Bromley, when I was desperately eager to impress him.

  The injuries, according to Peter, were even worse than was thought. Alan Stonebridge was having to play through the pain barrier every time he took the field due to boils on his leg, which explained why he hadn’t scored in the past six matches. Eric Nottage’s knee had swollen up like a balloon and was why he’d gone 11 games without a goal.

  The Grubby and I sat together for 90 gloomy minutes, the rain pelting diagonally under the roof of the terrace behind the goal, soaking us to the skin. It was so bad that it rendered several of his cigarettes unsmokable and he had to keep lighting fresh ones. He cleverly stopped the rain getting into his tea by placing the saucer over the cup.

  Bromley’s tactics appeared to be the standard response to any crisis. Revert to safety first. Defenders passed the ball back to Ian McGuire at the slightest hint of danger. Even the midfield sometimes saw going backwards a better option than going forward.

  The theory being that if St Albans didn’t have the ball, they couldn’t score. I felt this was a risky strategy, especially with own-goal specialist Alan Bonney back in the side after his recent holiday.

  It worked for about half an hour, when a bizarre piece of goalkeeping handed St Albans the opening goal on a plate. McGuire advanced out of his goal to meet the winger who had broken through the feeble Bromley defence. Despite being out of his area, he tried to dive at the feet of the bemused attacker who then rounded his prone body with ease and walked the ball into the empty net.

  It wasn’t just McGuire who was going through the horrors. Phil Amato, after his brief spell of looking like a half-decent player, reverted to his more familiar uselessness. This peaked with a succession of passes which went into empty spaces and stayed there until a grateful St Albans player retrieved the ball.

  But the expected avalanche of goals didn’t materialise. Instead, Eric Nottage dribbled into the area in an almost exact replica of my run for Hayesford Park Reserves against Forresters.

  He was just in the process of rounding the goalie when he was tripped. The referee (Mr AH Cooper, hometown not specified) decided to award a penalty and the sense of excitement that had been m
issing for the past few home games was back.

  The Grubby and I didn’t move. We didn’t need to as we already had the perfect view.

  Alan Stonebridge picked the ball up, placed it on the faded white spot, most of which had been washed away by the unrelenting rain.

  I knew exactly what Stonebridge was going to do. But did Mackie, the visiting goalie?

  I held my breath as my idol ran into take the penalty. I glanced over as The Grubby was taking a deeper than usual drag from his cigarette, causing the end to glow a bright orange against the fading daylight.

  Alan Stonebridge was nonchalant. With a subtle sway of the hips, he sent the hapless goalie one way and the ball firmly into the roof of the net.

  My heart felt as though it was about to burst with joy. I wanted to hug The Grubby, but decided I didn’t really know him well enough just yet.

  It was just like the old days. The whole team seemed to lift as a result and Bromley were actually looking the most likely to win. The only blemish in this period came when Postman Pat Brown stopped a defender by rugby tackling him.

  The Grubby tutted in disapproval. He was a purist and didn’t like to see that kind of thing on a football pitch.

  Then, in a heartbreaking few minutes, Ian McGuire gave St Albans two goals. The first was when he dribbled the ball to the edge of his penalty area and then allowed the number ten, John Butterfield, to take it off him with laughable ease and slotted the ball in easily.

  The next act was even more generous. Butterfield headed a corner straight at him. This time McGuire, his confidence visibly shattered, stood paralysed as the ball passed inches over his head and into the net.

  At least Bromley showed a bit of fight. First Ginger Warman and then Eric Nottage both came close. A Stonebridge header skimmed the bar before bouncing off the corrugated iron at the back of the stand and into The Grubby’s arms. I noticed that he took it well, getting his chest right behind the ball.

  When the final whistle went, neither of us was too downcast. It was a greatly improved performance, making me think that we were about to turn the corner.