It feels as though the new football season has started a little too soo this afternoon. A summer
which had rather looked as if it might not arrive at all has settled to a ninety degree heat from
which there is no respite, even in the shade. Even by the coast in Brighton, this is weather that
simply makes you want to curl up and fall asleep.
In November of last year, a non-league football club made its first appearance at its new home
ground. This in itself is nothing truly remarkable. After all, football clubs relocating has been a
common enough sight over the last quarter of a century or so. For this particular club, though, the
move was a special one, bringing, as it did, to an end twelve years of asset-stripping, internecine
arguing and a battle to keep senior football alive in a borough on the periphery of London that had
become synonymous with one of the best known names in non-league football.
The end of season play-offs are both exhilarating and exhausting. For the clubs that finish in
places just below the automatic promotion places, everything comes down those two or three matches
at the end of the season and they come so quickly after the end of the normal league season that
the work that has gone into securing a place just above that dotted line can feel as if it has come
and gone all too quickly.
This weekend saw the end of the normal season for many of the leagues below the Football League
and the beginning of the play-offs in some. This weekend, we're going to have a look at a few of
the outstanding issues at the top and bottom of the leagues, starting in the Blue Square Bet South,
where a Sutton United side jostling for the best position possible in the play-off positions was at
home against a Farnborough team that has only narrowly avoided relegation at the bottom of the
table.
It is not that often that league title races are open enough to go to the final day of the
season with the whereabouts of the championship trophy still undecided, but this season two of the
divisions of the Ryman League will end with five clubs still hoping to win automatic promotion as
champions of their division.
As the 2011/12 season enters its final straight, we have six matches from six different
competition this week to make our Non-League Videos Of The Week. First up is the FA Trophy
Semi-Final First Leg between Newport County of the Blue Square Premier and Wealdstone of the Ryman
League Premier Division.
After all the excitement of the recent rounds of cup matches in the FA Cup and FA Trophy over
the last couple of weeks, it was back to the league for non-league football this weekend, and we
have highlights from six matches for you this evening. From the Blue Square Premier, we have the
match between Forest Green Rovers and Lincoln City.
After twelve years, comes the return home. Enfield Town have been a going concern for more
longer than a decade now, but today is the day that normality, perhaps, began to return to this
particular corner of North London. They've already played a clutch of matches here a friendly to
open the ground against a Tottenham Hotspur XI, a Middlesex Senior Cup match and a Ryman League Cup
match but today sees the arrival of league football to The QE2 Stadium, which has already on
account of its Donkey Lane postal address earned itself the nickname of "The Donkeydome.
Just over ten years after their formation, Enfield Town return to a ground of their own at
The QE2 Stadium on Wednesday. The first match is a Middlesex Senior Cup tie against Harefield
United on Wednesday 9th November followed by a Ryman League Cup tie against AFC Sudbury on Monday
14th November.
We have matches for you this evening, as our Non-League Videos Of The Week. Our first comes from
the Blue Square Premier, and is the match between Mansfield Town and Cambridge United. Our second
is from the Blue Square South, and is between Woking and Havant & Waterlooville. We then have two
matches from this weekend's FA Trophy Second Qualifying Round, with Bury Town playing Hythe Town,
and Hednesford Town playing Matlock Town.
The football clubs of the Premier League and the Championship had a break for another round of
international matches this weekend, but there were few such luxuries for the butchers, bakers and
candlestick makers of non-league football with a round of fixtures which included the Preliminary
Round of another competition which has suffered a little damage to its reputation in recent years,
the FA Trophy.
This week's non-league videos of the week come from a variety of different competitions,
including the Second Qualifying Round of the FA Vase. First up, though, is the match between
Cambridge City and Banbury United in the Southern League Premier Division. Cambridge were beaten in
the play-offs in this league last season, and are hoping to go one better than that this this
season, whilst Banbury United are are hoping to challenge for the championship themselves.
It was Non-League Day this weekend, as you will all now be thoroughly aware, so to close up on
this it's time for this week's Non-League Videos Of The Week, this week featuring no fewer than six
matches, from the Blue Square Premier, the Blue Square South, the Northern Premier League, the
Southern League and the FA Cup.
Well, all of the leagues have finally started. The Isthmian League caught up with the rest and
started its competitive season this weekend, meaning that everyone has now started for the new
season, and this evening two of our four matches come from this league. First up, though, we're off
to Surrey for Chertsey Town's first match in Division One Central of the Southern League.
With the future of Supporters Direct still under threat, it is worth taking a moment to reflect
upon an anniversary that will most likely go unremarked upon elsewhere, but is still an anniversary
that has changed our perception of how football clubs can be run. Long before Chester FC or FC
United of Manchester, before even AFC Wimbledon were formed, the first club set up in protest at
the ownership of one individual took their first steps.
It is the end, then, of another long, hard season, and perhaps now is an appropriate time to be
looking at how those clubs that are owned and run by their supporters trusts this season managed to
fair. As AFC Wimbledon paraded the trophy that confirmed their accession into the Football League
nine years after their formation, the words of the FA's committee, that a new club in the borough
would be, "not in the wider interests of football", have never sounded more hollow.
The football situation in Enfield, North London, has been confused and fractured for several
years. Jason LeBlanc writes on the present and the future of football in the borough.
The Prime Minister will be aware that there are two great football clubs in north London,
Tottenham Hotspur and Enfield Town.
The weather had its say in the non-league programme this weekend, but we are still able this week to bring you six matches from the matches that did manage to go ahead. First up is a match from the last thirty-two FA Vase between Newport (Isle of Wight) FC and Brighouse Town of the Northern Counties East League.
Enfield Town 2 Tottenham Hotspur 1 - Friendly Match
Enfield Town used to be a small market town in the County of Middlesex on the edge of
the forest about a day's travel north of London. As Greater London has grown, Enfield Town and its
surrounds have become a residential suburb.
Football is a passionate sport. It's played by passionate people, and followed by passionate
people, and without such people, the sport would not thrive the way that it does – as Jock Stein
famously said, "Football without the fans is nothing". The various governing bodies use the fact
that the game is passionate, and that football fans are passionate people in order to sell
television rights, and other marketing concepts around the world.
For many, many years, there were effectively no new football grounds built in Britain. Over
the last quarter of a century, though dozens upon dozens of clubs have bulldozed their ancestral
homes and moved on to pastures new. This summer, we hope to run a series of articles on the
subject of Britain's lost football grounds, and we're starting this off with a repost from 2009 on
the subject of Southbury Road, the late, lamented home of Enfield Football Club.
Quiet, isn't it? In years ending in an odd number, the Euro-centric football enthusiast's
calendar suddenly opens out before them like the savannah plains. The 2011 Women's World and the
European Under-21 Championships sit before us like twin oases and the press will continue to feed
the constant thirst with a drip of transfer stories, many of which will come to nothing and many
more of which will not become truth until the last possible moment before a ball is kicked in anger
again.