Keep the trouble away from football

This topic is one that was suggested to me a few weeks ago but it’s been finding the right moment to squeeze it in amongst other work, full time work and moving.

We discussed it on the podcast I’m involved in late last week (The Premier Non-League Podcast) as a growing concern that there are pockets of troublemakers starting to creep into the non-league game.

We’ve seen in decades gone by the level of violence mostly at the top level of the game and not just in this country, indeed that level of disturbance caused a European ban for English clubs at one point in the mid 80’s for a few years.

There are the odd reports these days of ‘meet up’s’ happening but it appears more low key and less frequent, if it wasn’t I’m sure social media would be picking up on it far more than I see, either that or I’m not following the right/wrong accounts to pick up on it.

Now the reason I’ve chosen to write about it is it seems to be coming a little too common for my liking over the past few months at the very least and at all levels of the non-league game.

Back in December a crowd of over 2,000 saw Worthing beat local rivals Bognor and there were a few unsavoury incidents within the game with constant abuse thrown at Bognor keeper Amadou Tangara, while you might not feel there’s much in that a lot of it was coming from young kids and not ones usually seen at games either, nothing done to stop it from the adults around them.

When the two sides clashed again in the Sussex Senior Cup around three weeks later, a crowd not too much smaller than before saw a fight break out just after the game had finished despite warnings made to Bognor that segregation should have been in place. Once again it appears that there were some spectators there who weren’t recognised as regulars of either club.

Now I know you can’t possibly remember all the faces who frequent your club especially when bigger crowds are present, but surely there would be someone out of 50-100 who go all the time would know who they were.

It hasn’t been isolated to Worthing either although there was a further issue which I will come to later in the piece. Almost four weeks ago Wealdstone visited The Hive and absolutely wrecked the away end to the point it could have endangered those there to watch a game of football.

The game was always going to have some needle to it given the recent history between the clubs and the ground situation but the damage caused included blocking all the toilets so they flooded and then pulling down all the electrical wiring in those areas meaning every chance one of their own could have been electrocuted.

Were they true Wealdstone supporters or more just jumping on the hostile bandwagon and deciding to bring their own chaos to the situation? So far that remains to be seen as I believe investigations are on-going over the cost of damage and loss of earnings for Barnet FC.

Speaking to Bromley fans on Twitter as I do quite often it seems a few jumped on that bandwagon when they recently played Southend Utd away. A fiver a ticket seemed to add a few that weren’t recognised to the away following, whether it was Southend people that decided infiltrating the visiting support and trying to start a series of fights in that end or just some deciding the football wasn’t enough and a few punches were, who knows!

After Littlehampton’s FA Vase penalty shoot out win last month over Brockenhurst there were reports of trouble after from the near 1,300 crowd and there was a viral video of the visiting keeper getting whacked during the pitch invasion, problems that saw Hampton unable to host a crowd of more than 1,500 for this weekend’s quarter-final tie until earlier on Sunday it was announced it was allowed to be increased to 2,200.

Success does encourage the hangers-on and leeches who add themselves to the mix, the ones who think a day on the beer and then either shouting a bunch of constant foul mouthed abuse is appropriate or actually throwing a few punches is the way non-league football like it.

It’s not always that success reason that invites them along, in my opinion it’s also the likelihood of succeeding in what they want to do and not getting caught because of a lack of stewards or police presence.

Only a week ago, police attended Woodside Road at half time after Enfield fans turned nasty against Worthing. Only it wasn’t fans of Enfield but believed to be Spurs fans who didn’t fancy the away trip to Leeds for 12.30 ko and decided the South Coast should be the troubled destination.

We know of course it’s unlikely to be someone we know to be in the thick of it, but we don’t want these undesirables attaching themselves to our clubs and our grounds, why they feel they need to is beyond me. Is it being priced out of PL matches? Is it as mentioned above a lower police presence and smaller stewarding levels? I don’t what it is exactly but I don’t want it anywhere near the game to be quite honest.

I wouldn’t be surprised to know there are a few more instances I haven’t seen on social media or haven’t been reported anywhere, I hope these are few and far between and there aren’t more I see over the course of the next couple of months, but I think we’re all agreed we don’t want these people across the non-league game…….