Almanac English Soccer – League Two round up: Mates and the EFL (Dec 8)

 

 

League Two roundup

08/12/2024

 

Mateship and the EFL.

 

I have a friend, Bryan, who supports Tottenham in the Premier League. He’s unusual in a way in that as a supporter of one of the top teams in England, he has always maintained a keen interest in the lower divisions of the Football League.

 

‘You wouldn’t get that from an Arsenal supporter, Paul,’ he once told me.

 

He even has a top four list of non-league teams that he follows. It’s an evolving list that chops and changes, and was once a top five list, but Notts County were promoted back to the Football League last year, so the top five has been trimmed to a top four.

 

As of December 2024, Bryan’s top four list of non-league teams is:

 

1 – Marine, nicknamed the Lilywhites, are a Merseyside club who compete in the National League North.

 

2 – Barnet, a team from Harrow in London, who are known as the Bees and play at Hive Stadium in the National League.

 

3 – Ebbsfleet United, a club from Kent that rose from the ashes of two teams, Gravesend and Northfleet, in 2007. They won promotion from the National League South to the National League two seasons back but are currently mired in last position of the National League.

 

4 – Oldham Athletic. A founding member of the Premier League in 1992, the first former Premier League club to play non-league football and sit four places below Barnet on the table in the National League.

 

I’ve had no explanation from him as to why these clubs made his list. The colours of the team? Their nickname perhaps? Sympathy? Pity? I have no idea. Marine played Tottenham once in a FA Cup tie, maybe that’s why he likes them, and he’s been texting me Ebbsfleet’s results over the years.

 

I follow Wimbledon because I was listening to the radio in the middle of the night 28 years back and the commentators were laughing at the Dons smashing Chelsea at Stamford Bridge. Bryan has a far more interesting story than mine as to how he came to support Tottenham. He was 11 years old in 1981 and attended Papatoetoe Middle School in the south of Auckland. His home-room teacher, Mr. Tooley, an avid sports fan, informed his students that because there were the same number of students as football teams competing in Division One in the 1981-1982 season, and to keep the school year interesting, he put all the student’s names in a barrel with the names of the teams, matched each student with a team, and Bryan was drawn to support Tottenham. It was an exciting time to be a Spurs fan. They were in the middle of a successful FA Cup campaign; they were soon to beat Queens Park Rangers, and the previous year they come from behind to win against Manchester City. As any Tottenham supporter would know, when they beat City in 1981, it continued the strange feat of Spurs winning in the year that ended in ‘one’. Their two division one title wins occurred in 1951 and 1961, they won the FA Cup in 1901, 1921, 1961, 1981 and 1991, they won their first League Cup in 1971, and their sole Anglo-Italian League cup triumph was also in 1971. Unfortunately, besides three League Cup wins scattered across the following decades, it’s been a dry run for Tottenham, with no league or FA Cup other titles in 2001, 2011 or 2021.

 

‘We’ll win the treble in 2031,’ Bryan assures me. ‘Don’t you worry about that.’

 

‘Back in the ’80s,’ Bryan continues, ‘all the matches started and ended at the same time. I’d wake up in New Zealand when I was a kid at 6am and they’d broadcast the second half of a match on the radio, then I’d write the results down, and Shoot magazine had a cardboard ladder of all four divisions, and all the teams had their own individual card, so you could move the clubs up and down the ladder depending on the results. Then on the Monday, they’d have the highlights package on the telly.’

 

‘Mr. Tooley became a father figure for me. I looked him up online from time to time, trying to see if he’s still around. He got me into sport. I was 11 years old, and if you were looking for male role models other than your father, he was the first one for me. He also used to do this four-minute run every day. Every afternoon we’d go out onto the track, just our class, just to do a run, and that’s how I got into running. But without him, I probably wouldn’t follow English football.’

 

Bryan moved for New Zealand to Tottenham in 1991, – ‘it had to be Tottenham,’ to the suburb of Seven Sisters. ‘The Seven Sisters Road was where Tottenham Hotspurs’ stadium was. One end of the road was Arsenal, the other was Tottenham. That part of Tottenham, the Seven Sisters area back then had a very high concentration of Jamaicans living in the community.’

 

The only game he saw Spurs play was a home game at White Hart Lane where they lost to Chelsea. He saw Arsenal play at Highbury. It was the middle of winter; he had his Spurs shirt on under his bomber jacket. ‘Standing in the terraces, surrounded by Arsenal supporters with my Tottenham shirt on underneath my jacket, I would have been trampled if they had seen it. They had beaten Spurs three weeks back and were still chanting about it. Half of their chanting was about Tottenham, even though it was a United match. It was the last year of Arsenal’s North Bank terrace before it was pulled down. They drew a mural to give the players the illusion there was a crowd behind the goals after they demolished the stand.’

 

Bryan only stayed in England for seven months. ‘I saw England play Germany that year at Wembley – a reunited Germany. But London was miserable. It was winter, I was working in Watford and squatting in Hackney. The only illegal part of squatting was breaking in, but a Kiwi friend of mine knew someone who worked for Hackney Council, and he would give you the key to a vacant flat for a one-off payment for 200 pounds, then you could live in the flat rent free.’

 

Now living in the Blue Mountains of NSW, like me, he gets up a few times a night to check the results when the games are on.

 

‘Spurs are the sixth most popular sporting club on the planet. Sooner or later, they got to get it right. We have one of the best backlines in the League, we beat City twice in just over a month, then lose at home to Bournemouth. We’re not there yet.’

 

We have a tradition, where if I’m on holidays, I send him pictures of the names of towns I’m travelling through that share the same names as English football teams. On the top of the South Island of New Zealand is a suburb west of Nelson called Stoke. The guitar capital of Australia is Tamworth. Between Dubbo and Orange with a population of 300 people is a small village called Yeoval. Bryan does the same when he’s out delivering mail and comes across houses with names like, ‘Wrexham’ or ‘Millwall.’

 

Stoke plays in the championship alongside Millwall, and Wrexham, since the Ryan Reynolds-Rob McElhenney Hollywood takeover, are flying through the divisions and are second in League One, while Tamworth and Yeovil-Yeoval (it’s one letter difference) compete in the National League.

 

One of my favourite places to travel to is the inner northern suburbs of Melbourne. Carlton, Fitzroy, Clifton Hill, Collingwood; suburbs that retain their grand colonial architecture and are packed tightly together alongside Edwardian and Federation houses. There’s a thriving café culture spread across the suburbs, and with its youth and hipster/industrial scene, it’s a place where I could happily spend my days walking the streets and cobblestoned lined laneways. The first train stop after Clifton Hill on the Reservoir line is Rushall, named after the nearby retirement village. Rushall-Olympic, a midlands team near Walsall play in the National League North.

 

Which is a good enough excuse as any to get me back down to Melbourne to take a picture of a train station to send to Bryan.

 

 

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League Two results 07/12/2024

Crewe 1 Bradford 1

Port Vale 0 Walsall 1

Accrington 1 Bromley 2

Chesterfield 3 Tranmere 0

Doncaster 2 Cheltenham 2

Gillingham 1 Salford 0

Harrogate 0 Wimbledon 3

Morecombe 0 Grimsby 3

Swindon 3 Fleetwood 1

Postponed

Barrow v MK Dons

Newport v Carlisle

Notts vColchester

 

Note: After weeks of heading the table, Port Vale have slipped to second place; bottom teams Carlisle and Swindon have stabilised, and Tranmere and Morecombe are struggling.

 

View the table HERE

For more by Paul Harman click HERE

 

 

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