Next to the pool table in the compact and, in its own little way, cosy clubhouse of the 61 FC hangs a framed England goalkeeper shirt signed by Paul Robinson.
“There’s a story behind that,” Richard Everitt, one of the club’s founders and six decades later still club secretary, recalls from behind the bar where he is fixing a cup of tea. “It covers where burglars tried to get in through the wall.”
They attempted to smash through the wall? “Oh yeah,” he adds, walking around the pool table. “And over there.” He points to a spot where a patch of bricks look newer than the rest and four pins hold a metal plate outside. “And there.” He points to a crack in the ceiling. “They tried to come in through the roof one time.”
This is life at the other end of the English football pyramid. Everyone knows about the Premier League at its apex, with its billionaire squabbles, outlandish spending and regular rule breaking. But The i Paper has come to this tiny alcove of Luton, just off the A505, to find out what it’s like being a club at the bottom, why people stick with it and how they keep going.
During an illuminating hour, Everitt tells a harsh story of survival, unfair relegations, the strange football purgatory many clubs in the seventh tier of the pyramid are stuck in, unable to be relegated yet without the requisite facilities for promotion. He recalls the astonishing tale of a match abandoned due to a murder, the hard times and the good, and describes the love, underpinning it all, of a football club living on the edge of the English system that refuses to let it die.
You’d struggle to get more bottom than the 61 FC. This season, they have lost 15 of 15 games, conceded 107 times, scored nine. Their heaviest defeat is 12-0.
Two seasons ago, they finished bottom conceding 181 goals in 32 games – almost six goals per game – with two wins and a draw all season and a goal difference of -164. Last season saw a relative improvement – conceding only 84 goals. They still finished bottom.
“It’s tough, but in a funny sort of way you build up a camaraderie about it,” Everitt says. “Oh, we’ve been beaten 12-0, we go in the bar afterwards, we have some food and a laugh and a joke with the other team. What more can you do? You can’t cry.”
They have finished bottom in six of the last seven seasons (they finished second bottom in the other one) in a kind of reverse Manchester City. All played out in the Second Division of the Spartan South Midlands Football League, because it is impossible to be relegated. “There’s nowhere to go,” Everitt says.
“Why do we carry on? Well, other clubs haven’t. You go back 10 years within a mile of here were three other clubs in the pyramid – Brache Sparta, Luton Old Boys and Kent Athletic – they’ve all gone. Because they haven’t got an old man like me saying, ‘No, we’re going to keep doing it’.”
A frustration for Everitt is that the club’s position is not entirely of their own making. It wasn’t so long ago they competed in the fifth block of the pyramid, until the Football Association introduced rules meaning clubs had to have a certain standard of facilities to play at various levels.
“We got to the South Midlands Premier Division,” Everitt explains. “We won the County Cup in ‘84. We had a really good period. In the ‘90s the FA brought in the ground grading rules. We finished seventh in the Premier and got relegated because we hadn’t got the facilities.”
They tried to comply, raising money for floodlights and getting permission from the council, who own the pitch, to install them. “The following season not only do you need floodlights, the ground has to be enclosed and you have to be able to take money from a gate. We couldn’t do it. It’s a public park.
“So we’re down from One to Two. Not because we weren’t any good but because the FA deemed the pyramid should be based on the facilities not ability.
“When a footballer comes here on a Saturday afternoon they’ve got decent changing rooms, good kit, they come into the bar afterwards, we cook good food, we look after them well – what more do you want?”
Many other clubs like the 61 FC are now essentially trapped at the bottom of the pyramid. Old Bradwell United finished top in four successive seasons but were blocked from the league above.
“In our league table there are only about three teams who can go up. That’s a huge problem with the pyramid,” Everitt says. “The FA have created this, but they don’t really look down at our level. They’re not interested in it.”
Old Bradwell, he points out, are starting to fade away after finishing in the top two for eight seasons. Being unable to offer promotion is a hard sell to potential players and turnover is high.
Last summer for the 61 FC was particularly bad. Preseason training and friendlies had been prepared when the manager called Everitt to say after 18 months he was leaving to take an assistant manager job higher up the leagues. The main issue? The manager had brought most of the players in, and they followed him, along with his assistant, a physiotherapist and even “a social media chap”.
“The club was left with barely anything,” Everitt says. “It was mayhem. We put stuff out on social media. Players came along. Some were nowhere near good enough. It took a long time to resolve, and we haven’t resolved it yet.”
Everitt, 81 years old, stepped into the manager’s role until they brought in Marvin Samuel, who lives in nearby Hitchin and had been coaching Letchworth Garden City Eagles, in the league above.
When they try to recruit players they are frequently asked if they can get promoted and the answer is no. “It’s always an obstruction and we’ve got no way of solving it. We’ve had a couple of good seasons in the last 10 years. We won the Beds Senior trophy twice. But when we win and finish high up the league, the following season the players all go to better teams.”
It is, it transpires, the same down this end as it is at the top: players scheming for moves to better clubs, people talking, rumours spreading, deals being done behind backs. “Players are offered £15 a game and off they go.”
“At the end of the day the Premier League reflects our football,” he adds.
Which is true, until Everitt tells some of the club’s stories and you realise it is, in fact, an entirely different world. “What other club in England has had a game abandoned after 25 minutes because of a murder?” he says.
Come again? “It was against Risborough Rangers, about 15 years ago. I was in the dugout. I noticed there were two young lads hanging around behind the far goal, and they weren’t regulars, and they seemed to be agitated with one another. While the game was going on they walked around the back of the clubhouse.
“Then a gunshot went off. One lad ran. Our lads tried to help the one who’d been shot. The lady in the kitchen brought towels out to stop the blood. But it was too late – he was dead. Three of the lads got a police commendation for trying to save him.
“Police swarmed the area, shut the park down. Poor old Risborough Rangers, they had a long drive back but they wouldn’t let them leave until about 6.30pm. They wanted to interview everybody.”
There have been around 10 break-in attempts, Everitt says. Eight years ago, they suffered an arson attack. There is a sloped driveway leading to the clubhouse and he “used to drive up it and dread what I’d find. Every day I’d think, ‘What’s going to happen today’? Sometimes I’d open the gate and see loads of cans of Coke and know we’d been broken into and they’d been dropped.”
That’s the sad thing about the break-ins – there really isn’t much to take. The 61 FC scrapes by with takings behind the bar, generous local businesses who offer the odd £100 in sponsorship to cover fees for officials, a handful of events which make money but only when they can get them.
Outside, the place isn’t much to look at. Inside, it is such a rich testament to history that people refer to it as “the museum”. Walk down the corridor from the entrance, past the changing rooms and the referees’ room, to reach the bar and there is a wide board with pictures and newspaper clippings acting as a shrine to the Beds Senior Cup win in 1984. As well as Robinson’s goalkeeper shirt, the bar walls are awash with memorabilia and pictures that map not only the football club but changing times.
The club started life as part of Christ Church in Old Luton. The vicar opened a youth club and a group of members formed the team.
The club’s name derives from the year it was founded by Everitt and “five or six” others. “The badge tells the story,” he says. “It was founded in 1961 and the badge is a cross.”
Originally, they were called the 61 Club – a nod to the youth club – but in 1970 they had to break away. The council was seeking a football club to take on the pitch at Kingsway Recreation Ground and they put their hand up.
But they needed funds to build a clubhouse and the vicar said they couldn’t run raffles as it was against God’s word. “So we became the 61 Football Club,” Everitt says.
They built a small red brick building by the pitch and extended it in 1972, 1976 and 1980.
Everitt was a secondary school teacher – in the first half of his career PE, the second geography. Through work he made connections with Luton Schoolboys and it all provided a great pool to recruit players.
Sixty-four years after it all began he is still here.
“I do love it,” he says. “What else would I be doing? Sat at home, bored to tears, watching daytime television. I’m 81 but I think I’m still with it. It keeps me young.
“Other people my age play bowls or go to golf with other old people. I don’t mix with old people. I’m meeting young people all the time.
“I got a message the other day from a player who’d made a mistake saying, ‘My bad’. I thought, ‘My God’.”
Everitt visits the clubhouse every day. “To make sure it’s still here!”
Does he think the club will survive after he’s gone?
“I’ve got a limited number of years,” he admits. “Although I’ve got a family line which means they all think I’m going to keep going. My grandad lived to 101 and my dad to 104. My dad was involved with the club until he was 101. They all think Richard Everitt is going to hang around for another 20 years. I’d hope it will carry on.”
Money is the major issue the club faces. We are talking at one of the bar tables and behind Everitt pinned on a corkboard is a printout of first-team matchday expenses. It costs £52 for a referee and £92 for two linesmen – “the biggest problem we have, raising that sort of money is very difficult.”
It is £30 to rent the pitch, £60 for food and the cook. The kit wash costs a tenner. Then there are things like the electricity bill.
They may only get 15 in for a home game and, not having a gate, can’t charge for tickets. They open the venue for events, which can be a lifeline, but usually book around eight or nine a year. “We took £700 behind the bar for one last year – that set us up for a month.”
Plus the sponsorship money – “that’s how we survive,” Everitt says.
When the roof leaked recently they crowdfunded £2,500 to patch it up. But they really need £15,000 for a new one. Again, therein lies another problem: the council will only give them a short-term lease of five years. To access funding through the Football Foundation or the Lottery, they require a 15-year lease.
A self-perpetuating cycle of struggle.
Meanwhile, the other existential issue is that “there are fewer and fewer volunteers”, he says. “People at the FA don’t realise the problem coming down the line. I’m 81, Pat Burns, chair of the South Midlands League, is 83. Barry Snelson, secretary for the Bedfordshire County League, is 82. They both desperately want to get out of it but nobody will step up. I think society in general, people don’t volunteer anymore. It’s concerning.”
I steer the conversation back to what it’s like conceding 100-plus goals in a season. “You love that don’t you! We’ve actually got a good goalkeeper as well. We’ve got a goalkeeper coach – at our level I’m proud of that. Rafael comes back every week and works with him. He comes to training every week. He’s not walked away; he’s stuck at it. That stickability is credit to them, isn’t it? To me that’s a positive.”
But what do you say to the players after a 12-0 defeat?
“The way I look at it: did the players do their best? Yes. What more can I ask?
“Well done lads, worked hard, didn’t go for you on the day, let’s go to the bar, have a drink and a bite to eat, we’ll go home. That’s football.”
Although it can, he admits, be hard to keep players motivated. Everitt grew suspicious of one player who ruled himself unavailable to play for several months with a “groin injury”.
“There has to be losers and winners in football,” he says. “At the moment we’re losers. And we’ve got to recover from that and get ourselves back in a better position.
“We will do it – we will recover.”
He adds: “Luton Town were in the Conference seven years ago. I remember being a boy when Manchester United and Liverpool were in Division Two and Luton were in Division One. You don’t give up.”
At the end of an enthralling interview, in which Everitt really has been a good sport to a stranger who has essentially come to talk to him about how rubbish his football team is, it pains me to ask if he thinks the 61 FC are the worst team in the country.
He shrugs. “If we are, we are. So be it. We are where we are. I’m not surrendering.”
from Football - The i Paper https://ift.tt/P5ydjg8
Post a Comment
EmoticonClick to see the code!
To insert emoticon you must added at least one space before the code.