Hitchin: To the Top Field — Terrace Edition

Words: Tom Reed

Images: Tom Reed

Shot on film and digital where stated.

It’s nice that during a time of global social and political instability, England retains it’s addiction with 22 players mainly miscontrolling footballs and shinning the spheres into touch.

This football obsession comes to a head during the “international break”, in which the Premier League is halted, to allow the national team a fixture or two, while even matches at League 2 level are postponed due to call-ups to obscure nations for players that never really seemed to have it in them.

There should be TV adverts for a special medicated cream for the specific condition of “ants in your pants” suffered by football supporters that simply don’t know what to do with themselves when the Premier League grinds to a halt and the luscious locked Anthony Gordon takes up the bandwidth with home truths about the Spanish being better with controlling footballs and not shinning the spheres into touch.

Lacking tubes of football anusol, social media is full of comments about how “boring” the break is and how “pointless” international friendlies are.

Fortunately, non-league football, that of five levels below the Premier League and below, runs straight through the whole thing, a blinking beacon of sport like a 24-hour petrol station, doing excellent trade for those that know where to look.

©Tom Reed/ Terrace Edition. Hitchin Town FC. On film.

Maybe it’s that ability of clubs such as Hitchin Town FC to slow things down and distill football to its purest form that is actually unsettling to modern day football fans that expect everything on-demand and with a slickness that is almost video game like?

Yet, those that can glitch the top-tier matrix and take an afternoon at a classic old-school ground like the Top Field at Hitchin, can find that there is more to life than the Premier League and that football can be about something else entirely.

There’s some supporters sitting out the front of Hitchin’s bar, where the beer comes first as it should, that are sitting on the porch like they are on the Bayou.

You half expect them to start up a cajun ditty by the Hackberry Ramblers as they half-watch the car park attendant, who has done the job for 65 years, keep an eye out for those “parkingly challenged”.

Hitchin does signage well, there’s one for a beer garden, which all football grounds need and another well typefaced board reading “FA Cup Originals”. The predecessor club Hitchin FC took part in the inaugural 1871-72 FA Cup, playing a team of workers from the great glass building of the 1851 Great Exhibition known as “Crystal Palace” in the first round.

Maybe it’s that long history that allows Hitchin Town the benefit of being so laid back as to be horizontal. They have created an environment that does make you wonder what the fuss is about in the top levels of English football. A smorgasbord of non-league sport spilling out rather than the tight terrine of the Premier League.

The safety stewards are completely hands off, there’s no one telling to to do this or that, which means you are left to enjoy the match in your own way.

Some ultras had turned up from opponents Leiston FC in deepest Suffolk, a couple of miles from Sizewell B nuclear power station. Little is known about Leiston FC other than they play at Victory Road, which is a pain when they lose. Their chairman is called Andy Crisp.

The six or seven Leiston Ultras sit contemplatively on the vast open concrete terrace on one end of Top Field, being able to go wherever they want with their drum and not restricted to an away section like they would if Mr Crisp ever got them to the football League.

There used to be several fields in this part of Hitchin and presumably a bottom field but what remains has been carefully curated into one of England’s finest remaining traditional football venues, by not doing much at all.

In a country where antiques shops and auctions are all the rage and vinyl is having its moment over digital downloads, all Hitchin Town need to do is sit and wait and watch their home become a sought after objet d’art.

There’s timber terraces and a wooden main stand with its contrast red plastic seats, which could serve as a station for a heritage steam railway, the punters listening to the huffs and puffs of the players instead of a GNR Class 23.

A certain comfort drifts through the trees, knowing that supporters saved Top Field back in 2014 via a protest campaign against the ground being sold to developers for a supermarket. Thousands marched through the Hertfordshire Town to suggest it wasn’t such a good idea and that was that.

As the match kicks-off, the groundsman stands happily in his yellow and green bucket hat, watching over the playing surface which is mainly flat and dotted with orange autumn leaves like vintage Britvic beer-mats.

He talks about crows playing havoc with the pitch, digging up the soil to get at the leather-jackets below and chuckles at the notion of throwing some sausages down the sidelines to keep the corvids off the grass.

There’s a proud father in his Hitchin bobble-hat, which wouldn’t look out of place at Carrow Road, Norwich with their shared canary motifs.

He’s the father of Hitchin’s captain, a strapping centre-back and happily chats about those known unknowns that distinguish world-class central defenders and their standard stock counterparts that keep everything solid at the back.

Kids muck about and swing off the crush barriers, doing all the stuff that will keep them coming to the Top Field for years to come. A cavapoo dogs sits regally, unsure as to why it isn’t at the feet of royalty, while the queue for the food stand meanders past and the football is moved from back to front and occasionally shinned into touch.

At half-time you get a little ink stamp of a football on your hand to enable you to go out to the bar where the fans on the porch could be warming up the accordion and the fiddle.

There’s no rush back out for the second-half at Hitchin as they would break the stillness of the best of English football.

There should be thousands here.