Always Meet (and play Sunday League football with) Your Heroes

The year is Championship Manager 01/02. My hair is shaggy and bleached blond, my sixth-form suits are simultaneously too big and too tight on my weird teenage body (it’s still weird), and I’m sharing a room with my pre-teen brother. It’s going great.

Somewhere in all of that mess, I started supporting Bromley Football Club. As if I weren’t awkward enough, I began to idolise a bunch of Ryman League footballers. Big Danny Harwood, tough-tackling Dean Forbes and Grant Watts, wing-wizards Gary Drewett and Kirk Watts, dynamite strikers Wade Falana and Adolph Amoako. If you know, you know.

I’m always jealous of people who can remember their first Bromley game because I haven’t the foggiest. I just have a mental collage of sparse crowds, frozen pitches, and brutalist football. But from the moment I clanked through Hayes Lane’s old iron turnstiles, I knew this rusting, rotting, crumbling concrete cauldron was for me. 

I won’t sell you a sob story, but I didn’t grow up in a footballing household. Knee-grazing schoolyard kickabouts and Gazzetta Football Italia turned me into a diehard, but my family had no interest beyond cheering me on at my junior games. 

My friends from footballing families had their clubs chosen for them, passed down like religion. How I envied their sense of certainty and belonging. But it’s just possible that I had my club all along without knowing it. 

My granddad told stories of watching Bromley in the post-war years, and he claimed to have been at the Nigeria game in 1948, but by the time I was showing an interest, he hadn’t stepped foot in Hayes Lane since the days of wooden rattle clackers.

In my primary school, you either supported Tottenham or Arsenal. There was one kid who supported Millwall, but he was treated like a leper, so I decided to stay in my lane. Ian Wright swaggering around in the bruised banana kit swung it for me, but Arsenal was never my team. My chances of going to a game at Highbury were as remote as me mastering my times tables (still haven’t, never will).

I cried when Nayim lobbed David Seaman from the halfway line in the dying embers of the 1995 Cup Winners' Cup final, but I realise now that I wasn’t crying for Arsenal. I was crying because I was experiencing footballing heartbreak for the first time. And because I was nine.

“Don’t be so ridiculous,” said my dad. “It’s just football.” 

My search for a team to call my own would go on until 2001. I wouldn’t say I found my tribe at Hayes Lane, because I lurked awkwardly in the shadows like a footballing Phantom of the Opera (still do), but it felt like a space in which I belonged; like I had history there or something.

Forgive me if I rewind the cassette to primary school again, but I played a lot of organised football as a kid. I’ll never be able to unhear the beachball-like ping of a dimpled Mitre Mouldmaster. Take one of those to the ear on a cold morning and you soon warmed up.

But no matter how much football I played, I just wasn’t as good as other kids. If the cream rises to the top, I was the wet stuff at the bottom with bits of cow hair floating in it.

It was Sunday League for me, and that’s where I found myself as an oddly-shaped teenager in the early 2000s. My mate’s brother-in-law played for a men’s team called Cudham United (Green Army!) and they were always short on players, so getting game time was almost a sure thing. For a perennial substitute like me that was music. 

My mate and I bluffed our way through some testy training sessions with balding, fag-scented blokes flattening us into the sandy astroturf at every opportunity. After a few weeks of punishment, we’d done enough to earn a call-up to the first (and only) team. My flowing blond locks had even earned me a football club nickname: Nedved, in honour of my slight resemblance to the flaxen-haired Czech footballer Pavel Nedvěd (look him up, kids). Two decades later, if I bump into a Cudham player, the nickname lives on. I’m pretty certain most of them don’t know my actual name.

Cudham United play their home games at the recreation ground behind the wonky old Blacksmith’s Arms pub on Cudham Lane. Music hall performer Little Tich was born there. No, you hurry up and get to the point. On Sunday mornings, my haphazard warm-ups were accompanied by the bells of the 13th-century village church, whose gravestones hide over sixty years of wayward C.U.F.C balls. It was a bucolic scene, but once the ref’s whistle blew, the Sunday League carnage began.

Youth football was a distant memory as the blinding rumble of mortgage-paying studs thundered around me. I was fast-ish and could deliver a decent cross, so I was hung out to dry on the right wing. I didn’t pull up trees, but I didn’t disgrace myself. More to the point, I survived. Which was all the more surprising considering I had long blond hair and was wearing Champagne-coloured Adidas Predators. What was I thinking?

I didn’t ask much of football in those days. On Saturdays, I was getting a kick out of watching Bromley play the likes of Uxbridge and Bognor Regis. On Sundays, I was getting kicked. It was my own little footballing Eden and I didn’t think it could get much better.

One Sunday morning, when I sat my teenage frame down on the dressing room bench and waited for the kitbag to arrive, I saw a familiar face across the room. I had to be mistaken. It looked like… No, it couldn’t be. Another lad arrived in the dressing room and greeted the guy warmly. 

“Morning, Kirky.” 

Bloody hell, it was him! Kirk Watts, Bromley’s wing wizard, was a ringer for my Sunday League team. I’d watched Kirk jink across the Hayes Lane turf just a day earlier. I’d even chatted with his parents in the John Fiorini stand (they were lovely, by the way). Less than 24 hours later, bleary-eyed on a Sunday morning, I was going to be playing alongside him. What on earth was happening?

I remember watching him smashing balls at the goal during the warm-up and being mesmerised by the cleanness of his strikes. Kirk’s technique was so clearly a cut above the Sunday League level. What was he doing there?

It turns out that before he was (in my teenage eyes) famous, he went to school with several of the Cudham lads. When they needed a ringer, Kirk got the call. I don’t know if Bromley manager Stuart McIntyre knew Kirk was moonlighting in the Orpington and Bromley District Sunday Football League, but I doubt it. Can you imagine? 

“Sorry gaffer, I can’t play against Dulwich Hamlet. I slipped on a dog turd at Cudham Rec and blew out my ACL.”

I started to overthink it. What if Kirk gets injured? What if I injure him? I wouldn’t just have Bromley’s wing-wizard cursing my name, I’d probably have my season ticket ripped up.

That Cudham match, like so many of my teenage experiences, is a half-forgotten blur. I know I missed a sitter, which wasn’t unusual for me, but it’s memorable because Kirk supplied the cross from the left wing. Of course he did!

One of my habits was arriving late at the back post (mostly because I was unfit). The ploy rarely yielded results, but on this occasion, Kirk Watts, decked out in Cudham’s green and black stripes, spotted my run and pinged the ball towards me from the opposite corner of the box. I watched like a flaxen-haired hawk as his cross arced through the air. The goal was begging. All I had to do was meet it on the volley and get it on target. 

Shinned it into the side-netting, didn’t I. Pillock. I’d just embarrassed myself in front of my non-league hero. I felt like running off to the churchyard to search for an open grave.

The game played out and I have no idea what the score was. Hell, I don’t even know what year this was. All I know is that when I sat down in the dressing room afterwards, Kirk Watts sat down next to me.

“Well played, young’un.” 

I don’t know if he meant it or was just saying something for the sake of saying something, but my teenage brain melted. My teenage mouth, meanwhile, mumbled something in response, but I can’t tell you what it was, so let’s just say football noises. Kirk went back to laughing and joking with his old schoolmates while I went back to staring at the dressing room floor and trying not to clap eyes on man tackle. 

I went home elated, but I couldn’t escape the memory of that sinner of a shinner at the back-post. It still haunts me. Pillock.

I played alongside Kirk several times in the months that followed, but he seemed to drift away as the season went on. I’ve no idea how he could rationalise playing Saturday football for Bromley and Sunday football for Cudham. Fitness-wise he was an engine, and he seemed to be having a good time, but the risk surely wasn’t worth it.

(Cudham United playing at Hayes Lane in a postseason friendly, May 2008. Number 17 had trimmed his hair but hadn’t given up the white boots.)

Cudham United had me on their books for over a decade and I served with absolutely no distinction. Songs will not be sung. I once scored a left-foot volley from thirty-five yards out, but every dog has their day, don’t they?

Kirk Watts, meanwhile, became a fan-favourite wherever he laid his boot bag. Bromley, Tonbridge, Lewes, Cudham. The middle-class streets won’t forget. 

Kirk must have played well over 100 games for Bromley in his two spells with the club. In that time, he scored the winning goal in the 2003 London Senior Cup final, won the Kent Senior Cup, and helped Bromley gain promotion to the Conference South in 2007. 

Ask anyone who followed the Ravens in the early 2000s and they’ll tell you that Kirk’s flashes of fleet-footed brilliance provided rays of sunshine during a lot of bad weather for Bromley Football Club. Playing Sunday League football with him made the sunshine all the brighter.

So, what’s the moral of this story? I’ve been pondering that question and I’m fairly certain there isn’t one. But while reflecting, I realised that From Bromley with Love is one of the few places on earth where I could share this story and have people get it. 

Non-league fans are closer to their club’s players and sub-plots. The heroes and villains aren’t household names, but the passion they generate is just as intense, and the glories and heartbreaks are all the more intimate. Who needs Nayim from the halfway line when you have Ryan Hall? Or Kirk Watts, for that matter.

Where Bromley Football Club is concerned, my experience feels very much of a different era. The modern equivalent would be looking over and seeing Louis Dennis kitting up for some Sunday League punishment. It just wouldn’t happen.

Or would it? 

Louis, fancy a kickabout?

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