Perhaps this ground with its capacity of fewer than 7,000 – today brimming with 5,236 – is in fact reality whilst the 40,000 all-seater behemoths of the Premiership are the true parody constructions.
The Lamex Stadium on Stevenage’s Broadhall Way has a blocky modern frontage, suggesting the superstructure of a much larger stadium cut violently short after a few stories. Pitch-side, the Lamex further violates the visual expectations of what a stadium comprises, at least if those expectations are based on top-flight sport or television. One stand is topped by a small clock tower, but all are low. One in particular, behind a goal, is only a few rows of spectators deep and peters out entirely two-thirds of the way across the pitch. The corners are open. Hoardings advertise Stevenagevanhire.com and Mather Marshall estate agents. The Lamex seems a parody of what a stadium should be. Now though I wonder if that analogy is inverted. Perhaps this ground with its capacity of less than 7,000 – today brimming with 5,236 – is in fact reality and the 40,000 all-seater behemoths of the Premiership are the true parody constructions.
“With the non-league experience I think you look at football a completely different way,” Robert Sargent, a 45-year-old Luton fan tells me. “It’s not about the money. It’s about the communities and the people in the local areas, as opposed to all these prima donnas in the premier league.” I wonder if he is right.
Luton’s travelling support is vocal. They shout with a glottal stop rather than a hard consonant: Come on Lu’on! They sing a variant on a children’s rhyme: Ee, ei, ee, ei, ee, ei, o, up the football league we go. The players are in their away kit, striped orange and blue. Their sponsor is Easyjet, the budget airline that operates out of Luton’s airport. The club did not disclose to me what the sponsorship deal comprises, but I came to believe there is something touchingly apt in a budget airline sponsoring this team.
Around nine minutes in, Luke Wilkinson scores for Luton with a headed strike. Against the run of play, Stevenage’s Tom Pett equalises in the 33rd minute. This day is, however, dominated by two other men from the Luton ranks; the 24-year-olds Charlie Walker and Alex Wall, despite both men starting the match on the bench.
Luton’s manager, John Still, brings Walker on in the 69th minute for striker Paul Benson. Later, he heads in at the back post through the legs of Stevenage goalkeeper Chris Day. The ball is cleared, but many believe it crossed the line. The goal is not given. There is another moment of realisation here for a spectator weaned on televised sport; the expectation of the replay is visceral, yet it does not come. The moving image captured has no role in official adjudication either. Only later will the tape made by 24-year-old Peter Booker, Luton’s one-man analysis department, be scrutinised. By then the question is academic. Walker’s goal was disallowed.
Walker is softly spoken, gentle. He seems a man at peace with himself and the world. The longer I spend with the club the more his beard expands. Many of the players favour fluorescent, highly-coloured boots. Walker is no exception; today he is shod in pink.
Today too is a major day for him, his first ever appearance within the fully professional football league. Last season he plied his sporting trade for Peacehaven and Telscombe FC, a part-time club in East Sussex that participates in the Ryman League, several flights below Luton’s own, well-submerged, position. Walker lived with his mother and had a day job as a builder. Until John Still signed him he thought he was too old to be a professional footballer. After the match he explained how the game compared to his previous experience.
“I thought it was alright. It’s just everyone’s a bit stronger, a bit more organised, a bit more quicker,” he said. “But since I’ve come in I’ve worked on all of them things, and I feel I’m good enough to be here.”
Several days later, at the training ground, Walker explained that the professional deal Still offered paid similar – around £25,000 – to the amount as he was making when he combined his builder’s pay with the additional money he made playing for Peacehaven – £400 per month in the season and a £25 bonus per goal. If he took the Luton offer he would though have to pay rent, rather than living cheaply with his mother. He had to weigh up the cost of going pro. That did not take long though, once he had discussed the issue with his girlfriend.
“It all comes down to what you want to be doing really,” he said. “If I’d have turned this down I’d have regretted it for the rest of my life. I want to be a professional footballer, and that’s it, so if it’s the same money…”
Already, it seemed, the rumours I’d heard of lavish money did not correspond exactly to reality.
Still, the Manager, is 64; his hair is extant if greying at the sides, but gone fully on top. He told me that the Charlie Walker effect – a willingness to bring players up from the netherworld of non-league – is a key part of his philosophy. Another example within the squad is reserve goalkeeper Elliot Justham, a blonde 24-year-old who until last year worked on track maintenance for London Underground and played part-time at East Thurrock United.
Yet the Luton squad also features those who have come the other way. At Stevenage, when Wall comes on in the 83rd minute, he replaces another striker called Mark Cullen. Cullen is not that tall; his hair is straw-coloured. Born in 1992, he grew up in Ashington, near Newcastle-upon-Tyne. His lexis retains its northern roots. I once heard him relish a halftime drink in a game he was watching from the stands: “Bovril for me lad, I’ve been looking forward to it all day,” he said in a distinct Geordie brogue.
Cullen also once scored in the Premiership.
The goal came for Hull City in May 2010. Cullen, just turned 18, nodded in a cross from George Boateng against Wigan in a 2-2 draw. (Ironically, this result confirmed Hull’s relegation from the top flight). The teenager could not keep his place in the team at Hull. Managers came and went. Loan spells elsewhere did not work out. After a stint at Stockport County, Cullen signed for Luton in May 2013.
“Obviously I did some things that a lot of players will never maybe get the chance to do, like play in the Premiership and score, especially at a very young age like,” he told me once. “So to be able to have that on a CV is really good. But I have got some regrets in the way some things worked out, but that’s football, innit, in a way like, it doesn’t always go the way you plan.”
Cullen and Walker are extreme examples; their wildly divergent former experiences make them the outliers of the Luton squad. Yet many other players were formerly on the books of bigger teams, if only as teenage trainees, and Walker and Justham are far from the only ones to have played part-time at some point. Lower league football is a mixing vessel, a place of oil and water. The ascendant meets the descendant but which hue you are is not always clear, and can change rapidly when Saturday comes.
Likewise footballers at this level occupy two positions simultaneously. Down in the fourth tier of the English game they are – in parallel – in the gutter and among the stars. Given that the aspiration of so many boys is to play professional football even these men, at the bottom of the professional game, are hugely highly selected. It is widely agreed that the increase of foreign players in the Premier League, where less than a third are now English, has driven better domestic players down the pyramid. Yet League Two players have also fallen short of the great pools of money and fame.
Between the gutter and stars then, and all the time in Luton.
Wall is the other man of the hour. If Walker’s day is about arrival Wall’s speaks of redemption. Moments after he comes on, he finds himself unmarked at the edge of the area. He curls the ball into the bottom corner of the net. The score is 2-1; Luton take victory from the jaws of draw, three points rather than one.
Their shaky start to the season, winning only four in 10 league games, seems to be fading. But for Wall the result is personal too. He was recently sent off in a reserve fixture. He has a temper; he does not seem a young man at peace with the world, unlike the mellow Walker. He keeps his hair aggressively oiled back over his scalp. But now Wall has scored. He is redeemed, if only temporarily; a goal is a goal but it is also only a goal. There is always another game.
After the match Wall stands by the touchlines.