When you’re back home from university and your team isn’t playing over Easter there’s only one thing to do: find a local non-league football club you’ve never heard of or been to before and go to their match instead. The 16th of April was a nice enough day, the Derbyshire sun was battling through clouds to create a calm, warm day, and nothing else in the world was happening it seemed. It was that perfect storm of circumstances that makes it ideal to go a watch a game of football. That’s why I went to watch Heanor Town FC versus Leicester Nirvana.
For those uneducated few among you, Heanor is a small town in Derbyshire about ten miles north of Derby. Heanor Town, or ‘the Lions’ as they like to be known as was founded all the way back in 1883 and operate out of the Town Ground. The ground, which is shared with the local cricket club, is populated with stands on only two sides. Behind the goal that the Lions shoot into in the second half there’s a small stand filled with benches, the kind you might find in a rural bus station. Along one side of the pitch are the dugouts and behind those is another stand with a small terrace which is where most of the spectators located themselves on the day of the match.
Also in the Town Ground, the remnants of an old open terrace still lie, by seeing it you can imagine that it is as old as the club itself as it has been fully reclaimed by nature. Grass covers the steps and a proud oak takes centre stage, its trunk bursting through the ground.
Heanor play in the United Counties Premier Division North, the ninth tier of English football. Leicester Nirvana obviously plays in that very same league as well, but it was difficult to accept them as a men’s side. The team who, on the day were in blue and black, must have had an average age of no more than 21 and this difference, I feel, played a major part in the outcome of the game.
The match ended in a 3-1 win to the home side, and the scoreline definitely wasn’t just being generous to Heanor as they played very well. The first came from a well-lofted freekick which was put across to the back stick to be met with the outstretched boot of Heanor’s number 4 Max Thornberry. Leicester Nirvana’s ‘keeper could do nothing to stop it from crashing into the roof of the net.
The second may have been less graceful, but they all count in the end don’t they? Heanor’s number 10, Debrouwer, did well to double the host’s lead after he found the ball loose in the box, managing to bundle it into the bottom corner.
Nirvana were just too young it seemed and were routinely muscled out of possession being beaten by the experience and heightened physicality of the older Heanor Town side. At the start of the second half however, they were able to claw back a goal from a well-worked cross. Most notable for them on the day perhaps was their number 3, a tireless left-back that got no luck in the match but carried the ball effortlessly into the midfield and defended bravely despite a quite noticeable age difference between him and Heanor’s front line.
The death blow was struck in the 68th minute when Heanor’s number 6 Jake Carlisle headed in from a fantastic corner taken by their number 12 Vickers. It was such a good in-swinging corner that it would have likely gone in of its own accord, but Carlisle helped it home past Nirvana’s ‘keeper from a matter of inches.
Yes, the match was good, but for me, the real star of the whole afternoon was the food offered up at the Town Ground. In a world where a pie in a plastic wrapper costs the best part of a fiver in the premier league and other food options can pass the ten-pound mark at some grounds, Heanor does things differently. It seems the national rise in inflation hasn’t hit Heanor yet because the ‘full works’ (a meat pie, chips, mushy peas and gravy all together in a large takeaway container) costs only £3.95.
Do you know what you can get for £3.95 in the premier league? I don’t know to be honest, but I bet you can’t get anything. At least nothing as generous and blood vessel clogging-ly delicious as what Heanor were offering up. If there are any of you who don’t browse Twitter as obsessively as I do, Footy Scran is a Twitter account dedicated to showing the best (and occasionally worst) of food on offer at football games across the globe. The full works that I had at Heanor Town was more than worthy of the honour of featuring on Footy Scran and all the praise that would come with it.
My trip to Heanor Town was an ode to non-league football. A microcosm of the entire non-league pyramid. The banter from blokes on the terrace, antagonising the young Leicester Nirvana players, the scran on offer, even the football on the pitch. In short, it was great, certainly better than staying inside on a Saturday. Leaving the Town Ground, I reckoned that it was almost as if Heanor Town had been created by a movie director to create the quintessential non-league product. If that was the case, that director would deserve an Oscar because it was a classic non-league football experience.
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