Bloody Casuals

Walton Casuals  1  Yate Town  1

Southern Football League – Premier Division South

Many years ago now, when I was a student, I had a thing about books written on the subject of football violence.

One of my favourites was called ‘Bloody Casuals’ by Jay Allan, a book charting the activities of the Aberdeen Soccer Casuals through the Eighties when a huge sub-culture formed around designer clothing, organised fighting and heavy drinking.

As time passes you kind of forget about these things though, as the Casuals did themselves when we moved into the Nineties and Acid House found it’s way into the World. Lager was replaced with Ecstasy, violence with love and Sergio Tacchini with baggy jeans.

A couple of years ago now when I joined a new regional management team with work, I ended up working with a lad who I’ve known for a while, but not known especially well. What with an overnight stay in Glasgow every month nowadays, it’s given a few of us a chance to really get to know each other, and ‘Jock’ as I shall call him for obvious reasons, had a bit of a story.

Jock, it turns out, was basically a key player in the ASC, and the bulk of the stories that Mr Allan talked about, he was party to in some shape or form. Obviously though, that was a long time ago now, and as he says in his Aberdeen accent “I couldnae fight sleep nowadays!”

But, interestingly, even at the age of 48, he’s still massively into the casual clothing culture, and that in itself can bring about problems, as I shall explain. A couple of weeks ago the two of us had a wander into Glasgow and ended up at the famous Horseshoe Bar. He was wearing a very stylish Aquascutum coat, it was subtle, but for those in the know, it made something of a statement.

We were half way down our second pint when he turned to me and suggested we drink up and move on. Once outside he explained that he’d been spotted by some Rangers Casuals and the pair of us were starting to attract attention. Clearly my Next fleece was catching their eye……

It’s not unusual apparently, back in Aberdeen he is quite well known, and it’s got to the stage where he has to be careful where he goes, even with his wife for a quiet drink. Some of the younger element see him as a bit of a trophy, they want to make a name for themselves as the person who took an old stager of the ASC down. It’s the legacy I guess.

Why am I talking about Eighties soccer culture and what’s left of it? Simple, I went to Walton Casuals last Saturday and all I could think about was Jock and his casual mates bouncing around the streets of Edinburgh taking on the Hibs mob with shopping trolleys as weapons. It’s the word casual, and what it conjures up, for those of a certain age of course.

So, disclaimer, Walton Casuals are a family football club and do not condone football violence in any way, shape or form, and any link with that is purely down to their name alone, so please don’t sue me!

Playing on a shiny new plastic pitch, Casuals dropped onto my hopping radar this season as they fell onto my list of the ten Step 1-4 clubs I’d not visited who were nearest to my house. A simple methodology that only goes wrong when you get your Walton in Surrey mixed up with your Walton in Liverpool!

Anyway, on a day when the weather wasn’t a major problem, I travelled with confidence, and despite a problem at the Crooked Billet Roundabout which involved making the fatal error that the right hand exit onto the island takes you left and the left exit takes you right, I was soon queuing up to get over the bridge into Walton on Thames.

The ground sits to the very East end of Walton, close to the River Thames, and forms part of a large sports centre. My mate Dave says the old ground was very close by, I couldn’t say, I never went despite them only leaving it a couple of years ago, and to be frank, I’ve not been that arsed to check it out properly.

The Walton Sports Hub is a tidy venue, but if we are being critical, it’s all about the stand, and that’s pretty much it. You enter in one corner from the large car park, and the stand, with it’s dressing rooms underneath and it’s clubhouse to the rear dominates on the North side. It also has another frontage to the rear that serves the athletics track that sits behind, but otherwise it is very much the focal point. The rest of the ground is hard standing, with no additional cover.

Walton Casuals buggered about in the Surrey County Premier League for a period before joining the Combined Counties League in the mid-nineties. They won the CCL in 2004-05 and found themselves in the Isthmian League second tier, which lasted until the end of the 2017-18 season when they won the play-offs and found themselves in Step 3, albeit they were shifted laterally to the Southern League Premier Division South, where they remain.

If you look back at football in Walton on Thames though, the premier club was always Walton & Hersham, who share the stadium with Casuals, but used to play at the famous Stompond Lane ground. However, in 2015-16, the club dropped into the CCL and were playing at a lower level than Casuals for the first time, and it remains that way now, with the gap being three divisions since they dropped another level to Step 6.

Casuals and visiting Yate Town from the Bristol area both sat in the bottom five pre-match, so it was an important game in terms of the relegation battle. A crowd of around 120 pitched up to watch it, with a fair few having travelled down the M4, and they were treated to a close game of football.

Cole Brown gave the home side the lead, who were being urged on from the dugout by Anthony Gale, the son of Tony Gale, the ex Fulham and West Ham United centre half who is the Casuals Chairman.

The lead, which happened in the fourteenth minute, was cancelled out ten minutes later when Tommy Conway broke through and scored for the visitors.

The game was pretty even thereafter, and in all honesty some of the football was very good, but you could see why both sides are struggling in the table, they didn’t have the quality in the final third to win games. At any level that is key, at Step 3 that is vitally important and indeed costly.

A good day out on the banks of the Thames, but if we turn the full circle and pick up again on the casuals theme. In February, half a dozen of us are going to the Kilmarnock v Rangers game as it coincides with our next meeting. Three of the six are Rangers fans, but we are in the Killie end due to ticket availability, Jock, however, on hearing that just smiled and said, “I’ll be fighting more than sleep that night.”

No matter what they say, it never leaves you……