Clad top-to-toe in Jersey Bulls paraphernalia, Andy Lane takes a brief step away from drum-banging duties on the Springfield Stadium touchline and rolls up a sleeve to reveal the tattooed badge of a football team in only their seventh year of competition. The bull rearing up Lane’s right forearm matches that on his wife Jojo’s left calf, encapsulating the impact the club has made on the local community. “It’s about pride,” Lane says.
Bulls’ latest visitors are Hassocks, a club hailing from a village just north of Brighton. Like every other team in the eighth-tier Isthmian League South East Division, this away day was the first they sought out when the fixture list was unveiled last summer, and more than 50 supporters have flown over for the occasion. “It’s a great novelty fixture,” says the Hassocks chair, Patrick Harding.
The lower down the football pyramid you go, the more regionalised leagues tend to become. In a volunteer-led landscape, where players are either partly remunerated or entirely unpaid, it is impractical to expect teams to regularly traverse the country, which is what makes the football clubs of Jersey, Guernsey and Isle of Man so unusual. Despite the inconvenience of up to 200 miles and vast bodies of water separating them from opponents, all three clubs compete in English non-league football; pseudo-national teams effectively representing their crown dependencies against part-timers on a weekly basis, before retiring to the clubhouse for pie and chips.
It was Guernsey who led the way in 2011, seeking an opportunity for their players at a higher level than their small community could provide. Granted approval to join the 10th-tier Combined Counties League – which ordinarily features clubs beyond the western reaches of London – they paved a path that their fellow islanders followed over the next decade.
All three clubs shoulder the entire bill for home games. Up to 25 members of the opposition’s playing and coaching staff are flown in from the English mainland, transported while on the island, put up in a hotel for the night and flown home the following day. The same applies to match officials.
The outlay for merely getting everyone to a home game usually lands somewhere in the region of £7,000, while travel to away fixtures results in similar costs. Flight delays can wreak havoc on kick-off times that are already adjusted throughout the year based on seasonal airline schedules. Away travel is equally hazardous, with weather-affected fixtures often called off only after an island team has already landed on the mainland.
The clubs primarily achieve their annual running costs of about £400,000 through gate receipts and commercial activity, saving money on wages. They all operate as outlier amateur teams at their respective levels – Bulls in the eighth tier, Guernsey and Isle of Man in the ninth – with players receiving no more than expenses at best.
Before seeing off Hassocks with a hat-trick, Bulls winger Rai Dos Santos spent the morning working as a football coach for local children. Despite their unpaid status, Bulls and Guernsey are firmly in the mix for promotion. “A lot of our lads, when they were youngsters, missed out on being at professional academies because they lived on the island,” says the Bulls chair, Ian Horswell.
The isolation is a double-edged sword. “We always say our biggest defence is the water around us,” says Guernsey director Nic Legg. “Where else are our players going to go other than a much higher level? But, at the same time, it’s the biggest restriction. We had some games last season when we travelled with 13 players and people would ask why. Well, that’s all we had. We can’t bring anyone else in.”
Weekend fixtures tend to promote better availability, although Bulls had to make do without 11 players for a match earlier this season after 10 of them attended a teammate’s wedding on the same day. Midweek away games can be fraught with absences due to work commitments.
“You can end up being very good at home on a Tuesday and Saturday, slightly weaker away on a Saturday, and away on a Tuesday you’re struggling to put a competitive side out,” says Isle of Man director Lawrence Looney. “You’re never going to win the league like that because you have to effectively forfeit so many points.”
The only way to solve that dilemma is to pay players – an ambition that all three island teams harbour over a variety of timeframes. Horswell has even grander plans for Bulls, suggesting “the dream is to become a fully professional side”, pointing to top-tier Portuguese club Santa Clara, who hail from the Azores, as inspiration. “We never want to lose our island identity, though, and have local people told they aren’t good enough,” he says.
The pathway is working. Sol Solomon scored 60 goals in two seasons for Bulls before he worked his way up to Tranmere in League Two. Bournemouth midfielder Alex Scott began his playing career with Guernsey in the English eighth tier. “When you play for Guernsey you play for your island and you are representing 65,000 people,” said Scott a couple of years ago.
That island pride is evident in attendances. Bulls’ matchday average of almost 900 this season more than doubles almost every other team in their division. Guernsey and Isle of Man crowds also dwarf most opposition clubs. Although official island representative teams exist for select few competitions, the club trio effectively serve the same purpose on a weekly basis.
“When we started in 2011, people believed they were watching Guernsey play as an island,” says Legg. “We played on that island pride. Particularly the older fans, they are really proud to be watching their island play in a UK league.”
While 50 or so youngsters flock to the tunnel for match-winner Dos Santos’s autograph at the final whistle, Lane and his fellow Bulls diehards take down the two dozen flags they have strung up next to the dugout. A step closer to promotion and another triumph for island football.
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