Southend United: Love and war at the seaside.

Words: Tom Reed

Images: Tom Reed

The long and winding road

that leads, to your door.

The Long and Winding Road. The Beatles.

The tread on a Southend Adidas Trimm Trab is paper thin, the number of times Blues fans with the blues have marched up the high street in protest about how their club is being run.

Thinner still is their patience with Southend United chairman Ron Martin.

Southend fans had been at Martin’s big fuck-off house in the morning, the home of the head of a club that doesn’t seem to have paid its players recently but a guy who can apparently afford a security detail to protect his mansion from a group of supporters asking simple questions.

The picket at Martin’s manor was merely a precursor to the main march in the seaside town that afternoon but served as a gentle reminder that no football club owner is insulated from the repercussions of their actions.

It doesn’t matter where Martin’s luxury abode is, but nevertheless typifies the pockets of wealth in Essex that are skirted by real deprivation, minutes down the road.

Southend’s fans are bereft of any tangible board level control in how the club is run or its future, so they reach for the banners and pound the pavements.

Like the rollercoaster on the seaside town’s Adventure Island amusement park, Southend United’s ascent to the Championship was leisurely but the descent to non-league, all too swift, with the club, formed in 1906, soon to be up in court facing a tax bill said to be “close to £2 million” by local reporter Chris Phillips.

The deadline to settle is March 1 and Sky Sports’ Jeff Stelling did a soliloquy on Soccer Saturday, calling Southend’s debt “humungous” and quoting the town’s MP on the date with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs “this is a final hearing and it would be very unusual for there to be any further extensions.”

When Soccer Saturday does a thing, it’s rarely a good sign.

Martin has a history of last gasp satisfying of HMRC, leaving Stelling incredulous at the “10 winding up orders in the past eight years and they’ve survived them”. Football finance expert Kieran Maguire, meanwhile, described Southend as having “practically got a season ticket with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs” which is just what every football fan wants to hear about their team.

Fans of the Shrimpers would give anything for a season ticket at Roots Hall next term but the fear that the Essex outfit could go to the wall early next month arguably boosted both the protest march to the ground and the attendance of the match against Gateshead.

“Making a killing, killing our club” chanted the Southend supporters startling the Saturday shoppers outside Marks and Spencer.

Everything feels long in Southend from the world’s largest pleasure pier to the plod up the cliff steps to the town centre. The march to the ground is deceptively short however, with Roots Hall one of the few remaining clubs well-situated within a waltz of a central pint.

“Fans not flats” read the lead banner of the march as the protestors made their way to the crossing at Southend Victoria train station, caught in the complexities of a land deal that suggests, all the while, that the club simply must leave Roots Hall for a new site further out of town, with little obvious commentary on an alternative.

At the station, the police seem to politely point the march onto the footpath but there is no stopping the sheer energy of the supporters with the bravery to take this sort of direct action, so they walk straight into Victoria Avenue, the Shrimpers shutting down the main road out of town.

The dual carriageway is completely and eerily empty ahead, signifying the road Southend fans face.

If Martin pays the tax bill, then any battle to remove him will be an onerous one, as the Times’ Gregor Robertson suggested this week, writing “land on which Roots Hall stands, and much of the site at Fossetts Farm, is owned by companies linked to Martin, so freeing the club from his grip entirely would be no mean feat.”

“IF Ron Martin pays HMRC on 1 Mar and we survive to fight another day, he WILL NOT be deemed a hero. The protests WILL NOT STOP until he is out of our club” tweeted the Southend Fan Protest Group who were part of the procession which ended outside the club’s main entrance.

A car’s horn keeps beeping and club staff look furtively out the windows and the O and the D from the Southend United Football Club sign have been fixed on in a different size font.

As the protest peters out, the supporters make their way to their usual spots in Roots Hall, to watch their beloved side see off the visitors from the North-East, consolidating a playoff position in the National League and adding a few more thrusts to the mind-fuck they are going through.

Martin himself has kept his council largely on his side of the situation but must accept fans’ frustrations given the illogical set of events at Southend. What does he honestly expect supporters to make of a club with a reported near two million pounds overdue tax bill, that seemingly requires bridging finance to keep its head above water but aims for the building of thousands of houses to fund a 16,226 capacity stadium?

Indeed, the protesting supporters behaved impeccably and have put together a clear campaign with no little stoicism and dignity. They are mainly younger fans who will live under the branches of whatever trees Martin plants and absolute shame on the so called guardians of the game on a national level who leave them to toe this path alone.

You’d half wish that Hollywood film star Ryan Reynolds had bought Southend and engaged on the kind of regenerative scheme for Roots Hall he is building at Wrexham’s Racecourse.

©Tom Reed/ Terrace Edition. Southend United FC.

As for Septuagenarian property developer Martin, not afraid of a few frank words if the video of him appearing to swear at a fan on video is anything to go by, he must surely take it on the chin when fans ask whether he is the right man to take the club forward?

All is fair in love and war, you know.

“We’re all fed up and we’ve all had enough of the current owner” said Southend fan and “Inbetweeners” actor Martin Trenaman, the dark comedy of the situation not lost on him.

“We’ve gone from one disaster to another like a toddler with a flame-torch and it’s just insane.”

Even if Southend make the Barnet match on March 3 it seems like the Essex club faces an extended track to peace and progression, on to the horizon like the pier which juts out over a mile into the Thames Estuary.

You can find Tom on Twitter: @tomreedwriting

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