Rolling Stones: Maidstone United get moving in the FA Cup

Words: Tom Reed

Images: Sam Wainwright

Additional images: Tom Reed

We fly past England’s fields and hedgerows.

The air is Guinness head thick with cold.

The crush barriers are colder still, waiting. Peeling.

For the cup.

Kent, Kent, Kent.

The bare arse of an island pointed at France.

If it’s the garden of England, football can come across as a back-yard kickabout concern.

There’s only one league club in a county of 1.9 million and that’s Gillingham.

Maidstone United, from the County town, were a league outfit, but went bust in 1992 and haven’t broken through those dotted dividing lines to league football since.

©Sam Wainwright/ Terrace Edition. Maidstone United vs Barrow AFC. Rifles pub.

Not that they aren’t trying, there’s no sense of knowing their place in the town that produced Peasants’ Revolt leader Wat Tyler.

They’ll give it some in the Rifle Volunteers pub about the potential of Maidstone to kick on and be a real force in Kent football.

The Goachers stout is good in there and the barmen is friendly and there’s an old fashioned till which probably holds bar tabs from the 50’s. A plaque above the bar is dedicated to customers who have passed away and their favourite sayings.

The words “Roy ‘how much!’ Harris” is engraved into one, such was the propensity of its use at the prices.

“Same price every time he came in” sighed the barman wryly in recollection.

Not that there’s long to savour the 4.5% black gravy before, those startling zero degrees in the lungs and the walk from the town centre to the ground, which is tempting husbands away from Christmas shopping assignments.

©Sam Wainwright/ Terrace Edition. Maidstone United vs Barrow AFC.

Things are always moving in Maidstone, whether it’s the 36 Engineer Regiment in their barracks or the Stones fans in their amber and yellow bobble hats, like little lanterns in the December gloom.

The Gallagher Stadium is a perfect FA Cup venue on this standout Round 2 fixture. The thin metal modernity of the 2012 build, contrasted by a club with thick history.

They were rolling stones for a while, groundsharing with Dartford before that 90’s financial implosion, haven to scrape their way from the Kent County League Division 4 back to the National League South, a tantalising double promotion from the EFL.

If Gary Lineker described Millwall’s Den as “a trap”, Maidstone’s ground is a deceptively cold oasis.

0-2 Barrow, says a Stones fan outside, but his eyes suggest otherwise. “They call me Edgar because I used to have round glasses like Edgar Davids”.

“I had a real good left foot too”

“Levi Amantchi’s our best player” adds another, talking about the Stones’ 6ft 3” forward.

“He can’t head the ball but he has scored 20 goals this season”, he adds, with that eye-catching haul by December, almost a throw-away line.

Maidstone are no mugs clearly, and manager George Elokobi’s bizarre Sun interview talking about eating snakes a child in Cameroon served as another disorienting tool to anyone trying to get to grips with his Stones side.

Fans describe former Wolves player Elokobi as an organiser and a mentor, a world away from flicking catapults at birds as a kid.

Even when Barrow took the lead in the 20th minute, there was no feeling of a Maidstone collapse.

Ben Whitfield tapped home after a handling mistake by Stones Brazilian keeper Lucas Covolan.

“The keeper gets bored easily” says a nonplussed fan on the heaving Genco End terrace, of a goalkeeper who started at Vasco De Gama in Rio before ending up on the River Medway.

Maidstone’s Sam Corne got the equaliser on 35 minutes, popping home with his left foot to send those traditional side-line huggers with the amber pates wild underneath the TV gantry.

A replay might have seemed a fair outcome in that second-half lull when temperatures fell further and even the fog didn’t know if it wanted to descend or hang around in case anything happened.

By minute 74, half the crowd had taken to the warmth of the big club bar to partake in that very English pastime of watching events on big screen when they are actually at the game.

All of Maidstone’s characters were in there, with ruddy faces and a sense of an occasion that finally lived up to what the club can be about.

Bivesh Garung shaped for a 20 yarder in slow motion, it was either going to test the fans at the back of the terrace or hit the top corner and nothing in between.

In the event, the beer went everywhere in the bar and Lucan Covolan was bored no more.

The Stones had reached the Third Round for the first time since that 1992 implosion.

After the match, Barrow offered to refund the tickets of the 220 Bluebirds who had made the long trip from Cumbria and left lower than the submarines their town is known for.

It was an overblown gesture as they had merely been done by a team that they had underestimated.

Success seems only a shot away now for the Stones, it seems only a matter of time before things really get rolling and that Kent back-yard reverberates to the bouncing balls of another Football League club, long awaited.