Shot Out Of Darkness: Floodlights and football fans

Words: Tom Reed

Images: Tom Reed, Ian Parker, Han Balk. Mike Bayly, Franz Raith.

Cover image: Tom Reed - Griffin Park. Brentford FC.

The sound of the drum is calling

The sound of the drum has called

Flash of youth, shoot out of darkness

Factory town.

All we ever wanted was everything. Bauhaus. 1982.

As a kid in the consumer ’80s, we wanted a lot of stuff we couldn’t have.

“All we ever wanted was everything, all we ever got was cold” sang local band Bauhaus as mums sat us down in front of Kays catalogues to circle items we’d never get, just to keep us quiet for five minutes.

I wanted a Mr Frosty, I yearned for a Boulder Hill play set from the cartoon M.A.S.K, I never got any of it. What I could get though, for about three pounds, was a place under the floodlights of the County Ground, Northampton Town FC.

Cheap thrills on the Hotel End, after a trip on the 51 bus from the Eastern District and those giant orbs like the BFG peering in to the stadium with a head torch.

The floodlights made the match a cinematic experience that was better than it was.

A shinned shot that looks like it’s going top bins when it is clearly going over: The floodlights did that. A crunching tackle that makes the crowd grunt, when it’s merely the tired act of a journeyman to buy a short breather: The floodlights did that too and made the resulting yellow card the most striking banana split on the Dulux paint colour card rather than a dull daffodil white.

Floodlights are essential football engineering for they fix a vibrant colour palette on our retinas and are a hulking great constant on changing maps.

They power up when it’s not even dusk, switched on by a Wizard Of Oz figure behind a curtain who decides that the match needs double light and are always a hundred per cent correct in the decision.

©Tom Reed/ Terrace Edition. Griffin Park. Brentford FC.

We were told to never look at an eclipse of the sun but I used to peer up into the floodlight glare, purposefully, through the mesh of steel and then away so you’d blink a halo while tracking the ball.

Looking at Han Balk’s photography of the floodlights at Go Ahead Eagles in the Netherlands, you’ll see how they pin down the ground like thumb tacks on a poster in your teenage bedroom.

If I said to you the floodlights at De Adelaarshorst were the best floodlights in the world, you’d struggle to counter the point. They are structures of both elegance and substance which bathe the surrounding terrace streets in a half-light but nobody closes their curtains.

I remember the floodlights at Griffin Park Brentford, the now lost greatest ground in London that had a pub on every corner but also the most beautiful pylons which meant the punters didn’t have to strain their eyes to light a fag outside the turnstiles.

Dads would place sons on the big concrete blocks at the bottom for a better view and to spark the flicker of love for the game.

Up North at Barnsley’s Oakwell, Ian Parker captures the grand floodlights that cut across the different hues of the skies that dance like the town’s nite spots as if it’s two am even though it’s barely quarter to five. They were paid for by the transfer of John Beresford to Portsmouth in 1989.

It could be Los Angeles rather than Yorkshire.

©Ian Parker/ Terrace Edition. Oakwell. Barnsley FC.

Mike Bayly brings us down to earth and back up again with photos of floodlights that are higher than church towers and taken at defunct clubs like Railway Athletic, which frames the illumination of matches as as sign of industrial progress and decay.

Franz Raith makes the floodlights of Austrian grounds into science fiction visions and War Of The Worlds invaders over First Vienna 1894 and SK Sturm Graz.

And in these times of energy fear and trepidation to switch a bedside light on for too long due to the bills, floodlights offer a solar shower for dim 60 watt lives.

So forgive us wives and girlfriends, boyfriends and husbands when we’re on a slow crawl through traffic in England’s factory towns and we point upwards at yet another set of floodlights in the distance.

They are lighthouses which beckon us onto the rocks

Metal giant redwoods above the canopy

We can be young again under them.

Floodlight Friday is the best day of the week.