How Westleigh Park visit rekindled memories of the most ridiculous trip of my football supporting life – Simon Carter

What one game, above the hundreds you have seen down the years, decades even, stands out amongst so many that have long been consigned to the deepest recesses of the memory?

Mine involves trains, cars, a lot of walking and virtually no sleep for a midweek trek from the west country to Kent. For a Leyland Daf Trophy Southern Area Quarter-Final. A big game, obviously - there were 40 letters in it for a start.

Maidstone United versus Exeter City at Watling Street, Dartford’s home stadium where the Stones had been tenants since selling their own ground to MFI in 1988, the year before they won promotion to the Fourth Division. I still call League 2 the Fourth Division. I always will. Pompey play in the Third Division, not League 1.

(This is not unusual behaviour - when I worked in Southampton, I knew someone who still referred to St Mary’s Stadium as The Dell. Some football fans, and I am one of them, are sticklers for tradition).

Anyway, Tuesday February 21, 1990. Exeter City, my team, just three games from English football’s perennial Holy Grail. Beat Maidstone, get through a two-legged semi-final and we’re there. For the first time in the club’s history. Twin Towers. Hallowed turf.

Wembley.

As the years have passed, and the EFL Trophy comes around again, routinely either ignored/boycotted/heavily criticised - delete as appropriate - I have regularly taken myself back to that chilly evening in the south east of England, forever asking the question of my then 21-year-old self: Why?

Living in Yeovil at the time, I boarded a train to Waterloo knowing full well there were no trains back that evening, not unless I wanted to leave the ground at half-time. I was reliant on meeting an Exeter fan at the ground who would happily take me back to south Somerset.

This was a cunning plan, worthy of Baldrick at his most ingenious, and would have no doubt worked had I found such a supporter.

Sadly, I didn’t.

The one car driver I did find would only take me to Exeter, and could only drop me at the services, a hefty walk across the city to the train station. This wasn’t great news.

‘That’s great news,’ I lied to my (relatively) Good Samaritan. So it was, after finally arriving at Exeter St Davids station at around 3.30am, I sat in the waiting room - alone, chilly and questioning my sanity - waiting for the first train to Yeovil Junction (from where it was a two-mile hike into work).

So why did I go? Perhaps it was because, deep down, I wanted to be there when we reached the semi-finals of the much-maligned EFL Trophy. Perhaps it was because I wanted to write about it in a newspaper column three decades later. Perhaps it was because my friends weren’t going and I wanted a little bit of one-upmanship (and, let’s be honest, who doesn’t?) Whatever, only 1,684 other people shared my enthusiasm. And I bet they all, unlike myself, had a damn good idea how they were getting home that night.

I certainly didn’t go because Watling Street was a new ground. I’d been there twice that season already. Exeter - and this is a good quiz question - had played there in the first and second rounds of the FA Cup (drawing with Dartford and, after winning the replay, drawing with Maidstone too) and also been there in the FOURTH DIVISION. Four away games at the same ground in one season, and two in the same competition. You don’t get that too often.

Above all, though, I went for one reason - I wanted to be able to sing ‘we’ll really have a laugh when we win the Leyland Daf’. A good terrace ditty, you have to admit. But I didn’t have a laugh, and we didn’t win the Leyland Daf. We were a goal down to Maidstone inside a few minutes and eventually lost 2-0. Armed with the glorious benefit of hindsight, I should have left at half-time.

(As an aside, both right-backs that evening went on to play in the Premier League – Maidstone’s Warren Barton and Exeter’s Scott Hiley, who appeared in the top flight for Manchester City and Southampton and was Pompey’s player of the season in 2000/01. If you’d asked me in 1990, I’d have said Hiley would one day play for England, but as it was Barton went on to make three senior appearances five years later).

Exeter, regrettably, never did win the Leyland Daf, or the Autoglass, or the Auto Windscreens, or the LDV Vans, the Johnstone’s Paint or the Checkatrade Trophy. All these years on, I’m still waiting for an EFL Trophy appearance. We did eventually get to Wembley, 18 years later, and we’ve been back another four times since, losing three FOURTH DIVISION play-off finals in four seasons which is, you have to agree, some achievement.

As for Maidstone, they lost in the Southern Area semi-final in 1989/90. They folded two years later, just a few weeks into the 1992/93 season. They are still waiting for their first Wembley outing. Dartford also pulled out of the Southern League around the same time for financial reasons. So my third visit to Watling Street turned out to be my last.

Only this month, I watched Maidstone draw 0-0 at Hawks in a National League South encounter. I thought about the Leyland Daf defeat when I was watching the game. I always think about the Leyland Daf defeat when I see Maidstone’s name. I always will. I remember it far more than the two wins I saw against the same team that season.

All football fans, whoever we support, can link any team’s name with an anecdote, a memory, a game, a missed penalty, a refereeing error, from years ago. We can easily remain bitter for a long time. A very long time.

Have a go. Here’s three London clubs, at random, with my instant memories whenever I hear or see their name - Leyton Orient (won 3-2 with a late 25-yard free-kick from Tony Kellow, 1987), Charlton Athletic (won 4-3, 1980, Kellow hat-trick), Fulham (won 6-4, 1993, Alan Ball was our manager, ex-Pompey striker Micky Ross scored a hat-trick). Every club’s name opens a little portal in my subconscious.

Maidstone now average around 2,000 at their Gallagher Stadium which was only opened nine years ago. Not bad for sixth tier football and around double their average when they won the Conference (lest we forget, playing home games in Dartford 23 miles away) in 1989/90. More people now watch them play Concord Rangers than watched the 1989/90 FOURTH DIVISION champions (yes, that’s Exeter - still our only ever EFL title win. You can feel sorry for me if you want).

‘Get up to anything good last night?’ I was cheerily asked when I arrived in the offices of the Western Gazette newspaper in Yeovil town centre at 9am on Thursday, February 22, 1990.

As I hung up my jacket, my sleep-deprived brain worked quickly to deliver a humorous, possibly even witty, reply. But like my team the previous evening, I was beaten.

‘No.’