Back to their Roots: Cleaning up Southend United

Words: Tom Reed

Images: David Shields

Additional reporting: David Shields

Football grounds are supposed to be places of communal pride and a respite from the working week.

Supporters don’t expect their players to be superstars, just to produce skill that rises above the workaday on green pitches that are the last remaining link to a concept of common land.

At Southend United, however, their Roots Hall ground had become a symbol of the dysfunction of the English game, where Premier League clubs go on rooting-tooting tours of the USA to grow the brand, while equally-loved outfits back home are going through their own cost of living crises.

Passers by, in the deep blue shirts of the Essex club, couldn’t bear to look at the sight of the place, which seems less left to rack and ruin and more treated with a humdrum lack of care by the club’s owner Ron Martin.

Having less than a week to drag and paint and tweak and buff and polish the ground that opened in 1955 into one fit to host National League football is just another task that has fallen on Southend supporters, who are rising up to grasp the job of stewardship of the Shrimpers.

©David Shields/ Terrace Edition. Southend United.

Southend’s story is quite well told now, with the broadsheet media finally catching on and sending tired writers down to scrawl a few words about the £275,000 unpaid tax bill and the transfer embargo, while putting the finishing touches to an opus on the new Man Utd £900 million Adidas kit deal.

The Shrimpers’ active fans, usually considered no more than a chirpy set of lads in the noisy corner of Roots Hall, have quickly turned themselves into an efficient unit of direct action. There were plenty telling them that protest won’t work and to let things play out with the pound shop Rod Stewart in relation to the club’s staff going unpaid for periods.

Yet they stuck to their guns and it seems it was mainly their picket on Martin’s big Benfleet mansion which brought pressure to bear and made the chairman sweat out of his undone shirt collar and seriously market the club for sale.

Roots Hall is one of the last remaining undeveloped old-school grounds and its decent location just a ten minute drive inland from the Adventure Island pleasure beach, makes it a focus for the obsession of “saving” clubs by developing stadia for retail or housing and moving them to larger out of town venues.

With the majority of England’s characterful grounds replaced with soulless bowls or echoey mega-stadia, Roots Hall’s heritage and mismatched charm becomes all the more priceless but it is on borrowed time with the proposed new site for a Southend stadium at Fossets Farm framed as an inevitability.

It was then, an act of real feeling, that 165 Southend fans turned up at Roots Hall on Sunday to get it fit to pass a safety inspection so that the club could host Oldham Athletic for the National League opener this Saturday.

Polishing a classic car even though it didn’t have many miles left.

There were scenes from a stock-take at B&Q with mops and buckets and brooms and paint brushes being brandished. A jet-washing company had turned up to offer their surfaces for free and spray off some of the accumulated grime.

Lawrence Austin organised the cleanup and his first game was a 1-0 win over West Ham in 1993 at Roots Hall when Stan Collymore and Brett Angell terrorised the Hammers. Barry Fry wasn’t here this time to sweep the touchline like he had run it after overseeing the win over West Ham but Austin was enthused by the number who turned out, including the CEO, his wife and the current Southend manager Kevin Maher.

Irishman Maher played over 400 games for Southend and returned to take the top job at the Shrimpers in 2021. It’s doubtful Maher ever envisaged donning a J-Cloth to clean Roots Hall himself but is considered to have done a stellar job in difficult circumstances with the club having just 16 contracted players on the books due to the embargo.

“It shows what the football club is about, it’s about the fans and always will be about the fans…it’s an unbelievable sight but one we are very grateful for” added Maher.

The cleanup worked, with Southend granted a safety certificate to play the match against Oldham this Saturday. The grass will be mowed, the concourses jet-washed and the plastic seats pristine.

Yet, Southend being Southend it’s not a clean denouement to the story, some fans are aggrieved that the fans have done “Martin’s job for him” in tarting up the ground and inadvertently provided an income from gate receipts. Some won’t enter Roots Hall at all with Martin in charge.

“You do know you are putting people off” said Martin in a recorded address to protesting fans outside his giant pile with regards protracted takeover talks from unknown parties.

It’s clear that Shrimpers fans will never be put off supporting the club they love.

The tactics board in the ground was covered in messages of support for Maher and the team. “Don’t do it for Ron, do it in spite of Ron” read one message.

There will be plenty hoping that Ron Martin’s name is erased from the club in the not too distant future. Then the fans can continue the heavy lifting and fine polishing of protecting community football in Southend.