Southend United: What We could be. A protest march.

Words: Tom Reed

Images: David Shields

You can bring joy

Like I never had

I’m gonna be right near you

As long as I can

Things Get Better. Dr Feelgood

Think, right, what it’s like to support a football club with what feels like a death date hanging over it.

March 1 2023.

Yet, the demise of the one true constant in your life, might actually not happen because someone delivers a cheque.

Or it might, because they don’t.

It may not happen at all, the fate of the 116-year old Southend United Football club in the limp but lethal grasp of the unfathomable, Great British tax system.

A club that is simultaneously planning for a new stadium but also due in court for that early March deadline over a large, overdue tax bill.

An outfit that aims for the building of thousands of houses but has reportedly paid its staff late.

A community institution described by football finance expert Kieran Maguire as having “practically got a season ticket with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, such is the number of times that they’ve been served with winding-up orders”.

A chairman who has pulled them back, from what seemed like the brink, at the last minute before.

Stays of executions and a descent down the football leagues.

©David Shields/ Terrace Edition. Southend United FC.

A Rolls Royce with its exhaust pipe dragging down Southend sea front.

February’s a son of a bitch month, both long and short. March’ll come too soon and mindfuck the Southend supporters even more.

Southend’s always been that sort of place, in its own haze.

The pub rock band Dr Feelgood, from just down the road in Canvey Island, called the area the ‘Thames Delta’, with its mud flats and oil refinery at the end and the beginning of the great river. The place people go to holiday and others can’t wait to leave.

Wilko Johnson, of Dr Feelgood, had his own long last dance with death before laying down his guitar for the last time in November of 2022.

“When I was a teenager it seemed dreadfully mundane to me; not nearly exciting enough. Now I can see that there is a lot here that can be mythologised. I spend a lot of time thinking about this place.” said Johnson on his beloved Delta before he passed.

You can see why Southend fans marched with a fuckoff great “Martin Out” banner, down Southend high street on Saturday past McDonalds and Savers and all the bargain basement shops of the Thames Estuary town that has seen better days.

There was about 100 of them, give or take, which signifies the incoherence of what Southend are facing. Marches are usually best planned when the feeling is high and there’s real unity of cause but speak to these centurions and every one can give a different reason why they are so unhappy with they way their football club is going.

Of course, the youthful faces in their number with the CP Company goggled-hats and the Aquascutum checked scarves, as grey as the Southend skies, bought jeers of a “school day out” from those who struggle to remove lard-arses from pub stools.

Yet, more often than not it’s these young punks with the pyros who see what’s coming down the road before everyone else and take the flak and produce the publicity which bring the pressure to bear to bring some sort of resolution to these things.

More brave than stupid.

As for Southend chairman, Mr Ron Martin, he doesn’t bear much discussion, described as a property developer and the sort of businessman that ends up owning football clubs all too often in England.

He took control of Southend circa 2000, about which time plans to move to a new stadium were announced but Southend have had all manner of schemes to leave the well located Roots Hall, five minutes from the beach.

The late Sir Bobby Moore was pictured in 1986 with a model for a 30,000 capacity ground at Aviation Way, the plans for which never made it off the runway.

The notion that Southend have to leave Roots Hall has remained and the proposed 17,000 new-build at Fossets Farm has come to feel like a raison d’être.

That’s not much comfort, of course, as Southend lose 1-3 at home to upstarts Eastleigh, another team that’s never been in the league turning over the Shrimpers with in-your-face football.

Young Stoke City loanee Blondy Nna Noukeu makes a couple of errors between the sticks for Southend and draws the harsh ire of the Roots Hall crowd, some of whom, understandably, look ready to snap.

There’s not much hope of a seasoned replacement for Noukeh with the club placed under a transfer embargo for missing a HMRC payment.

The result leaves the Shrimpers, fittingly, cruelly, so near yet so far to the playoffs in the National League, one of the most difficult to escape divisions in English football.

Southend are a non-league side now, despite reaching the Championship in 2006/7 and the League Cup Quarter-Finals after dumping out Manchester United in the Fourth Round.

They were Ron Martin years of course and the Chairman can point to putting millions in the club but that seems futile when you have to apply for “bridging finance” to fill a “funding gap” to pay what’s owed to HMRC.

For what it’s worth, from the 2019 Southend accounts, which Maguire described as “later than a Sunday morning League tackle” the club was said to have losses of “£45,000 a week”. Southend owed South Eastern Leisure (current sole Director Ronald Martin) “over £14m by looks of things” tweeted finance guru Maguire.

By the look of things is about right, from what we can make out, in the abstract clutching of this intangibly miserable situation at the Shrimpers.

At full-time, a banner drops down from the stand at Roots Hall which reads “RIP SUFC. Ron Martin: making a killing, killing us”.

Martin is no-where to be seen and with the lack of that Septuagenerian to grab by the lapels and scream a Southend pier Edvard Munch sequel, fans turn on each other and the in-fighting begins.

Some supporters apparently confront former Roots Hall legend Stan Collymore, back at the club as the “Senior Football Strategist”.

They ask him, on video “what is your role?” and the former-pro, who infamously described himself as a “journaliste” when periscoping trouble at Euro 2016 didn’t seem so keen on his kind of war reporting.

Instead of just saying what his role was, Collymore seemed to swear and asked the clearly desperate fans to write him a letter.

A long-hand response to this crisis which is coming to a head quickly. God knows what provocation Collymore received, if any.

Short clip of what happened with @StanCollymore today after the game. #martinout pic.twitter.com/SeUCiL5mxD
— Southend Fan Updates (@fan_southend1) January 28, 2023

A coalition of Southend supporters’ groups, including the Shrimpers’ Trust and the All At Sea fanzine have called a meeting for January 30th and asked for new investment at the club.

“We have gained little confidence over the last week that the current situation is likely to be resolved in the immediate future”.

Meanwhile, the inevitable statement from Martin on the March 1 date with destiny and HMRC didn’t come with the customary confidence but was delivered as flat as the feeling in getting done at home by Eastleigh.

“Whilst I am not currently able to outline precise timings, I am conscious of the fans’ concerns and will look to provide a further update as soon as is practical” wrote Martin, failing to abate the sense that things could be touch and go.

“We could have been a Bournemouth or a Brentford” sighs a longstanding Southend fan.

Instead, Southend are an example of what we could be, at clubs all over the country.

The need for an independent regulator is clearer than ever.

Fans shouldn’t have to live with this lack of security and chronic stress of a sport that is supposed to be a release from everyday worries.

“This is about as serious as it can be” wrote local reporter Chris Phillips.

The tide goes out on the Thames Delta and soon Southend United could go with it, that’s the fear round here.