An article in today's Guardian looks at the distances clubs travel in the National North League. In particular Oxford City.
Oxford
sits about 60 miles west of London and 75 miles south of Birmingham.
Its closest major towns include Northampton and Reading. So it seems
strange that its second-biggest club, despite competing in a regional
league, will start their season on Saturday in Lancashire and clock up
eight round trips of more than 350 miles in the next nine months.
That
fate has befallen relegated Oxford City – and they have faced similar
before. On winning promotion to the sixth tier of English football for
the first time in 2012, City transferred from the Southern League
Premier to the Conference North. That stint lasted for three years
before their entry into the National League South and after eight
seasons there and one in the national division above, they are back
where they started. This season they will cover just over 6,600 miles
getting to and from league games – an average round trip of almost 300
miles and a 2,575-mile increase on their most recent campaign in
National League South and 1,339 miles up on last season.
How did
it come to this? Each season, the Football Association evenly splits the
48 sixth-tier teams across the two regional divisions. Its
considerations are geographical, drawing a boundary between the 24 most
northern and southern teams. Even so, Oxford look an odd case.
The
town of Hemel Hempstead, which has a team in National League South, is
marginally further north than Oxford. However, Hemel Hempstead’s stadium
is south of Oxford City’s. A National League spokesperson said the
relevant location is “where the club is based, not the geographical
location of the whole town”. Hemel’s total league mileage? About 3,700,
at an average of about 160 miles a match. That division includes Truro
City, who provide most clubs’ longest away trip and whose travel chart
reaches about 11,300 miles.
The manager who must deal with the
challenge at Oxford is Sam Cox. He ended last season in caretaker charge
of Wealdstone and has embraced his first full-time role. “Given the
logistics that we are in, we are the underdogs,” he says. “The boys know
the cards we have been dealt and ultimately they’ve signed on and
joined the squad because we can be competitive.”
The mantra of
“control the controllables” is key for Cox. “We plan strategically
through the week to ensure tactically and in terms of game
understanding, we’re prepared. All the bits in between – the stayovers
and prep for that – are what provide us with the challenges.”
The
club are also a “cornerstone of the community”, he says, and the
33-year-old has not forgotten how arrangements affect supporters. “These
fans are going to be taking up their whole weekend to support us and
travelling up and down from the north is not going to be an easy task.”
Fine
margins make all the difference in an environment where attitudes are
changing. Cox remembers from his playing days, spent mainly in
non-league, that the “Conference was a league where players dropped down
to retire. Many teams trained only once a week. Now, players are
younger; there’s more players dropping from Cat[egory] 1, Cat 2, Cat 3
academies into these leagues. The league would benefit from some
strategy to ensure that these circumstances don’t happen.”
Oxford
are not the only ones to endure trials and tribulations in the league.
Scarborough Athletic are one of the four longest away days on Oxford’s
list. Their location in North Yorkshire has proven problematic. The
chairman, Trevor Bull, says: “Our players are part-time and the biggest
problem occurs with midweek fixtures where players might travel
independently or end up missing the game altogether.
“Our
location is also a disadvantage in regards to recruiting players, which
we mitigated by training 40 miles away in York, so players have two
hours less to travel for training sessions. For some away matches,
players have less distance to travel than for our home games.”
South
Shields are the division’s most northerly team. Though they are one of
its few full-time clubs, they feel the difficulty of extensive travel.
Their chairman, Geoff Thompson, recognises the administrative struggle
the division has to manage. “The National League South is mostly clubs
in London, south of London and the south-west so it’s a complicated
problem and I’m not exactly sure how it could be fixed.”
He regards the situation as part and parcel of a journey through the tiers. “Just over nine years ago we were in a Northern League division with entirely local football. We’ve had a number of promotions into the National League system and that has come with a price.”