The late Peter Overton once had some advice for a team mate who was struggling on the field. “Stick it in the onion sack and you’ll shut everyone up.”
Overton played for both Tonbridge and Maidstone and he was part of the Angels side that lost 3-2 to the Stones in an FA Cup tie back in 2002. That was a very different era, with over a thousand fans able to attend without segregation. That alone means it seems like a very long time ago.
Six of the Tonbridge side that day played for Maidstone at some stage and at least a couple of ours had played for them. And yet even though it had been two years since the release of DJ Otzi’s version of “Hey! Baby”, no one thought to sing: “Heeee-eeee-eeey Judas! Oooh! Aaaah! I wannaaa knoooooooooooooh, why you’re such a cunt.”
Overton, who passed away in 2018, played for Maidstone in the County League (a level that was frankly beneath him), went to Tonbridge among several other clubs and then came back for a spell under Lloyd Hume and Alan Walker in the early 2000s.
All of this was normal and still is. Football goes in cycles. In the 80s any Maidstone player who joined Tonbridge was on the way down but by the 90s the reverse was true and it stayed that way till the new ground opened: the tipping point arguably came when Lee Worgan and Frannie Collin joined us from Tonbridge in 2013, with Sonny Miles following a year later.
Players have always moved around and they always will, but this season was different, with an exodus down the A26. As the only man to have gone in the opposite direction during the summer, Tom Leahy was always the most likely panto villain for the local dog molesters, while our own were spoiled for choice. Their squad had six ex-Maidstone players and unlike in 2002, when this was considered no big deal, this time there was an edge.
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I wouldn’t personally recommend shouting the j-word at any footballer, because aside from any moral considerations, it’ll usually fire them up. And whatever happened last night wouldn’t alter the fact that Reynolds and Corne gave us all one of the best days of our lives.
Corne and Tanga went to Tonbridge because they got better offers. Harness and Beeden were released and Reynolds has been round the houses since 2024, which in a different way, also seems like a very long time ago.
Pavey on the other hand, was less a panto villain than an actual villain when we last met, allegedly performing rhinoplasty on Nathan Harness without an anaesthetic. You can read all about that in issue 35, but the disciplinary process that followed was heroically incompetent.
(Just an observation here, but isn’t suspending a player from football at Step Five and below, when he plays for a Step Two club, a bit like allowing a drink driver to keep his license as long as he surrenders his skateboard?)
Tonbridge’s social media team knew what they were doing when they staged this photo and the replies when it was posted speak for themselves. So does the song: “Alfie Pavey, he nuts who he wants.”
You might have thought that keeping a low profile would have been sensible, especially if your punishment doesn’t even amount to a slapped wrist, but Pavey waded in when Oliver Ash protested on Twitter, calling him a clown and saying “see you Tuesday”.
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In the aftermath of Tuesday night, Alan Dunne said he wouldn’t make excuses, before blaming the linesman. If the above replay is the one he was going by, if anything it suggests the linesman was right, so there was no need to go the full Marc White about it.
He also said they’d missed a few sitters. One of these came in the third minute of stoppage time, when, if Pavey had been as accurate as he was when he picked out Harness’s nose, it would have been 1-1.
Leahy, by contrast, kept quiet, and at the end of an outstanding team move he stuck it in the onion sack, which, for the kids, roughly translates as the topmost part of the bins. “Had to silence a few,” he posted. “Left foot, top corner, job done”. Peter Overton would have approved.
