EITHERone hundred and two years of hurt. Alderney’s losing streak in the Muratti Vase, the annual tournament to decide the champion of the Channel Islands between themselves, Jersey and Guernsey, is something to behold. Their Muratti triumph in 1920 is not just the last time they won the competition, it’s the last time they won a match in it.
Not that it is a particularly fair fight, with Jersey’s population of 112,000 and Guernsey’s 68,000 dwarfing the 1,800 on Alderney. “Winning would be like a non-league team beating a Premier League side,” says the club secretary, Lee Sanders. “The gulf is probably comparable with that. But it is not impossible.”
It’s the hope that, year after year, keeps Alderney coming back. There is fresh enthusiasm for this Saturday’s game against Guernsey. However frequent or devastating the Muratti defeat – the record loss stands at 18-0 (to Jersey) in 1994 – the gilded opportunity to be the team that finally break the losing run is tantalizing.
Since the famous 1920 win, Alderney have scored 39 goals, and conceded 462 in the fixture. “We’ve had some close matches recently,” remarks Reg Atkins, Alderney’s chairman for six years and involved since 2002. “We’ve also been annihilated. The whole island lives in hope rather than expectation.”
Tensions run high between the islands, and Alderney’s mindset is influenced by the fact that in the past Jersey and Guernsey have seen victory over their smaller neighbor as a formality.
“The first year I joined, Ron ‘Chopper’ Harris was manager of Jersey,” Atkins says. “They had already booked their flight home on the proviso that there wouldn’t be extra time, and the tickets for the final were already printed without our names on it. When we hit the post in the last few minutes to almost take the game into extra time, we gave them a scare.”
As the smallest island of only three square miles, Alderney alternate between playing Jersey and Guernsey in a home semi-final, with the winner facing the other team in the final. With 25 miles to Guernsey and 35 miles to Jersey the only feasible way to travel between each island is by an unreliable ferry or an expensive airplane.
It is a problem that blights the domestic season. Alderney also competes as a club side on a weekly basis but every opponent is based in Guernsey. “An average away day costs the club close to £1,700,” Atkins says. “That’s flights, hotels, car hire, insurance, sometimes paying for a player to come from the mainland. And two-thirds of our games are away, as the Guernsey sides refuse to travel here more than once a season.”
There cannot be many places in the British Isles where it is more difficult to organize a game of football. Last season there were six home games and 16 away, costing more than £25,000. There are no Football Association grants to subsidize this, with money raised through annual player subs (a princely £700 each) and fundraising: club membership, player and match sponsors, scratchcards, raffles, program sales.
Things aren’t much easier for home matches. The Arsenal Ground, situated on a slope beneath Fort Albert, an old Victorian coastal fortification, is not the most welcoming place. “It’s quite exposed here,” Sanders says. “I once saw our goalkeeper take a goalkick and it went straight out for a corner.”
There are further problems beneath the surface. “Until recently we had problems with rabbit holes and moles on the pitch,” says Atkins. “But there was a big culling so we’re OK now. But there are no indoor training facilities, no floodlights. In the past we’ve even had car headlights and head torches to light up the pitch for training during winter. Every home match we have to have a referee come over from Guernsey. It’s ridiculous what we have to put up with.”
Infrastructure and finances aside, the biggest challenge is recruitment. More than half the Alderney population is over the age of 55. “We’ve got quite a geriatric population,” Atkins says. “There are just 125 children on the island.”
To play in the Muratti, one must have been born on Alderney or lived there for at least six months, which leaves a pool of men aged 16-34 of fewer than 100. It is not unreasonable to say that while Alderney have the demands of an international side, they have the catchment area of an average pub team.
The fierce support for the team on the island, though, is anything but amateur. A quarter of the island’s population, about 450 fans, are expected to turn out on Saturday, some making the mile-long train journey from town aboard a steam train with decommissioned London Underground carriages (the Channel Islands’ only railway). The high street in town is decked out in blue to support the team. There is a mascot, merchandise, programme, a live stream of the game for natives – or Ridunians – unable to attend. “People here are very proud of their island,” says Sanders. “I think it stems back from the war years, when people were evacuated and then forced to rebuild after the Nazis left.”
Occupied from 1940-45 during the second world war, the Germans built a concentration camp and labor camps on Alderney. “Everyone is reminded every day by the bunkers, lookout towers and underground tunnels that remain today,” says Sanders.
One of those evacuated was the grandmother of Josh Concanen, the football team’s player-manager and the linchpin of the side. Concanen left the island as a boy to play in Exeter City’s youth team and returned to Alderney after playing semi-professionally in England.
“When I first came back here we had a dreadful reputation to start with,” he says. “But the recent results have been some of the best we’ve ever had. The playing standard can be highly frustrating for me but also rewarding to see improvement. It helps that we’re all really good friends who have grown up together so we can be quite critical of each other and still get on fine afterwards.”
Alderney’s semi-final opponents this year, Guernsey, normally play in the semi-professional Isthmian League, and Concanen is hoping they arrive with a degree of complacency. “It’s up to them if they want to carry on that way. There’s enough quality here. One day it’s going to bite them in the ass. There is a bit of resentment for sure.
“Winning it would be an absolutely huge moment for Alderney. For the whole community it’s a big thing – it would be a hell of a day.”
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George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism