25th Jan 2025 

Standfirst: Matt Eastley recalls an extraordinary set of coincidences which sparked a remarkable chain of events

I recently paid what was – these days – a very rare visit to The Valley, home of Charlton Athletic.

 Outside the ground, who should I bump into but another old St Mary’s boy.

 This was not the first time I had randomly bumped into him outside a football ground. This time though I knew who he was. Let me explain.

 There was a time when I barely missed a Charlton Athletic match.

 Between around 1989 and 2010, I must have gone to around 1500 matches, home and away, many of them with my old mate Chris Nutt who started with me at St Mary’s in 1977.

 While following Charlton was once central to my life, things change. Marriage, parenthood, geography, personal circumstances not to mention existential crises at my once beloved club meant that suddenly my attendance at Charlton fell off the proverbial cartoon cliff face.

 Come 2010 I was living in mid-west Kent and I had discovered the joys of non-league, semi-pro football, in my case Tonbridge Angels who back then were plying their trade in the old Ryman Premier League, basically the seventh tier of the country’s footballing pyramid.

 Through them I got involved with BBC Radio Kent and after a couple of seasons summarising on games I became a football commentator.

 Suddenly every Saturday of the football season saw me behind the microphone at various clubs on the Kent non-league circuit.

 By 2017, I had virtually stopped going to Charlton, except for the very occasional midweek evening game and even this was to drift off as I felt myself increasingly alienated from the club I once loved and my affection for Tonbridge Angels grew.

 So it baffles me to consider what on earth I was thinking when I decided to travel the virtually 300 miles one-way trip to Blackpool where Charlton were playing one Saturday in late January 2018.

 Not only had I decided to drive the six-hour journey in my ageing car, I had also decided to take the journey and the whole trip on my own. Looking back it seems nothing short of masochism.

 This move was unprecedented which makes what happened later even more coincidental. I had never travelled to an away game on my own, let alone one at the other end of the country and certainly not in the depths of winter. I still can’t explain my thinking as I left Kent just after 8am with my wife shaking her head with bemusement as I set off.

 Anyone who’s battled with the various motorways between London and the North West will know it’s never plain-sailing and this was no exception.

 Stuck on the M6 with the clock ticking and my back aching from being in the car too long, I seriously thought about abandoning the whole trip and turning back. For the last part of the journey I had to get my foot down but was still no closer to rationalising my decision.

 In the event, I got to Blackpool with about half an hour to spare, slightly frazzled, but in the mood to watch a bit of football.

 Just that week Jimmy Armfield had died. Armfield was something of a Blackpool FC legend. He was capped 43 times for England and was an unused member of Sir Alf Ramsey’s 1966 World Cup Winning Squad as well as playing nearly 570 matches for Blackpool, his only club. He was a true hero at Bloomfield Road, Blackpool’s home and his death was a big deal for The Tangerines as they are known, and I knew there would be some sort of tribute.

 As I parked my past-its-best Alfa Romeo in the large car park outside Bloomfield Road, I began chatting to a friendly Blackpool fan in the way football fans of opposing sides do, just exchanging small talk and pleasantries.

 I explained that I’d just driven all the way up from Kent on my own and he looked at me with something approaching pity while at the same time, implicitly understanding that this was the type of weird thing football fans are wont to do on occasion.

 As I explained to him the torturous journey he suddenly received a text on his mobile and began shaking his head:
“It’s off,” he said, disbelievingly immediately looking at me with even more sympathy.

 “What do you mean, it’s off?” I replied with a nervous laugh.

 “The match,” he said. “It’s off. Waterlogged pitch.”

 “You’re joking,” I said.

 “No, I’m not. It’s definitely off.”

 A quick text from a group of Charlton friends who’d made the far wiser decision not to come to this match confirmed the news.

 So there I was effectively stuck in Blackpool on my own on a very cold January afternoon and anyone familiar with the north Lancashire coast will know that it gets very cold indeed.

 It was the first time I’d ever visited Bloomfield Road and so I thought I’d take a quick tour around the outside of the stadium.

 I noticed a few people were hanging around as there was going to be some sort of ceremony for the departed Jimmy Armfield.

 I was feeling very solitary indeed when I suddenly saw a tall figure with a friendly looking face, accompanied by a woman who would later become his wife.

 The important thing is he was wearing a red scarf displaying his Charlton allegiance. Scarves are not as common as you might think among fans and the fact he was wearing one was significant.

 Charlton scarf or no Charlton scarf, nine times out of ten I might have walked past him. After all, there were probably 250 or so other Charlton fans up there.

 But, without really thinking about it, I made up my mind to say hello.

 It proved to be one of the better decisions I’ve made.

 I approached the pair and said something bland like: “Hello. There are other Charlton fans as mad as me then?”

 And that was it. We were up and running and the conversation flowed.

 We had time to spare because obviously the allotted time was supposed to have been spent watching football.

 We chatted as you do but at some point we must have crossed that invisible line where you start sharing slightly more individual stuff like names and where we grew up.

 He told me his name was John, his girlfriend was Lorraine and that he grew up in Erith.

 I’m quite a nosey person really and I like these finer details so the inevitable next question was: “Which school did you go to?”

 I can still see John standing in front of the main entrance to Bloomfield Road, incongruous geography if ever there was such a thing:

 He said: “Oh you won’t have heard of it, It closed ages ago.”

 “Go on,” I laughed. “You never know I might have done.”

 “Well it was a Catholic school called St Mary’s,” John went on.

 My reaction was an explosion of laughter and something trite like: “You’re joking. That’s where I went! What’s your second name.”

 “Battison,” he said. “I’m John Battison.”

 At that point a penny dropped of such monumental proportions that it almost shook Bloomfield Road to its foundations.

 Well that was it, we were away. All disappointment at the torturous drive north and the postponement of the game was forgotten as we rolled back the years and shared our experiences.

John or ‘Batty’ as he is invariably called, started at Mary’s in 1972. He was five years above me and captain of the first fifteen in season 78/79 and our paths never met. Why would they? He was school rugby captain, a sixth former, a leading figure in the school and I was a mere second form ‘tick.’

 It was then I shared with John that I’d been toying with the idea of writing something about St Mary’s and researching its history as it seemed an establishment which had been virtually forgotten. In truth, I’d been kicking that particular can down the road, finding excuses not to start it.

 I said I wasn’t sure I could find enough people to tell me the story and John simply said: “Oh that won’t be a problem. I’m in touch with plenty of people. I’d do it.”

 So I did.

 It is no exaggeration to say that had that chance meeting not occurred in far-off Blackpool, all that followed would not have happened.

 John and I have both reflected on the bizarre set of circumstances that led to it, a series of coincidences that made it happen:

• I had stopped going to Charlton home matches years previously, let alone away matches
• A regular fixture involving one of the longest journeys that season was a particularly bizarre and random choice
• The fact I went alone is just odd and unprecedented
• Postponements are actually rare – but this definitely had a bearing on our meeting
• The fact Blackpool legend Jimmy Armfield had recently died meant that people were lingering rather more than normal
• The fact I chose to go up to John and Lorraine and start a conversation
• The fact said conversation reached a stage where we exchanged names and some details of our schooling
• The fact I had been idly toying with an idea to write a St Mary’s book.

 

Maybe someone was watching over us?

 When ‘We Did Our HomeWork On The Bus’ was launched in October 2022, John spoke and reflected on this chance meeting.

 We discussed it again at the reunion at Sidcup Rugby Club in 2024.

 There were another set of unusual circumstances which caused me to bump into John yet again outside The Valley before the recent home game against Reading but perhaps that’s a tale too far.

 We now we have a bond and I suppose if it wasn’t for a chance meeting in the cold northern seaside town of Blackpool, there would have been no St Mary’s reunions, no commemorative books, no website and hundreds of people may not have been reunited with old friends.

 

So I guess Jimmy Armfield and Blackpool FC will now prove to be a footnote in St Mary’s history.