FA Youth Cup Preliminary Round
Leylands Park, Burgess Hill
Admission: £5.00
Programme: None
Attendance: 120 (estimate)
To kick off a busy week of groundhopping in this, my second week of annual leave from work, I decided to start off with take in a FA Youth Cup game this evening, and wanting something fairly local ahead of a drive up to East Anglia in the morning, I chose this as the game that most appealed.
This evening would be the first time I have visited Leylands Park since Boxing Day 2013, and there has been some additiom of furniture since then. The entrance remains in one corner of the ground, with plenty of bright and attractive signage drawing attention to the club and its games. Hand sanitizer dispensers and a qr code to scan for track and trace purposes are available around the entrance. A portakabin is situated immediately to the right, whilst to the left is quite a spacious and modernly designed clubhouse bar, with decking to the front. An addition since my last visit was an all-seater stand with a metal roof supported by scaffolding behind the goal. Just beyond the goal is still a tea-bar hut, although it was closed this evening. Along the length closest to the entrance, a long all-seater stand with 5 rows straddles the half way line, whilst there is still just hard standing along the other length. Another new addition to the ground is a small metallic stand for standing behind one end towards a corner flag. Leylands Park remains a really pleasant place to watch football, surrounded by trees and in a quiet setting. No programmes were produced for this fixture.
Whilst Horsham's first team play a division above Burgess Hill in the Isthmian League, both clubs' youth teams are in South Division of the Isthmian Youth League. It would be difficuly to predict how this game would pan out. Burgess Hill were in eighth place in the ten team division when last season was abandoned, following one win and a draw from their eight league games, but for Horsham, this would be their first competitive game since reforming their Under 18 team, and therefore the club's first fixture in the FA Youth Cup for five years.
On a pleasant sunny evening, it probably did tell that the Horsham youth team will take some time to gel, as Burgess Hill dominated the first half, having countless good chances but were denied by a real man of the match performance by the Horsham keeper, who made some great saves and parried, and when he was beaten, in added on time at the end of the first half, a shot from the edge of the area taking a deflection before coming back off the bar.
A minute after the break, Burgess Hill thought they finally had broken the deadlock. A ball in from the right was parried into the danger zone by the keeper, and an overhead kick saw the ball loop into the net, but the referee disallowed the goal for a high foot. But as the second half wore on, it looked like the home side would rue not putting at least one of their decent chances away, as the game was much more even and Horsham did slightly more of the attacking. But in the 84th minute, Burgess Hill finally broke the deadlock, when a corner was played in and was thumped home first time at the near post. Horsham pushed hard to grab an equaliser, but it was Burgess Hill who came closest to scoring again, when a glancing header from a free kick dropped just wide of the far post in the 88th minute. But they had done enough to seal progression to the next round, which they deserved to. Horsham's new Under 18 side will certainly take positives from the game, staying in the game in a tricky first half for them, and coming back strongly after the break.
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