Five of Withdean Stadium’s weirdest features

When Brighton left Withdean Stadium in 2011, it was a football ground unlike any other in English football.

There was an away end that was so far away from the pitch it was in a different postcode to the rest of the stadium. Players changed in a set of huts behind one of the goals and five of the six stands had no roof. Six stands in itself was ridiculous.

What makes this all the more remarkable is that over their 12 years at the Theatre of Trees, Brighton and Hove Albion carried out numerous improvements to turn it into a Football League standard stadium. When they moved in in 1999, it was even less suitable and contained even more weird and wonderful features.

That is what led Huddersfield Town manager Lou Macari to decry playing there as like being on a pre season tour to Scandinavia.

On the tenth anniversary of the Brighton’s final match at Withdean, here are five of the most quirky aspects of Brighton’s early years at their ‘temporary’ home.

The player’s tunnel was a wooden footbridge
In that first season at Withdean when the ground consisted of only two stands, the club faced a bit of a dilemma – how can you segregate supporters with just two areas for all 6,000 people to sit?

Their answer was to give away fans 500 seats at one end of the North Stand, which was accessed by walking along the running track at the front.

This led to another problem, namely how could the players get onto the pitch from their changing rooms, given that they needed to cross the same bit of running track that the visiting fans were now using?

The answer was a rickety old wooden bridge made out of MDF and kept up by a mixture of scaffolding and what looked suspiciously like gaffa tape.

Quite how it did not collapse at some point over the season is nothing short of a mystery. It didn’t look like it could take the weight of one Mark Walton, let alone Mark Walton, 15 other Brighton players, 16 opposition players, four match officials and all the coaches and physios who filled the benches.

Yet survive it did, right the way through the 1999-00 season until it was removed to make way for a new stand for away supporters. There cannot have been many stranger players’ tunnels in the history of English football.

You could see into the player’s benches
Another feature that was binned after just one season were the see-through substitute benches in front of the South Stand.

Given the number of wind up merchants in the lower leagues, it was a surprise these actually lasted a year. It seemed like it would be just a matter of time before some overexcited manager or player took advantage of the fact that the entire home stand could see their every move by doing something provocative.

That moment duly arrived with the visit of Rotherham United in April. The Millers man mountain of a defender Guy Branston was on a mission to get Darren Freeman sent off. Every time the Albion striker went near Branston, the Millers man would throw himself to the ground.

Needless to say, this did not sit well with the Albion fans who began directing their ire at the Rotherham bench. At which point, visiting boss Ronnie Moore turned around in his seat and casually flicked a middle finger at the South Stand.

Several bottles came flying down from the further enraged locals and an angry mob gathered on the track to show their dissatisfaction with Moore. The dugouts were painted white two months later.

You could score into the hammer net
Before the Worthing based away end opened in 2005, the stadium’s hammer net used to remain in place during matches. This led to an excellent side game to the football of who could score into the alternative goal.

It required quite a bit of skill. Not only did somebody have to take a shot that was so shit that it ballooned off towards the corner flag, but they also had to get the ball into a pretty small gap.

It definitely happened on one occasion as we can recall the entire stadium celebrating as if the Albion had just won the Premier League title.

We’ve no idea who the opponents were or if it happened more than once, which is a shame as it was fantastic to bear witness to something so pointless and yet brilliant. If you’ve got any idea about when it took place, get in touch.
 

There was only 15 minutes of pre match music
One of the major obstacles to the Albion moving in at Withdean was the apparent disruption that having 6,000 football fans descend on this leafy Brighton suburb every other Saturday was going to cause the local residents.

In order to try and minimise the shattering of their peace and quiet during the early years at the stadium, part of the planning permission stipulated that music could only be played over the tannoy for 15 minutes before kick off.

That gave just about enough time for three or four songs and Sussex By The Sea as the teams ran out. Not that you could hear much of it anyway, with the Withdean sound system being notoriously rubbish for those in the South Stand.

This meant that the players warmed up in eerie silence. Half time took place to just a background murmur of people dissecting the 45 minutes which had just gone, unless Dick Knight was on the pitch making one of his frequent speeches. There was no music as people departed either.

Although strange, this may in fact have been no bad thing. John Baine was in charge of the tannoy alongside Paul Samrah throughout the Withdean years, which means that the ban probably saved us from being subjected to a load of terrible ska music.

Litter picking after games was a thing
What do you do after a home game? Our favoured options are pub or pub, although some fans do go home. At Withdean, there was a third option – litter picking.

Another of the locals’ concerns was that football fans would rock up and start throwing their rubbish everywhere, turning Withdean and Westdene into a scene from Stig of the Dump.

The club countered this by setting up little patrols. Volunteers would clear the streets of any rubbish after every home game to try and keep the area as clean as possible. At one point, the little pickers even had their own £6,000 sponsorship deal with McDonalds.

Because hardly any football fans dropped litter, the litter patrols largely collected rubbish left lying around by the general public.

As a result, for the 12 years that Brighton played at Withdean, it was the cleanest area of the city. Given the annual bin strike that the unions like to hold, perhaps the City Council should get the Albion litter pickers back together?