‘He knew the game and had a great gift for story-telling’ – A tribute to Charlton Athletic reporting stalwart Kevin Nolan

BY RICK EVERITT

Kevin Nolan liked to joke that since his first Charlton match had been the victorious 1947 FA Cup final, his career as a supporter had always been going downhill.

That turned out to be truer than he could have imagined over the last decade. But Kevin, who died at the age of 87 on Friday, continued to entertain and inform fellow travellers with his original wit and colourful insight to the very end of his life.

From 1986 onwards he contributed more than 1,000 Addicks match reports to the SE London Mercury, and latterly the South London Press. When those print opportunities declined, he popped up regularly on local news websites instead.

For many years he also contributed a weekly column to the Mercury about another of his passions, the local boxing scene. It was called Neutral Corner – somewhat ironically because Kevin was anything but neutral. Indeed, he was opinionated in person and on the page, as well as often very funny, but he was never gratuitously cruel.

The Mercury of the late 1980s needed to publish an interesting First Division match report five days after a game which had already been extensively covered in the national press. Kevin’s imaginative and often irreverent style did that job perfectly, but it puzzled a generation of footballers who were accustomed to a much more functional approach.

Their bemusement was compounded by the fact that Kevin usually only wrote up what he had seen on the pitch rather than the post-match pleasantries in the press room, or arranged to interview them elsewhere, so to them he was operating in the shadows.

Equally, his unwillingness or inability to suppress his partisanship could lead him into trouble at provincial grounds where displays of emotion in the media area were generally frowned upon, although he enjoyed his role too much to put it at any serious risk.

It was never all about the fees he was paid, either, which was probably just as well. But he certainly appreciated not having to pay for his ticket, much as he had taken satisfaction from bunking over stadium walls in his younger days.

One of his favourite yarns related to clambering illegally into Bolton Wanderers’ Burnden Park in December 1981, only to find himself and his companions isolated on an away terrace that had been closed because of heavy snowfall.

His mammoth reporting career began four seasons later in the inauspicious circumstances of a defeat at Shrewsbury Town’s old Gay Meadow ground in the April of manager Lennie Lawrence miraculous promotion year.

“Events bordered on farce a minute later when Hackett passed four defenders, guardsman correct and perfectly in line like the back four of a table-football team,” he wrote. “They headed in the opposite direction, arms aloft in frantic appeal for offside, but the crucial arm of linesman Mr Joyce stayed resolutely – and quite correctly – by his side, while Hackett ran on to beat Lange from close range.

“Division One, in that Keystone Cops moment, seemed as remote as it has been since that fateful 4-3 loss on the final day of the 1957-58 season!’

Eight months shy of his 50th birthday, albeit still an active amateur player himself, Kevin had no journalistic background. But he knew the game and had a great gift for telling stories. He ran Marvels Lane Boys’ Club for two decades.

The key to his freelance assignment was his home and away commitment to Charlton and his friendship with Mercury sports editor Peter Cordwell, to whom I also owed my own recruitment to cover the other parts of the Charlton adventure from 1989.

The Mercury was always much more than an interested bystander in these turbulent years, with the Valley abandoned and the club staging home games at Crystal Palace’s Selhurst Park. Kevin was never an activist, but his passion was always persuasive.

He could wax lyrical on the pain that Charlton had caused him and reacted badly to defeats, but his four decades in the press box were by no means all misery. There were12 top-flight seasons, five promotion campaigns, three Wembley appearances and the return to The Valley in 1992. He relished them all and his vivid commentary enhanced our own joy.

Like many of us, however, he was probably most comfortable recounting his more youthful exploits. His tales of Charlton’s post-war First Division days were told in occasional articles for my fanzine Voice of The Valley and others.

Even recently he was helping former television commentator Martin Tyler put together a feature on the 7-6 comeback win over Huddersfield Town from December 1957. His personal recollection, though, as shared in VOTV in 1990, focused typically on his failure to impress the full drama of events on a girlfriend he met up with after the game.

This proud Irishman, who nonetheless was as much of a Londoner as any of us, had mercifully missed the Addicks’ 1956/57 top-flight relegation season while doing National Service. There was another, longer gap in his attendance a decade a later after he moved to California. But the call of home remained. Soon enough he was back in Grove Park.

Family was one thing that mattered more to him than football, although they weren’t exclusive. His son Steve’s ABA flyweight championship win in 1983 resulted in an invite for father and son to watch a game from the Valley directors’ box, which was only marginally less natural territory for Kevin than a spot in the Cold Blow Lane end at Millwall.

He married Hazel in the 1990s and she became a familiar figure in press boxes alongside him – another sign of his indifference to orthodoxy – as well as a huge personal support.

I found him another gig soon after I joined the football club staff in 1998, leading tours of the rebuilt ground. His knowledge, enthusiasm and warmth made him the perfect guide and brought him closer to the club he cherished, but which hadn’t always loved him back.

A stroke and then the Covid pandemic could not keep him away. He had forsworn going up north, but he still couldn’t resist a night game at Morecambe. And there he was on the terraces at Forest Green Rovers for another evening game in February 2023 at the age of 86.

You wouldn’t put it past him to have been watching over Saturday’s 4-0 win at Walsall either. It was a fitting tribute. We’ll just never know what he might have written about it.

MAIN PICTURE: TOM MORRIS