Ifill up from the Downs

Saltdean United, turnover £40 000, average attendance 43 last season, play in the Sussex County League division two. Their ground, Hill Park, is 6km out of Brighton in Coombe Vale, on the Sussex Downs. To reach it you drive along Saltdean Vale, turn down a dirt path, pass a listed farm building, caravan park and dilapidated greenhouses and park by the bushes.

Clubhouse, toilets and changing rooms to the right, council-owned pitch on the left. A skeletal metal framework — it looks like an abandoned players’ tunnel — stands on the clubhouse side of the pitch; opposite, a small stand, backed by a steep, open bank, offers the notion of shelter when the wind and rain arrive on cold winter afternoons.

Today, though, is a glorious Saturday in late April. The ‘Tigers” are playing Broadbridge Heath; the surrounding Downs are green and inviting. The talk among the few spectators is of the FA Cup. Not Saltdean’s 4-0 defeat at home to Cray Wanderers back in the extra preliminary round last August (attendance 104), but the final.

Why? Because if you happened to be here a few seasons ago you would have seen Paul Ifill, a teenage centre-forward, playing for Saltdean. On Saturday you can catch him if you are near a television or have a ticket to the Millennium stadium in Cardiff.

Ifill will be playing on the right of Millwall’s midfield, trying to outsmart Manchester United in the FA Cup final.

‘It’s funny because when Paul was 12 I took him to Wembley and he said, ‘Dad, I’d like to play here one day.’ And in his first season at Millwall [1998/99] he did, in the LDV Vans Trophy. Now I have to pinch myself. I just can’t believe he’ll be playing at the Millennium stadium. It’s like a fairy tale.”

So says Everton Ifill, Paul’s father and one-time Saltdean teammate, describing what has happened to his son since he left Hill Park in 1997 and signed for the south London club. Tall, like his son, but a much fuller figure ‘when I was playing”, Everton Ifill, air-conditioning engineer by trade, is also a mobile DJ, karate black belt and formerly a bruising centre-forward no one wanted to mark when he played for, among others, Maidenhead and Windsor and Eton. In the 1980s he also played for Saltdean, introducing his son to the club as youngster.

‘My dream was always to play with Paul in the same team and we managed it.” Ifill was 16, his father 43. ‘I played centre-forward, Paul was on the wing. We both scored; he put over a cross for my goal.”

At 16, Ifill was playing county league football for Saltdean, picking up £25 a week and going to college with a vague idea of becoming a geography teacher. He had had his stab higher up, in youth games and trials at Brighton, Watford and most notably West Ham, where the talent spotters were more interested in a player named Joe Cole.

Ifill was born in 1979 in Brighton and attended schools in Rottingdean, the neighbouring village to Saltdean. His sister, Samantha, remembers ‘sitting and watching him play in the freezing cold at Saltdean”. A brief period on Brighton’s books ended when Ifill told his father he did not like how they did things. Then there were a couple of years at Watford.

‘I scored a lot of goals for the youth team. But they got a new youth development officer and I wasn’t in his plans.”

This was in 1995. Ifill enrolled at sixth-form college in Brighton and took PE, geography and sociology. And went back to playing for Saltdean’s youth team.

‘I’d pretty well given up on playing the game professionally,” he says. Everton, too, felt his son’s chance had gone.

Gerry Green comes from just outside Glasgow. He was on Partick Thistle’s books as a teenager with Alan Hansen and now coaches in the United States during the off-season. He was with Saltdean for 16 years, the last four as manager. As Saltdean take on Broadbridge on their bare and cracked pitch, Green, tattooed and shaven-headed, sits in the sun with a pint of cider and a cigarette and recalls Paul Ifill’s debut for the first team.

‘I had no centre-forwards but I knew this kid was coming through,” he says. ‘So I phoned Everton and I said, ‘Is there any chance of Paul playing on Saturday?’” Green cracks a wicked grin. ‘You know what it’s like,” he points to the game. ‘They’ll kick their granny out there. So Everton said, ‘Well I’m not really sure …’ I said, ‘You let me give him 20 minutes, and if somebody’s giving him a battering I’ll take him off.’

‘Everton went, ‘All right then’, and of course Paul scored. I asked Everton, ‘OK for Saturday?’ and he nodded. Paul scored two more then and he never looked back.”

Ifill would score 21 goals in 31 matches in his time at the club in the mid-1990s. Impressive, but hardly fulfilling his potential.

‘He had bags of scope, there was always more in the locker,” Green recalls. ‘He had pace and attitude. He was bright, alert, he played the right ball and he’d run at people.”

Green was not the only one who noticed. Dennis Burnett lives just up the road from Hill Park and helped to coach the youth and senior teams at Saltdean. Burnett played for West Ham under Ron Greenwood in the 1960s when Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst and Martin Peters were at Upton Park. He moved to Millwall and played more than 300 games for the Lions.

‘You give lads things to do in training and he [Ifill] was always up for doing them again, even if he missed. I thought he had a chance.”

Everyone says Ifill’s qualities are two good feet, skill and determination. When Burnett used his contacts to get Ifill trials, this temperament was crucial.

‘Paul was in his final year as a youth player. I phoned West Ham, then took the day off and drove him up to Bishop’s Stortford. West Ham had a very tough youth team and Paul didn’t know anybody, but after the first half West Ham were winning 3-0. Paul scored the first two and made the third. But he was left out for the second half. ‘I said to these people, ‘You make me laugh. Who’s running the game? All you’re talking about is Joe Cole, who’s done a bit of magic on the halfway line.’”

Three weeks later, though, Ifill was invited to West Ham’s training ground.

‘I took a day off work again and West Ham don’t offer me a penny. In all there must’ve been 200 watching. Paul’s playing centre-forward. They clear the ball out of defence and it goes to him on the halfway line. He kills it with his right foot and nutmegs the centre-half, runs through and smashes the ball into the far corner from 22 yards. Everyone claps.”

But nothing came of it. For whatever reason, Ifill did not impress West Ham. Burnett feels it was because ‘it demeans their own scouting system”. Burnett, though, did not give up and called Jeff Burnidge, an old friend and Millwall director.

Everton Ifill recalls the trial.

‘It was a reserve game against Crystal Palace. They put Paul up front and at half-time Jeff asked me how I thought he’d done. I was really sad for him because he was out of his class. I said, ‘No chance.’ And Jeff said, ‘Don’t worry about it. We knew it’d be hard, we just wanted to see if he’d get up. And he got up every single time. We can do the rest within six months.’”

Ifill went back to Saltdean and Millwall watched him three or four times, including his final game in county football when he scored in the 2-1 defeat by St Leonard’s in the 1997 Sussex Senior Cup final. Millwall liked him and Ifill was in at last.

Ifill has gone on to play more than 240 games for the Lions and this month was called up for Barbados, where his father is from. But he has not forgotten Saltdean. On the wall of the Tiger bar in the clubhouse is a signed and framed No 7 shirt. Last season he was the reluctant guest presenter of their end-of-season awards. ‘I won’t have to say anything will I?” he asked.

This year’s Saltdean vintage, like many footballing neutrals around the world, would like to see Millwall pull off one of the classic cup shocks. —