Stuart Leigh Beavon, born 5 May 1984, Reading, England.
PART ONE
Hailing from Berkshire, Stuart Beavon started out his footballing days with Hellenic League team Ardley United in 2001 at the age 17. Ardley United was merely the first rung, however, and by August 2003 Beavon had moved on to Combined Counties League side AFC Wallingford, a step that hardly set pulses racing but which sharpened him for what followed. The young sharpshooter scored a useful haul of goals there, and when the 2004–05 season dawned, he and two of his Wallingford teammates crossed the divide to join local rivals Didcot Town, a switch that would prove the making of him.
It was at Didcot, playing for the Railwaymen in claret and gold, that scouts from the professional game first began jotting his name in their notebooks. He announced himself in style too, netting twice in Didcot’s 3-2 FA Vase final triumph over AFC Sudbury at Tottenham Hotspurs´ White Hart Lane in May 2005. A low drive from Beavon sent Didcot ahead on 54th minutes, but Sudbury defender Shane Wardley equalised in the 65th minute – only to put the ball into his own net three minutes later. Beavon then made it 3-1 to Didcot in stoppage time before Neil Calver scored a second goal for Sudbury from the penalty spot shortly afterwards. The following campaign he went one better still, grabbing 25 league goals as Didcot romped to the Hellenic League Premier Division title, and even though the step up to the Southern League South & West Division might have troubled a lesser striker, Beavon’s scoring touch barely wavered. Across his two seasons with Didcot he plundered something in the region of a hundred goals, and clubs further up the pyramid could no longer look away.
Weymouth, then plying their trade in the Conference National, moved for him in January 2007, snapping him up on a free transfer, and over three seasons on the Dorset coast Beavon continued to find the back of the net regularly, racking up close to ninety appearances and somewhere around a quarter-century of goals for the Terras. It was solid, unspectacular non-league graft, but it kept him firmly on the radar of Football League clubs, and in February 2009 the call finally came that every non-league forward dreams of.
League Two outfit Wycombe Wanderers signed Beavon on loan on 19 February 2009, with an option to make the deal permanent once the campaign concluded. Wanderers had entered the Southern League back in 1896, before switching to the Great Western Suburban League in 1908 and then the Spartan League in 1919, and after winning that competition in both 1919–20 and 1920–21 they joined the Isthmian League, where they would remain for a remarkable 64 years, collecting eight league titles and one FA Amateur Cup title along the way.
Having rejected numerous invitations over the years to join the Alliance Premier League, the forerunner of today’s National League, the club finally accepted an offer in 1985, and eventually, under the management of a young Martin O’Neill, found genuine success in the fifth tier of English football, winning promotion into the Football League itself as Football Conference champions in 1992–93. Along the way they had also lifted the FA Trophy in both 1991 and 1993, added the Conference League Cup, and claimed the Conference Shield on no fewer than three occasions. This, then, was the club Beavon was walking into: unfashionable, perhaps, but stubborn, resilient, and not without its own proud story.
At the end of the 2008-09 season, Wycombe found themselves promoted to League One and Beavon duly signed for good. His first league start brought his first Wycombe goal too, in a 1–1 draw with Hartlepool United at Victoria Park, though the campaign that followed was a chastening one for the whole club: Beavon added two further goals from fourteen starts and eleven substitute appearances, but Wycombe slid back down into League Two regardless, their brief stay in the third tier lasting a single season.
Rather than walk away, Beavon stayed and fought, his contract extended for another year, and he repaid the club’s faith handsomely as Wycombe stormed to third place in League Two in 2010–11 and an instant return to League One. He was not the headline man that campaign — that honour belonged to Scott Rendell, who top-scored — but Beavon’s contribution alongside former Peterborough United player mattered plenty, and Wanderers manager Gary Waddock clearly agreed, because he was rewarded with the only two-year contract on offer at the club, tying him down through to the summer of 2013.
PART TWO
Stuart Beavon started the 2011–12 season sluggishly, a hat-trick in the Football League Trophy offering false hope before the league goals dried up entirely for weeks on end, but once his first league strike arrived — a priceless first-half winner in a hard-fought 1–0 victory over recently relegated Sheffield United at Adams Park on 24 September — something clicked, and he ripped off four goals in seven games in a run that had the Wycombe Wanderers supporters believing again. A quieter month followed, but then came a purple patch of three goals in two matches against Milton Keynes Dons and Chesterfield, followed swiftly by a brace against Rochdale that nudged his tally to nine for the season.
After another lean spell of three games without reward, his tenth arrived against Yeovil Town, and then, in a rampant 5–0 demolition of Hartlepool United, he helped himself to two more to move to twelve. By the time the campaign petered out he had amassed 21 league goals, good enough for fourth place in the League One scoring charts, a remarkable feat considering the team around him had been relegated back to League Two regardless. Goals, it turned out, could not save a sinking ship on their own.
He opened the 2012-13 campaign season, now back in the basement division, with his final goal in Wycombe colours, netting in a 3–1 win away at York City on 18 August 2012. Behind the scenes, though, the transfer rumour mill was already grinding, with Preston North End circling and much summer speculation about a move that ultimately stalled over valuation, Wycombe unwilling to let their prize asset go cheaply. Preston’s manager Graham Westley persisted, and on transfer deadline day, 31 August 2012, he finally got his man, Beavon signing a two-year contract at Deepdale. He wasted no time making his mark either, scoring in his very first appearance for the club as Preston defeated Swindon Town 4–1 on home soil on 2 September. Just over a year later, on 17 December 2013, his contract was extended by a further twelve months, tying him to Preston until the summer of 2015, a vote of confidence that suggested he had settled into life at the club nicely.
Yet a permanent switch to Burton Albion arrived before that extension had even run its course. On 30 June 2014 he moved to the Brewers, initially on a season-long loan that was converted into a permanent transfer on deadline day, and Burton proved fertile ground. The 2014–15 season was Burton Albion’s sixth consecutive season in League Two. They finished 6th in the previous season but failed to get promotion via the playoffs. It was Gary Rowett’s third season as manager of the club, he would leave in November to join Birmingham City. The club would appoint former Chelsea striker Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink and under his leadership the club finished first earning promotion to the Football League One for the first time in the club’s history. Beavon stayed on for a further two seasons besides, contributing fifteen goals from 102 appearances before eventually departing midway through his third campaign there.
That departure, on 1 January 2017, took him to Coventry City as part of a deal that saw Marvin Sordell move in the opposite direction to Burton. Beavon lost no time announcing himself in the Sky Blue shirt either, scoring Coventry’s second goal on his debut the very next day in a 2–2 draw with Bolton Wanderers. His most significant contribution, however, came a little later, when his goal proved the difference in a 2–1 win over his old club Wycombe Wanderers in the EFL Trophy semi-final, a result that sent Coventry to Wembley for their first appearance there in thirty years. It was a heady moment for a forward who had spent much of his career grafting away from the spotlight, and Coventry duly rewarded him with a new two-year deal. A loan to Wrexham followed on 27 July 2018, a season-long spell in the National League during which he made 46 first-team appearances and scored six goals for the Welsh club, before Coventry confirmed his release on 9 May 2019 as part of their end-of-season retained list.
Rather than fading quietly, Stuart Beavon dropped back into non-league football, signing for Jimmy Ginnelly´s Nuneaton Borough on 12 June 2019, a homecoming of sorts to the level where he had first made his name. That stint proved brief, though, and on 21 September 2019 he joined forces with Mickleover Sports on a season-long loan, a move that turned permanent in January 2020 once the arrangement had clearly suited both parties. Mickleover became something of a spiritual home for him thereafter: he continued to score goals well into his late thirties and beyond, eventually taking on a player-coach role in Gareth Holmes’s backroom staff, passing on the accumulated wisdom of two decades in the game to younger teammates.