Diary of a newfound groundhopper

Hastings United 4 Greenwich Borough 0, Bostik League One South East, Tuesday 31 st October 2018 On Saturday, at 3pm, while hundreds of thousands of people the length and breadth of the UK were standing and sitting at football grounds, eagerly anticipating the 90 minutes ahead, I was getting ready to spend the next hour bouncing around an inflatable theme park with my wife and kids. I’m not complaining. Well… not much. After all, it was the first Saturday afternoon this season that I wasn’t at a game, and it had been my idea to spend some family time together. Sort of. And anyway, the inflatable theme park was quite good fun (if not extremely knackering – for me and the wife, at least; the kids were fine). Yet I can’t deny that there was a part of me that was pining for a lost Saturday afternoon at the football. I think I may be becoming worryingly addicted to this groundhopping lark. Thankfully, due to Brighton council’s somewhat baffling decision to have a two-week ha...

Lancing FC 4 Arundel 3, SCFL Premier Division, Tuesday 23 rd October 2018 So, it’s half-term. While for those of us who work at home the thought of a whole week of the kids being around all the time, constantly moaning about being bored, arguing with each other and generally being annoying is enough to bring us out in a cold sweat (especially if your other-half happens to be a childminder!) it does have its upsides. My eldest’s football training takes a week off. Which means there’s no need to take him to training on a Tuesday evening. Which means extra time to indulge in a bonus spot of groundhopping. Yay. Having already been aware of this fact for a while now (half-term dates are indelibly etched into my memory – for all the wrong reasons) I already had the game I would be attending in mind. A visit to the Culver Road stadium, home of the Sussex FA, for the SCFL Premier League match between Lancing and Arundel. Looking to spread the joy that non-league football ...

Crawley Down Gatwick 2 Eastbourne United AFC 0, SCFL Premier Division, 20 th October 2018 In an ideal world, this weekend’s groundhopping visit would have taken me to an FA Cup match. Having managed to attend a match at a different ground in Sussex in each of the previous five rounds (including preliminary rounds) it had become my intention to keep this run going as far into the competition as possible. Alas, we don’t live in an ideal world. The fourth Qualifying Round would prove to be my undoing. Having already visited the ground of one of the county’s last two remaining clubs in the competition, Eastbourne Borough , in the previous round and with Worthing drawn away to Ebbsfleet (too far to drive due to my Saturday morning work commitments) my own FA Cup run has stuttered to a disappointing end. And with both clubs having now exited the competition just one stage before the First Round Proper, it’s a run that sadly won’t be revived anytime soon. And so to my n...

Hassocks FC 0 Lingfield FC 3, Peter Bentley Cup Third Round, 13 th October 2018 Whether or not it’s because in my new guise as a non-league groundhopper I’ve become more aware of it I don’t know, but this year’s Non-League Day certainly seems to have been better publicised than it ever has been before. There’s been ample column inches set aside for the day in various national newspapers and football magazines; airtime has been given over to it on national radio; there has been numerous mentions on television; while I can barely scroll through my twitter timeline without seeing various Non-League Day-related hashtags. With so much publicity for the day, and many clubs doing all they could to entice extra punters through the turnstiles, choosing where to go and watch a game this week was a harder choice than normal. Somewhat bizarrely, then, I ultimately chose to go and watch a game which didn’t offer any Non-League Day admission incentives. In fact, not once on Hassocks...

Eastbourne Borough 4 Dulwich Hamlet 3, FA Cup Third Qualifying Round, 6 th October 2018 It may only be the first Saturday of October, but it’s already the fifth weekend of FA Cup action this season (including the extra preliminary and preliminary round). Having managed to attend a match at a different ground in Sussex in each of the previous four rounds, it has become my intention to keep this run going for as long as possible (not including Crawley and Brighton when the league clubs enter the competition in November and January respectively). With Eastbourne Borough and Horsham being the only Sussex representatives drawn at home in the Third Qualifying Round, my decision became a straight toss-up between the two. Ultimately, I plumped for Borough, simply due to time constraints this Saturday making a jaunt eastward along the coast slightly easier for me. This meant for the first time this season I would be visiting a ground belonging to a team in the heady heights of th...