Crowborough Athletic 0 Eastbourne Town 4, FA Vase 2nd Round,
Saturday 3rd November 2018
After a Saturday off from groundhopping last weekend, normal
service was resumed this weekend with a tip up the A26 to Crowborough.
It was the lure of an East Sussex derby in the second round
of the FA Vase – between Crowborough Athletic and Eastbourne Town – which
ultimately tempted me to the Crowborough Community Stadium ahead of any of the
other Vase games featuring Sussex teams.
Yet while both of these clubs may hail from the same county,
and play at the same level on the Non-League pyramid, they are not actually
league rivals. Bafflingly, for reasons that I don’t fully understand – and haven’t
been bothered to find out due to my allergy to doing any research – Crowborough
Athletic play in the largely Kent-dominated Southern Counties East Football
League, as opposed to the Sussex-oriented Southern Combination Football League
to which Eastbourne belong. This factor, however, only furthered the appeal of
the match for me as it gave it more of a cup-feeling.
Having noticed warnings on Crowborough’s Twitter feed that a
larger than usual crowd was expected for the game, and that this meant parking
spaces in the car park outside the ground could be at a premium, I decided to
leave my house around 20 minutes earlier than I normally would have done to get
to Crowborough. My dislike of walking further than I strictly need to closely
matches my contempt for research!
I was accompanied to the match by my eldest son, while my
wife took the youngest to a party. In fairness to him, he’s much quieter than
the youngest and a bit more ‘with-it’ when it comes to understanding the game,
so the journey (and indeed the afternoon in general) is not peppered by the
incessant non-sensical questions that I’m faced with when his brother is in
attendance.
An interesting thing that he did say to me on the drive up,
though, was that he felt referees had an easy job. ‘All they have to do is give
free-kicks and goals, and book and send people off,” he stated with the sort of
misinformed innocence that only an eight-year-old can muster.
I assured him that there was much more to it than that, and
that being a referee is a thankless task. Not that I have any real experience,
save from a few games reffing his under 9s team, which to be honest is enough
for me. He still wasn’t having it, though, so I challenged him to ref the game
as we watched it, and I’d tell him whether I agreed with his decision or not. I
resisted the urge to do so by screaming obscenities in his face whenever I
disagreed with his decision – I’ve mellowed since my own playing days.
In fairness, he did quite a good job and I agreed with most
of his calls, if not his choice to want to book or even send players off for every
single minor discretion. I very much doubt, had he had his way, that there
would have been enough players left on the pitch by half-time to finish the
game if he’d been the man with the whistle. One Crowborough player in
particular, Philip Appiah, should have been sent off about three times
according to him, which was probably slightly harsh. That said, he was subbed
at half-time so maybe The Crows manager, Sean Muggeridge, agreed with him.
Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. We’ll get to the game
shortly.
We Arrivied at the ground at 2:15, and with the car park
already starting to fill up, I was relieved to be waved into a parking spot by
the stewards.
It was £8 to get in (nothing for the boy), plus £1 for a
program, which although fairly short on pages, was packed with plenty of information
and gave all the required information plus a little more. Another really good
effort.
The ground is similar to many of those found at this level,
which is no bad thing. There’s a main seated covered stand on one side of the
pitch, flanked by two smaller covered areas – one terraced and one seated. There
is also a large terraced area behind the near goal, in front of the club house
and changing rooms.
This is probably the first proper bitterly cold day that I’ve
experienced at a match so far this season, so we understandably elected to
stand on the side of the pitch benefitting from the last rays of the dying afternoon
sun. While this may have been good for keeping warm, relatively speaking, it
wasn’t great for football spectating as the low sun played havoc at times with
being able to actually view what was going on on the pitch.
Not that the cold seemed to bother at least one member of
the travelling contingent of Eastbourne Town fans who spent the entire game
shirtless! Pure madness!
The travelling Eastbourne fans, collectively known as Pier
Pressure, are simply fantastic for the atmosphere they create. From the moment
the match kicked off, right up until half-time (and then from after half-term to
full-time), they were continually drumming, singing and dancing in one of the
smaller stands that they had commandeered, creating a cacophony of noise, and
generally having a great time (see the video for a very short snippet).
Don’t
get me wrong, if you happen to be watching an Eastbourne Town match whilst in
possession of a hangover, then seeing this noisy band of supporters turn up is
probably akin to being in Hell. Yet from what I heard (admittedly from the
other side of the ground) there was no bad language used and no threatening
behaviour. More fans like these would be a real asset to local football, in my
humble opinion.
Their joyful mood was no doubt aided by what they were watching
on the pitch. I had previously seen Eastbourne Town earlier in the season awayat Shoreham, when they had been similarly dominant but somehow ended up losing
2-1.
A repeat was never on the cards today. Two goals in the
space of five first-half minutes from George Taggart – the second an absolute ‘worldie’
in the words of my son – put Eastbourne in control and they never looked back.
The depleted Crows – who had a number of players missing due
to being cup-tied – battled hard, but struggled to create any real chances of
note. In fact, the only real hope they had of getting back into the game was if
they ran of the balls which sailed over the low surrounding fences at regular
intervals and then seemed to take an age to be retrieved. (Well… that or the
ref taking my son’s advice and sending all the players off).
Perhaps had Town not scored a decisive third right on the
stroke of half-time then the second-half may have been more competitive, but
when Dan Bolwell did exactly that, finishing off a well-worked move, it was
game over – and the Crowborough players and fans knew it.
At this point, the Pier Pressure contingent were vocally baying
for six goals – Crowborough had won 6-0 the last time the two sides met a
couple of seasons ago and the visitors sensed the sweetest revenge.
However, this never really looked likely as in the second
half chances for both sides were at a premium. Town sensed they had already
done enough to win the match; Crowborough probably had half-an-eye on damage
limitation. An Aaron Capon strike –
which might have taken a deflection to wrong-foot The Crows keeper (who it has
to be said was wearing one of the most shocking-looking goalkeeper jerseys I’ve
seen for a long time) was all they had to show from a comfortable second-half
performance. The fourth goal sparked yet more pandemonium from the visiting
fans, with many of the players enjoying the celebrations with their loyal
followers – the shirtless man, in particular seemed to be enjoying himself.
So Eastbourne Town advance into the third round of the FA
Vase. If there was any real surprise to be had from the second-half, it’s that
it took the travelling supporters until the 85th minute to burst
into a rendition of Que Sera Sera.
True, there’s a long way to go until the Wembley showpiece yet,
but for Pier Pressure, and Eastbourne Town in general, the dream lives on for
now.
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