Diary of a newfound groundhopper

Storrington 0 Littlehampton Town 6, Southern Combination Football League Division One Cup Round One, Saturday 26 th October 2019 As with last week, my match selection for this weekend was made with more than half an eye on the weather. Having endured on-and-off outbursts of rain for much of the past seven days, and with an absolute deluge forecast for Saturday afternoon, the obvious – and safe – choice would have been to go and watch a match being played on a 3G surface… Again. However, having already visited all the local 3G surfaces, I was reticent to pay yet another visit to a ground that I’d already been to. After all, the whole point of being a ‘groundhopper’ is to visit as many different grounds as possible. It was only seven days ago that I revisited Lancing’s Culver Road ground, so I really didn’t want to spend a second consecutive Saturday at a ground I’d already been to. Plans to head to an all-weather surface a little further afield were scuppered by wif...

Wick 1 Selsey 0, SCFL Division 1 Challenge Cup Quarter Final, Tuesday 19 th February 2019 I do love half-term weeks. I mean, don’t get me wrong, having to entertain the kids for a whole week is nothing short of a nightmare (not to mention expensive), and my work productivity definitely suffers when they’re around. But the school holidays also mean no football training for the eldest on Tuesday evening which gives me the ideal opportunity to sneak an extra groundhopping game in. Extra football and an escape from the nightly ‘fun’ ritual of having to put the kids to bed? It’s a win-win as far as I’m concerned. A quick glance at the local fixtures revealed that while I’d already visited most of the home teams playing on this particular Tuesday evening, there was one ground I hadn’t yet visited; Wick’s wonderfully named Crabtree Park. So instead of spending Tuesday evening standing in the cold on the side of a football pitch in Brighton watching my eldest train, I inste...