Diary of a newfound groundhopper

Crowborough Athletic 0 Eastbourne Town 4, FA Vase 2 nd Round, Saturday 3 rd 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...

Steyning Town 1 Punjab United 1 AET (Steyning win 9-8 on penalties), FA Vase 2 nd Qualifying Round, 15 th September 2018 One of the main reasons that I decided to embark on my groundhopping adventure this season was to sizably increase the number of non-league grounds that I’ve visited. So here’s a confession. For the second time already this season, I have chosen to visit a ground that I’ve previously been to (last month’s visit to Saltdean United’s Hill Park being the other). Yet while Saturday’s visit to Steyning Town’s Shooting Field Stadium was my second visit to the ground, it was my first time as a spectator. My previous visit occurred around a year ago when I played in a Vets game for Withdean against the Steyning over 35s. That match finished in a 1-1 draw and I happened to score our goal (this last fact has no relevance whatsoever to the rest of this post, but was a fact still worth mentioning, in my opinion). Having missed out on attending an FA Vase match a...