A non-league match between Worthing & Dover Athletic didn’t stand out as having the potential for trouble, but that’s not how things turned out on Saturday afternoon.
By some considerable distance, the biggest irony of it all was that I almost didn’t go. I live in East Worthing, equidistant between several football grounds of varying standards, and a scouring of the weekend fixtures for the full opening day of the season led me to a binary choice.
One match was an FA Cup Extra Preliminary Round match between Lancing and Roffey. This had much to commend it. Watching an FA Cup match in its very first round in August is always bracing, and I’d never previously realised the extent to which I’d wanted to see a team play who’d been named by a dog.
But the pull of the other match eventually won the day. Worthing v Dover Athletic, in the National League South. Worthing, who I’ve written about on these pages before, had just been promoted from the Premier Division of the Isthmian League and were attracting four-figure crowds, which would have previously been inconceivable for anyone bar a bigger club fallen on hard times at this level.
Just 1,500 turned out for this match.
But Dover felt like, to me at least, an even more interesting story. They were also playing their first game in a new division, but having come in the opposite direction, from the National League.
And they hadn’t merely ‘fallen’. They’d reached near-terminal velocity, with just two wins and seven draws from their 46-match league season and a 12-point deduction for having failed to complete their fixtures the season before – See? I told you there was a wild story here – meaning that they finished bottom of the National League table with one single, solitary point to show for their troubles.
So how do you recover from that? Does losing sink into the character of a football club in the same way that wood stains? And how do the supporters keep the faith when there is so little to be had?
Pre-season hadn’t shown much of an improvement. A 2-0 win against a far-from-full-strength Gillingham had been followed by six consecutive defeats, all bar one against teams from at least one division below them. The new season was unlikely to be as bad as that which preceded it, but that was an extremely low bar to clear.
I walked to the ground, allowing plenty of time to get there. Arriving at a turnstile with 30 seconds to kick-off is something of a speciality of mine, but…
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