Seeing home from a different angle for once, and in more than one sense
Non-league matches still aren't often shown live on the television if you're below the National League, still less there when in they're being played in the town in which you reside.
The use of the word ‘home’ in a football sense tells us a lot about our relationship with clubs. Home is where the heart is. It’s comfy and familiar. We know where it is and its ours. All those other games? They’re just ‘away’. Somewhere else. Somewhere… other. Home is where we belong, and it’s where we expect our teams to win most of their matches.
The creation of the football supporter came about in less mobile times than these. Football as mass entertainment was forged in the same crucible as the railways that made it possible, a by-product of the industrial revolution. Kick-off times came to crystallise at 3pm on a Saturday, primarily to allow those who worked Saturday mornings to finish their work, scarf down some chips and a beer, and get to the turnstile in good time for kick-off.
By the 1870s it was possible to live in one town and work in another for the first time in human history. Travel was now possible in a way that it simply hadn’t been just a few decades earlier. Moving from town to town, county to county, even country to country is now so commonplace that we barely bat an eyelid at it.
The football supporter was created at a time when people did routinely live their entire lives in one town to an extent that is vanishingly rare these days. And this presented the nascent football supporter with something of a dilemma. To move or not to move? It should go without saying that leaving your hometown might be the only way to secure a better standard of living, a shiny new job, or an object of your affections.
But your football club wouldn’t move with you, of course. Moving would require either you to become a follower from a distance, checking up on their progress through newspapers alone, or making a weekly journey back home to watch your team. In other words, every home game would become an away day out. In an era before television and radio, you’d be almost completely cut off from your home team no matter who you supported. Being a football supporter wasn’t designed for this level of mobility.
It works both ways, as well. As someone who has moved away from the locality of the non-league team that I grew up supporting, I can attest that even with the internet meaning that I’m as up-to-date as anybody else, moving away fundamentally changes your relationship with a club. You may well start going to watch one in your new town, but one of the things that is most striking about all of this is that no, you never really do feel the same way about your adopted team as you do over the one that adopted you.
For the supporters of bigger clubs, maybe this isn’t all as accentuated. If most of your football consumption takes place through the television, all that will change is the walls of the living room in which you’re watching, when you move towns. But for many years, the only way of seeing your local team at all was to see them live. Goals from all four divisions weren’t regularly shown on national television until into the 1990s and even local TV and radio coverage could be patchy. Prior to that, most clubs outside the top flight might get a game or two per season on the local TV or Match of the Day, if they were lucky.
Below the National League, television appearances used to be completely non-existent (clubs made a killing in the 1980s by videoing their own matches and selling highlights compilations, some of which now exist on YouTube as grainy reminders of a past longer gone than most people my age would like to admit) and remain extremely rare beyond the FA Cup. But the weekend of Non League Day provided an exception to this, with TNT Sport showing a match from the National League South between Worthing and Bath City on Sunday afternoon. It’s not that Worthing have never been on the television before, but a league match on a Sunday afternoon certainly is a first.
I’ve worked in Worthing since 2008 and lived here since 2015. It is home, and it’s the only town my kids have ever known as home. But the football club remains at arm’s length. I keep an eye on their results, and in previous seasons I was making about half a dozen trips over to the other side of town to see them play. It’s a nice ground, crowds are good, everyone there is really friendly… it’s pretty much a perfect place to spend a Saturday afternoon, should you happen to be in town. It’s not… home. It’s not mine. But I’m happy that they’ve been reasonably successful in recent years. It’s been good for the town.
Things haven’t been going so well of late. Manager Adam Hinshelwood decamped to York City a couple of weeks earlier, and they haven’t won in their previous six league matches. A few weeks ago, a place in the play-offs seemed just about nailed on, but with the recent poor run the chasing pack have caught right back up and they need to get back to winning ways. There are probably other points of the season during which they’d rather have been playing Bath City live on the television.
But the football calendar doesn’t hold any sympathy, and at 2.30 on a pleasant Sunday afternoon it’s off to Woodside Road for the match of the afternoon. Pre-match, TNT focus on the George Dowell story, which is fair enough for a first visit. Should the club elevate themselves to a higher level than this, the story of George and how his trauma ended up giving him an ongoing life in football and rebirth to his home town’s football club is an obvious place to start.
The teams take to the pitch, and the match gets underway. The first extreme irregularity is the camera angle. On one side of the ground is a high, narrow stand which offers a terrific view of matches, but it’s on the opposite side of the pitch to what I’m seeing now. Even the club’s YouTube channel usually uses a vantage point from the main stand (although they have used the scaffold gantry which TNT Sport appear to be using), so I’m getting a view of the ground that you would never get if you were inside it.
It’s also striking how leafy it always looks. Down at ground level, Worthing looks pretty much like any other town. It’s got nice bits, slightly sketchier bits, but broadly speaking it just feels like a ‘town’. From up here in the Gods, though, it looks leafy and suburban. One thing you don’t get is how hemmed in it is. Woodside Road is tightly squeezed into a residential area. Underneath the gantry from which I’m watching, it’s only really separated from adjoining back gardens by a line of netting and some ferns. Both goals, to some extent or another, also back onto gardens.
There is also one bit that’s completely new. Away to the right is a new covered terrace, open for the first time, painted in bright red. There was a cover and some crumbling terracing with a tin shed roof along there until the end of last year, whereupon it was replaced with just a strip of tarmac, all of which led to the noisiest supporters choosing to stand on a small hump of terracing away in the corner, if the team was attacking toward that end.
The new construction is clearly longer than the older one was, and should offer a good view of games. Considering that the old cover was also painted red, the continuity between that and its replacement is aesthetically pleasing. If anything, that end of the ground doesn’t look that much different to how it did before. The pitch is an artificial one, and it looks lush and shiny with the sun beaming down upon it. Too lush and shiny to pass for grass.
Once I’ve adjusted my eyesight, there’s a football match going on, and what’s occurring on the pitch is a story I’ve seen plenty of times before for Worthing over the last couple of years. Always capable of scoring, but always capable of conceding, as well. This is a team which both scored and conceded 5, 6 and 7 goals in league matches last season, and who this season have conceded at least 4 goals on nine occasions and hand scored at least four on eight. Sure enough, on half an hour they’re a goal behind.
But as we’ve already seen, Worthing can also score goals. The main source of those has been striker Ollie Pearce, who has scored 34 in 36 of their 82 league goals. On this occasion, however, Pearce isn’t the main source. That falls to Danny Cashman, who brings them level with a laser-guided curling shot round the goalkeeper just seven minutes later. All square at half-time, and fair enough.
Teams that score and concede a lot of goals are necessarily unpredictable. From ten minute spell to ten minute spell, you can never quite make out where a Worthing game is going to end up because they have this tendency towards short blasts, rattling two or three in short order after having looked sluggish and out-paced. If this team were an athlete, they’d definitely be a sprinter rather than a distance runner.
Midway through the second half, more of that trademark defensive sloppiness gifts Bath a second goal, a set piece, this time. But that wasn’t quite that. Worthing came back again, and Cashman brought them level with a fierce shot from the edge of the penalty area which wouldn’t have looked out of place a division or two higher than this. Worthing pressed hard for a winner, but the final score of 2-2 was probably reasonable enough.
With six games to play of their National League South season, Worthing’s position is looking increasingly precarious. They’re now seven games without a win in the league. A virtually guaranteed-looking play-off place is now at risk. Six teams go into these play-offs, with the bottom four playing off against each other to play the top two in the semi-finals. Second or third place carries an advantage, and they’re only two points off it.
But at the same time, they’re only three points above St Albans City and Aveley, and Bath City themselves would be within a point of them were they to win their game in hand. And regardless, no-one wants to be limping into the play-offs. This is a point of the season at which form can have a huge influence. Worthing need to continue their forward momentum rather than be looking over their shoulders at the chasing pack. Losing their manager when they did certainly does not seem to have helped.
If Worthing aren’t quite ‘home’ to me at the moment, the town to about 120,000 of us, and there is… interest. The attendance for the Bath match was 2,119, their second-highest of the season. The first time I went to Woodside Road, about 15 years or so ago, the crowd was about 200. At the time, about 15 miles up the road, Brighton’s average attendance at the time at the unloved Withdean Stadium was about 6,000.
Worthing’s average attendance this season is 1,366, a six-fold increase over the last decade. At the same time since then, the Amex has been built and Brighton’s average attendance has swollen to 31,500. To build a non-league club up in this way is remarkable enough. To do so in the shadow of one of the Premier League’s great success stories feels close to miraculous.
You’d certainly never have guessed that they’d end up on the TV.