Stow away; or, when Moses failed to part the ocean

It's a different one to the one it had before, but Walthamstow has a football club bearing its name again, and that matters.

London is ultimately a collection of villages, and at no point is this more evident than when you go back as an adult to somewhere that you were familiar with as a child. When I around eight or nine, we went through a phase of going to Chingford on a Sunday morning to go to a market, and driving across Ponder's End Lock, the reservoirs and the River Lea felt like entering a portal into a parallel universe.

Our journey this Saturday lunchtime is only from Bethnal Green, but it involves both a train and a bus, and the train component to this involves getting making that change at Silver Street, barely a couple of hundred yards from the first flat I ever lived in, and then a—to me, at least—surprisingly short feeling journey on to Walthamstow.

This afternoon's destination is Wadham Lodge, on the north side of Stow and getting on towards Chingford. It's the strangest feeling to realise for perhaps the first time in my entire life that Walthamstow was so close to Edmonton. We don't walk it. The clouds overhead look angry. But had it been a sunny day and had we been an hour or so earlier, it might have been done.

But we did our ambling this morning, and now I have an appointment. I've known Mat for just over twenty years, although I've not seen him in more than ten. He's got his cousin with him, who's over from Germany. We're meeting them in The Dog & Duck, a pub that I've already heard of, and when we get there it's bustling and busy, with a smattering of people sitting around in Walthamstow scarves. Non league football, at which it's almost obligatory to turn up for with as little time left before kick-off, simply runs to a different timetable to the Premier League.

At about ten to three, the pub half-empties as people realise that it's almost kick-off time and they're still at least a five minute walk from the ground. Consequently there's a queue at the turnstiles when we get there, rarity at this level of the game, and they're just kicking off as we get in.

Mat's cousin asks me what level of football this is, and I have to refer to my fingers to get it right. This is Division One North of the Isthmian League, and I eventually count that this the eighth level of the game in this country. He briefly mentions that he's surprised by the quality of the football early on. He's pretty much the only person inside the ground of that opinion.

Stow misfired last week, ending a recent run of three straight wins with a 3-1 defeat at Cambridge City. Form has been a little up and down all season, and this feels like a disappointment following last season when, having transferred from the Southern League, they finished in 6th place in the table, albeit ten points adrift of a place in the division's playoffs. They were long ago eliminated from the FA Cup, and a trip to Wembley will have to wait for another year after a home defeat to the crypto-goons from Real Bedford on the first Saturday in September.

Their opponents this afternoon are Mildenhall Town, and perhaps it's appropriate that we should be seeing them in the week of the 40th anniversary of the BBC's 1984 nuclear horror play Threads. I started reading the town's Wikipedia page to research this during the week and within seconds my first thought was about the extent to which this pretty little town which sits in the middle of a rectangle made up of Ely, Newmarket, Thetford and Bury St Edmunds would have been obliterated into a smoking pile of radioactive dust had that particular flag gone up on account of its RAF base and another one nearby at Lakenheath. Cheery thoughts, at this exact point in the history of humankind.

On the pitch, Mildenhall won the Eastern Counties League last season and have struggled a little to find their footing at a higher level, with just two wins and a draw from their first eight matches. Stow are well above them in the table at kick-off, but it's difficult to ascertain from this distance why this should be. Mildenhall are quicker to the ball and moving it around more fluently. Walthamstow seem happy to send the ball forward in roughly the general direction of number nine, captain, and, to quote m'lovely companion, “absolute unit” Brian Moses, to very little effect indeed.

Moses is a journeyman non-league striker who's played all over, one who reminds you of those pictures of Romelu Lukaku when he was in the Anderlecht youth system; at least a foot taller than everybody else but also twice as likely to get the ball tangled under his feet as anybody else. It's probably a sign of my age that I'm slightly disappointed that he doesn't seem to have acquired the nickname ‘Hightower’. But if anything, he's more of a defensive asset than an attacking one this afternoon, a couple of important headed clearances from corners. The attacking support he gets is pretty poor, so this occasionally defensive helping out is really his main role throughout much of the afternoon.

It started to rain as we walked up towards the ground, and by the middle of the first half it is, to use the correct Met Office terminology, chucking it down. This is particularly bad news for whoever washes the Mildenhall kit. They're unnecessarily dressed in their change kit of all-white—their normal home kit is yellow and black—while the home team are in all-royal blue, meaning that the players that aren't half covered in mud by the time we've been playing for about half an hour are wearing an outfit that is starting to turn a tiny bit transparent. I think I speak on behalf of the entire human race when I say, sooner them than me.

The good news on this front is that we at least are sheltered from the worst of it, thanks to Wadham Lodge having cover at both ends. Well, I say “cover”. There are a few holes in this corrugated tin roof which don't offer much “cover” from water dropping onto the top of your head at all. There's a small stand on one side and a couple of steps of terracing opposite which are open to the elements. Unsurprisingly, this part of the ground more or less empties when the heavens open. At the end at which we're standing, “WALTHAMSTOW” is painted on the back of the cover. It has a grass pitch (which doesn't immediately turn into a bog), and it even has—be still, my beating heart—proper-shaped stanchions on the goalposts, an increasingly rare sight and a very welcome one, for deviants such as I.

Right on half-time Mildenhall score, a low drive from an angle that bounces in off the Stow goalkeeper's inside post. An inch to the left and it would have bounced out, but them's the breaks and the small number of away supporters delight in reminding the sodden and downcast keeper of this, when they've finished celebrating.

The interval itself sees a large group of kids take penalties against a goalkeeper who might not be putting all into the shots that dribble past him and is consequently rewarded with several cries of “DODGY KEEPER, DODGY KEEPER” from some of those who've remained behind the goal as he moves theatrically out of the way of a shot while trying to make it look as though he was actually trying to save it. It's a delicate balancing act, but fortunately small kids are extremely gullible. Two in a row hit the post. One rolls wide and the kid looks crestfallen. He gets a re-take and converts, the second time around.

Three minutes into the second half, Mildenhall score again. Indeed, Ben Nolan scores again, which makes it two in four minutes for him, if we exclude the half-time break itself. And that goal, in all honesty, completely deflates the game. It hasn't been high on clear chances, and this doesn't really chang, even as everything becomes a bit ragged as the players tire.

There are even still a couple of moments when you wonder whether there might be a red card. On a pitch as greasy as this one, the temptation to leap in with a sliding tackle is as high as it is risky. A couple of the yellow cards awarded would likely have been red at a higher level. But that's the nature of football at this level and the match finishes level, at least in terms of the number of players on the pitch.

It is thankfully not raining as we make our way back to The Dog & Duck. In the garden, one of the little huts is available, a nice touch in a pub which also has a mini-golf course, an apparent obsession with neon lights, and a gents with a mildly unsettling fixation with Only Fools & Horses when Peckham is a good fifteen miles away. The atmosphere is convivial, much as it had been earlier at Wadham Lodge.

And that is notable. There was little anger among the home supporters upon the scoring of that second goal. The final whistle was greeted with a shrug of resignation rather than anything more emotional. There were a lot of empty cans on the terrace behind the goal by the full-time whistle, too. I left with the feeling that perhaps the place could do with a little more fire in its belly.

One person distinctly unhappy at the final whistle is Brian Moses. The dejected home players walk behind the goal after the final whistle greeting the supporters and with a couple of cans of beer and a gin & tonic inside me, no, I am not going to turn down the opportunity to high-five the captain, even if he couldn’t look less pleased to be doing so. His hands are comfortably three times the size of mine.

There's a lot going right at Walthamstow. The crowd of almost 500 was excellent for this level. There was nothing whatsoever to indicate that the club is being run badly or anything like that. And if they're a mid-table team in this division…that's fine? Overreach through overspending in the pursuit of success has done for enough clubs at this level of the game in the past. If you're going to grow it, do so organically. If it takes a little longer, then fine. But for all of that, these are still early days, for this season. They end the day in 11th place, exactly halfway down, but there does remain much to play for. Mildenhall, meanwhile, are up to 14th. If this performance was anything to go by, they're acclimatising pretty well.

There was one particular neon sign inside the Dog & Duck with which I was particularly enamoured, a vastly scaled down copy of the signage from the Walthamstow Stadium greyhound track, which closed in 2008. There is, of course, a conversation to be had about greyhound racing and it's undeniable that the sport had been in decline for years, but that doesn't alter the fact that yet another of London's cultural icons has been converted into a fascia and some flats. I'm sure somebody will have gotten very rich off it, but it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that Walthamstow lost out, ultimately.

The same thing happened three and a half decades ago to Green Pond Road, the former home of Walthamstow Avenue. Again, there were solid reasons for its disappearance, but this was a loss to both the area and to non-league football in London. But there is a club there again now, as there has been for several years. And while things could be going better, on the evidence of Saturday's performance, the absolute state of Green Pond Road all those years ago confirms they could also be going an awful lot worse. At least Walthamstow has a club bearing its name, and one which is doing… fine. Sometimes, that’s all you need.