Words & Pictures to Follow: Worthing vs Havant & Waterlooville
This week's featured match will be coming from what is probably still a building site, in the FA Cup Second Qualifying Round.
The redevelopment work has been a long time coming. For as long as I can remember Woodside Road in Worthing has been a slightly lop-sided place. On one side there’s a large prefabricated stand which is the centrepiece of the stadium, also containing the bar, changing rooms and club offices. But it’s reasonable to say that the rest of the ground has been somewhat underdeveloped for some considerable time. The side opposite the main stand featured only a tiny cover straddling the halfway line and a huge net to prevent balls sailing over into adjoining gardens.
Behind one goal was some rotten terracing made, by all appearances, from anything that those making it could get their hands on and covered with a rusting, red-painted tin hut, while the opposite end was divided down the middle, cover on one side of it and open on the other. It was, and I do feel as though I should be absolutely clear about this, a lovely place to watch football.
But change had to come. Worthing are no longer flailing around in the nether regions of the Isthmian League. They’re an upwardly mobile National League South club with one eye on the possibility of another promotion, and these facilities don’t butter any parsnips any more. Idiosyncrasy doesn’t equal safety, and renovation was clearly a better idea than the possibility of moving the club out of town to some sort of tin shed near the bypass or anything like that.
Last season, those changes finally started. The crumbling terracing at the far end of the ground was replaced by metal steps, with the tin hut having already been finally sent off to the scrap metal yard a year earlier over safety concerns. But what to do about that opposite side? The answer was to replace it with a covered terrace which would run the length of that pitch, and work started on that at the start of the summer. Will the park benches dotted around one corner of the ground still be there? Progression has a tendency to smooth out quirks and every season I turn up for my first game there expecting them to no longer be there. This season may finally be the year when this comes true.
The work hasn't been completed yet. Everybody knows that the weather this summer has broadly been abysmal and it was already arranged that the club would play no home league matches until the 7th September, but when this match—against Hornchurch—finally came to be played it was with a restricted capacity of 1,500 and tickets sold out briskly. This week’s match in the FA Cup against Havant & Waterlooville is set to played under the same conditions.
The importance of getting this job done cannot be overstated. Worthing have been one of non-league football’s true success stories of the last five years. The installation of an artificial playing surface has facilitated a huge amount of interest in youth football and attendances have risen at an extraordinary rate; attendances at Woodside Road last season were consequently up 18% on the season before and have risen five-fold since the last full season prior to the pandemic. An increased ground capacity was required by National League regulations. If the club is to continue to progress, this work has to all be done.
Havant & Waterlooville have an FA Cup pedigree of their own, of course. In 2007/08 they beat York City, Notts County and Swansea City before losing 5-2 to Liverpool at Anfield in the Fourth Round of the competition. But recent years haven’t quite been so kind to them. I was last there on the Saturday before Christmas last year, when they were bottom of the National League South but showing signs of life against Taunton Town with a comfortable 3-0 win through a fug of antidepressant fog. I’m not taking them any more. Don’t need them. But that’s a whole other story.
That win turned out to be a false dawn. Havant only won six more games all season and ended up in 23rd place, with only the free-fallin’ Dover Athletic below them in the table. This season, therefore, they’re in the Southern League Premier Division South and their season so far is one that can be taken as either a glass half-full or a glass half-empty. Optimists will note that they are unbeaten in all competitions so far this season, including six league matches and FA Cup wins against Wallingford & Crowmarsh and Horndean.
But glass half-emptyists will be keen to remind observers that this unbeaten league record isn’t all that it might appear upon the briefest of glances. Havant may have played six league games so far this season, but they’ve only won one of them, drawing the other five to leave them in 11th place in the league table. Ironically, Worthing are in exactly the same position, albeit a division higher now, having only lost one league game themselves. They had a taste of the FA Cup First Round last season when they lost at that stage to Alfreton Town. We’ll have a better idea of whether they can repeat that by five o’clock on Saturday afternoon.