Ain't no Sunshine: Briefly, on the First Qualifying Round of the FA Cup
Football can be an escape when everything suddenly turns dark, but you always take yourself with you.
It has been, it has to be said, a difficult week. It’s not a subject that I can really discuss on here, since it involves other people and their other actual lives. Suffice to say that the last seven days have been both physically and mentally exhausting, and essentially they remain so now.
Can football really cure all ills? I have the children this weekend—I normally have them Mondays to Fridays only—and we’re kinda clicking our heels, a little bit. We can’t really stray too far from home, but at the same time these two little monkeys need to be gotten out of the house before they reach the stage of swinging from a lampshade while throwing excrement at me.
Lancing vs Athletic Newham in the Preliminary Round of the FA Cup will do. It’s one of the closest football grounds to my home, and it’s certainly the one that requires the least walking; five minutes at this end, one stop on the train, and then a other ten minutes at the other end. We can leave at 2.15 and be at the ground for 2.45. It couldn’t really be any easier.
These summer holidays generally haven’t been so bad. The levels of fighting between my six year-old and his eight year-old sibling have been significantly reduced from the Easter Holidays, when it was nearly dad who was packing a little suitcase and running away from home. But this time around, things have been much calmer. It’s helped that dad has been in a much better mood of late, but it’s also been a matter of these two kids growing up a bit too.
When I stop and think of their lives so far, I’m struck by how difficult they’ve been. Their mother and I separating during their infancy would have been traumatic at the best of times, but it’s been so much more than that. By the time he was three years old, my older kid had already lived in three different places.
My younger kid completely missed out on pre-school because of the pandemic, while my older lost months of school to my laughably half-baked (and due to the restrictions of work, too brief) attempts at home learning. They’ve lived in poverty, and their entire lives have been spent with the entire outside world bordering on civil unrest.
But this summer has been pleasant. We had a weekend here a few weeks ago because they were with me, and went to both the funfair and a vintage car and bus rally on successive days. We’ve had a couple of playdates in the park, so that they’ve had opportunities to run off all that excess little boy energy that they store up while sitting around the house drawing or playing Minecraft.
And we had one perfect day, one so beautiful that even though it was less than two weeks ago, already feels like some sort of dream I had. We went to the Natural History Museum, and looked at bones and skeletons, jewels and minerals, dinosaurs and birds. We went to the southern tip of Hyde Park and sat on a hillock while they ran around collecting sticks, so joyful and full of life. We got the train home that evening in a state of exhausted bliss. After the last few days alone, it already feels like a lifetime ago.
The day before this match, one of the most important results of my season came up, confirmation that we will be able to stay in this house for another year. It’s a moment of tension that comes up every August. Will they try to push the rent up to a level that I can no longer afford? What the hell do I do if that happens? Reaching agreement and getting that paperwork has, in times of stress, caused me to shed tears in the past.
This year, reader, I shed tears. It’s been that sort of week.
We’ve been living here since 2020 and my ex-wife—the actual relationship separation bit came years earlier; it’s a long story—moved out two years later. Her leaving wasn’t easy for the kids. She is, and will forever be, their mother. My job was to make that transition as easy for them as possible, and staying put in this house has been at the top of that list of my priorities, in terms of making it easy.
The kids are at two different schools, and we live almost exactly halfway between them. We have a garden, and they have separate bedrooms. It’s small and could do with a little fixing up, but it is home. Indeed, with us having lived here for four of his six years, it’s now the only home that my younger kid can even remember.
And now a lease is agreed for another year I can crack on with the little jobs that need doing, some redecorating and hacking and slashing away at a garden that even looks like a disgrace from Google Earth. At the bottom of it is/was a shed that was listed on the inventory as ‘dilapidated’ when we moved in four years ago and subsequently completely collapsed during some extremely high winds. It is without question a sign of my age, the extent to which I am getting excited about hiring a skip to finally get rid of that eyesore and maybe even putting in some new fence panels at the end of the garden.
I used to partay, you know.
Culver Road is as Culver Road does. The artifcial pitch gleams under the bright summer sunlight. The South Downs sit in the background. The PA system is so loud that my kids sit with their heads clamped over the ears while Bon Jovi boom out. “Don’t worry”, I tell them at five to three, “the teams will be out in a second”.
They eventually emerge at ten past three. We’ve already been instructed to Jump Around by the House of Pain (there was no jumping around), and of course as the teams take to the pitch Right Here Right Now blares out as a reminder of the extent to which I ended up overthinking precisely this sort of thing last season. By the time they finally kick off it’s 3.15.
(It later transpires that the kick-off was delayed by fifteen minutes because their opponents arrived at the ground late. Presumably some sort of announcement was made that we somehow, considering the volume at which the PA is cranked up to there, didn’t hear.)
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. It’s the one about the FA Cup and the home team who simply forget how to play football for twenty minutes and who awaken from the spell cast over them to find that a match they’d spent all week preparing for is already behind them. If you are a regular reader of this site, you have definitely heard this one before.
But in some respects, Lancing manage their fall from grace with even greater élan than Fisher had a couple of weeks earlier. They are, in the overall scheme of things, a division above their opponents and even manage to lure the home supporters into something of a false sense of security by taking the lead from a free-kick after eleven minutes.
It’s not the first time we’ve seen it this season, and we’re only just over halfway through August. Lancing’s collapse is, to put it mildly, vigorous. Within five minutes of having taken the lead, Lancing are trailing 2-1 thanks to two goals barely seconds apart. By the time we’ve played 24 minutes they’ve conceded four goals in nine and the game is just about wrapped up. A penalty kick given ten minutes from the break—even the official Lancing account of it has to concede that “noone saw what happened”—pulls the score back to 4-2.
It’s 4-2 at half-time, and it’s 4-2 full-time. Again, as with the Fisher match there’s a red card during the second half, but on this occasion it’s a frustrated tackle from a player on the losing team which warrants the dismissal. There’s been little feeling that Lancing were going to get back into this game since Newham pulled so far clear. They may not be named for a real place, but they deserve their spot in the next round of this year’s FA Cup.
I spend more of the second half watching my kids play than I do on the football itself. This is too lazy and languid an afternoon for football to seem particularly important. They’re playing a game in which they’ve set up a research facility in order to research things. The aim of the game seems to be to collect things to research rather than to actually research them, though to be fair they do have an impressive array of sticks, rocks, chunks of grass and pine cones lined up to research. I never do get to find out what they learn from it all.
We’ll keep on truckin’ because we don’t have any choice. I have a long week ahead, the sort of week in which every five minutes will feel like counting to three hundred. Football can’t always change your world. Sometimes there’s just too much going on. But if it keeps the people you love entertained while you get some sun on your face and try to cast everything else aside, it’s still working about as effectively as it can.
