Arundel nearly castled by Chessington's world of adventures

It was an afternoon of firsts for me, with an injured referee, a sixty-minute half and a penalty shootout.

There has been one particular club that has escaped my attention in the entire seventeen years that I’ve lived in this part of the world. This particular corner of the Sussex coast is home to a cluster of clubs of various sizes who used to all inhabit the Sussex County League together. Some, such as Worthing, Bognor Regis Town and Eastbourne Borough, have grown as the non-league game has grown but others representing the towns, villages and the hamlets of the county, have stayed resolutely where they are, even though the league itself has changed its name. Arundel FC are one such club.

This weekend was going to be different. My plan had been to spread my wings. But when the time came to sit down and pick out a match, a lack of trains out of London to the north scuppered my chances of getting back home to St Albans for their match against Eastbourne Borough and a degree of apathy settled in its place. Even Arundel, as it had for many of the previous seventeen years, felt like a bit of a faff. From where I live on the east side of Worthing it’s only ten miles away, but the train journey still manages to be—with two trains and a twenty minute stopover on the way—55 minutes, only ten minutes less than it takes to get from Brighton to London Victoria. “It’ll be an adventure”, I remind myself with little conviction as I lock the front door to leave the house.

Travelling on public transport in the UK these days comes with an element of jeopardy which makes for a white knuckle ride, whether you want it to be one or not. Will they be on strike? If they are, does that mean no trains or merely fewer? Will there be rail replacement buses because of engineering works? Or will there just be more, “Of course the trains aren’t running on time, because we’d much roll around on money than pay people with it, and weekend travellers don’t matter anyway.” Dystopian stories of the past told of travellers with a need to be vigilant at all times, but these tales forgot about the banality of evil. These days, you have to be vigilant for the sudden, unexpected movements of Southern fucking Railway.

Arundel is pretty. It’s nice, the sort of picture postcard village that you visit for a day to wander around, cooing at how nice it is, having a cup of tea in a little tea shop and maybe looking in a couple of the antique and craft shops before figuring out that actually the hill at the top of the town gets quite steep and that you need to decide whether to visit the cathedral, the castle (where you will at least have the opportunity to meet the ducks who swim in the river), or both, or whether to just head back to Brighton and drink gin and tonics in a pub garden instead.

The football club itself is strangely hidden, despite being in the almost literal shadow of Arundel Castle. The directions look extremely obvious, just walk towards the town centre from the station and turn off where you turn off for the castle; should be there on the right. Except it isn’t. I walk straight past the turning that I should have taken and even manage to miss the floodlights, which I mistake for lighting for the car park which is adjacent to it. By the time I realise how far out the way I’ve walked, I’m a distance out the way which makes my nostrils flare.

And this is a ground whose reputation precedes it. It’s one of Mike Bayley’s 100 British football grounds you have to visit. It’s even on the cover of it. But here, in the reality of half-past two on a Saturday afternoon in October and with football starting in half an hour, there’s little of this celebrity on show. The signposts for it are all half-hidden, to the point that the local petanque club seem to have primacy in what may be a unique ground share. And it’s cash only on the turnstile. Good job I actually remembered to bring a little with me, this time.

(Note to non-league football clubs: *please* make sure that cashless payments are available on matchdays. A lot of us simply don’t carry cash habitually any more and honestly, if I turn up at a club without cash and you don’t take a card, even though this is definitely a ‘me’ problem I’m going to consider it a ‘you’ problem and I’m going to wander off in a huff rather than walking however many hundred yards I need to in order to draw cash out and come back. Contactless machines can be bought for less than £50, these days. It will pay for itself, I promise.)

The petanque club does indeed ground-share here with the football club, though there are no elderly men with striped breton jumpers, berets and lavish moustaches hurling their boules at a jack on this occasion. Empty, it looks like the sort of the place that the government would like to house refugees. All it needs is a couple of snarling alsatians and a government minister cosplaying as a police officer. Otherwise Mill Road is, it’s fair to say, basic. There’s a small wooden stand which is its centre-piece, with “ARUNDEL FOOTBALL CLUB” written along the bottom of its roof in a pleasingly dated 1960s typeface, with a tea bar next to it and a media gantry opposite which appears to be… camouflaged?

The rest of the ground is pretty basic; a prefabricated clubhouse in the corner and one small cover with six seats in it, none one of which are occupied (except by me for about ten minutes during the second half), and enough space behind one goal to build an inappropriately massive stand, should they ever completely lose their minds and choose to do so. But it’s all about that view, really, from behind the far goal, looking towards the turrets of Arundel Castle poking out above the trees behind the stand. It’s something approaching an iconic image of football in Sussex. The longer I spend looking at it, the more surprised I am at myself for not having seen it first-hand before.

This is not the match I thought it was. The Southern Combination Football League’s fixtures page is a most baffling thing, finishing their weeks with a Saturday rather than starting them with one, and my reading of it had been that they were at home to Billingshurst in a league match. They are not. They are at home to Chessington & Hook United in a Division One Cup match.

It feels to me like a bit of a double-edged sword. The start of a non-league season can be very… cup heavy. I’ve attended five FA Cup matches already this season, and I haven’t been to a single replay. On the same day that this match is being played, FA Trophy qualifying round matches are being played across England. It’s a strange feeling, really. I’m not beholden to any one club’s fixture list this season. I’m self-aware enough to already be conscious of not wanting to fall into the trap of being a ground-hopper; I mean, I carry no ill-will towards them, but I’m starting to miss the rhythm of home and away, of a league season. All I’ve seen this last few weeks has been a bitty and disconnected series of cup matches. League football is the bread and butter of the season, and I’ve barely even seen any.

But enough of my first world problems. There’s a football match to be won here, and considering that this is far from the most important match that either of these teams will play this season, they do a reasonably good job of going at each other. Indeed, a couple of the tackles might on other occasions have warranted slightly harsher action than the yellow cards picked up here, but there is a greater tolerance for the mistimed tackle at this level of the game. Chessington score first, but Arundel finish the half strongly and lead 2-1 at half-time.

I say “finish the half” with a little caution, there, because the entire half is somewhat overshadowed by one of those football moments that occasionally crops up and causes hilarity in the crowd, this time when the referee pulls up injured and eventually has to walk gingerly to the changing rooms, never to return. Believe it or not, at this level of the game there are no fourth officials, so a mildly-looking grumpy bloke in a tracksuit who looks a bit like Graham Potter from some angles takes control of the flag. Within about thirty seconds of the eventual restart, the ball crosses the goal-line in front of him and the new referee asks him “goal-kick or corner?”

He shrugs his shoulders.

This is an in-game first, for me, though I should add that I harboured no Jimmy Hill-esque ambitions of being plucked from the crowd to run the line (in my imagination Hill carried out that entire sequence of events with a pipe hanging out the corner of his mouth, but that’s a whole other can of worms). Another in-game first follows shortly afterwards with the completion of my first ever in-game sixty minute half. The whistle blows for half-time just as the clock strikes four. Half-entertainment comes in the form of a look at the team line-ups on the board nailed to the side of the clubhouse, with the identity of the Arundel number 14. Honestly, I thought he’d retired. Mind you, when I see the number 15, my first thought is, “I thought he’d died”, until I spot the missing ‘r’.

There’s another in-game first, too. This is my first two-digit crowd of the season. Scanning around the ground, it looks like about 100. It’s later reported as 95. Perhaps the crowd was depressed slightly because these matches aren’t included in the season ticket. Perhaps the people of Arundel simply don’t care enough for the Southern Combination Football League Division One Cup. Perhaps they should, because at least a decent football match has broken out in front of me, and even though it can a be little bit bad-tempered at times—there is a red card for two accumulated yellows given to a Chessington player in the last couple of minutes—the mood of it all is some distance removed from the hysteria of the Premier League.

Chessington start the half the better of the two teams and snatch two quick goals to lead 3-2. The game has taken a little while to get going, but it starts to gather something of a head of steam. Chessington have plenty of chances to put the game beyond doubt but can’t quite take them, and what follows has a slightly inevitable air to it, when Arundel score a late equaliser. A draw is a fair enough result, but… there are no draws to be had today. This is Cup Football. Southern Combination Football League Division One Cup Football. We proceed straight to a penalty shootout on ‘90’ minutes. Actually, with another eight or nine minutes added on at the end of the second half too, we’ve almost played thirty minutes extra-time over the two halves of normal time alone.

Have I ever even seen a live penalty shootout? I’m not certain that I have. For the last eight or nine years, live football has been an activity almost entirely limited to Saturday afternoons for me. Parenthood does that to you. It forces you to timetable, and these became my space for going to a match. If I had the kids, they came with me. If I didn’t they didn’t. And now, in 2023, they are with their mother at weekends and too young to be staying up as going to midweek matches necessitates. And if you watch non-league football, most penalty shootouts take places on Tuesday nights, in competitions like this. If I ever have seen a penalty shootout live, it must have come in a match of so little consequence that I don’t recall it straight away.

At least they choose the end nearest the exit for it. By the time the coin is tossed and that end is chosen, it’s well past five o’clock and any hopes I have of catching the Saturday evening Crystal Palace vs Nottingham Forest match on a screen bigger than a phone screen are fading with the afternoon light. Despite the fact that there is barely a three-figure crowd watching, the conventions of the shootout are still adhered to. The teams form two clumps on the halfway line, linked arm-in-arm. The kids who were standing behind the goal at the far end of the ground scamper the length of the pitch to get behind this one. When it’s over, the winners celebrate in that way that teams do when they win a penalty shootout. And in that moment, it does mean something.

Arundel take the shootout 4-3. Chessington briefly lead, before missing their last two. It feels a bit harsh, but this should really be kept within the context of the competition in which it was taking place. Both teams will have more challenging and important games this season and it’s difficult to believe that there will be hysterical calls for the manager’s head in next week’s local paper. Life will go on. Next weekend, the two teams even get to play a league match.

By the time I leave the ground, I’ve forgotten what I was grumbling about. I’ve seen six goals (thirteen you include the penalties, but I’m not that much of a maniac), a referee going off injured, a sixty-minute half, a red card, and a penalty shootout. It cost a fiver to get here on the train, and it was only six quid to get in. And it turns out that I haven’t even missed anything in the Crystal Palace vs Nottingham Forest match—a match in which I had precisely zero emotional engagement whatsoever—anyway. Even my first world problems turned out not be problems at all. It’s almost dark by the time I get home, just after seven. “The nights are drawing in. Perhaps I’ll finally get some league football in”, I think to myself, looking at next weekend’s fixtures.

It’s the FA Cup Fourth Qualifying Round.