At this stage of the competition, the FA Cup does still matter.

Worthing vs Bath City demonstrates that far away from the executive corridors of the top end of the game, the FA Cup's heart is still beating.

By January it will have likely dissipated altogether, but as summer turns to autumn the FA Cup still has a spring in its step. It’s the day of the Fourth Qualifying Round, one step from the First Round Proper, as proper people call it, and the possibility of a big draw, a big payday, or continuing your run further in the competition.

Getting this far in the Cup is far from guaranteed. For Worthing, whose ascent from the nether regions of the Isthmian League to the play-off places in the National League South has been one of the non-league success stories of recent years, a win in this round would mark the first time in a quarter of a century that they’d made it this far. For their opponents Bath City, it would be the first time in more than a decade. These things don’t come around every year for most non-league clubs.

In a reminder of the pull of this competition, it’s the biggest crowd of the season, with almost 1,900 people turning out. A lengthy queue snakes out from the turnstiles in both directions as the stewards struggle to get everyone through in time for kick-off.

We wait outside the ground moving slowly forward but are then told to move into a queue for prepaid tickets only, even though the queue we're already in has started moving reasonably well and there’s no issue with us using our tickets once we get to the turnstile. Having turned up at 2.45, we don’t get in until five past three, and we’re certainly not at the back of the queue. There's what sounds like a minute's silence inside the ground shortly before kick-off, which few outside even realise has begun until the referee's whistle signals its end.

If Worthing are on the up their Woodside Road home is going to have to grow with them, and that's not completely straightforward. Work has already started, with the crumbling terrace and its tin shed cover at one end having been removed and replaced with a narrow strip of asphalt, two-thirds of which you can't stand on. A step has been awkwardly worked into one corner alongside two portaloos, all of which creates something of a bottleneck in that far corner on a busy day like this.

Otherwise, what's noticeable about Woodside Road is how penned in it all is by housing. It's in the middle of a residential area, and it's very clear that redevelopment options may be limited. On two sides there is insufficient room to rebuild without having a significant effect upon nearby houses. At the Woodside Road end of the ground, covered terracing has to stop halfway to allow for sunlight into houses which are so close to the ground that they look like unusual directors boxes from anything like a distance.

Certainly one side of the ground needs little work. The main stand was renovated several years ago and still features an excellent view of the game for those who can bag a seat in it, as well as a spacious and well-appointed bar underneath it. But what happens to the ground in the medium to long term nay end up being determined by how much further the club's upward swing can be maintained.

Worthing is a town of 120,000 people. There are smaller towns which support EFL football, and furthermore there is little competition at a similar level locally. Brighton and Hove Albion are fifteen miles away, but the Premier League is a different universe to the National League South and all the other local clubs who form their traditional local rivals—Bognor Regis Town, Lewes and Horsham, for starters—are at least one division lower. The potential for further growth is real, but what is it reasonable to expect a club and town of this size to be able to sustain? At what point will they smack into one of football's many glass ceilings?

An FA Cup run offers something that consistently good league performance can't, a feeling of legitimacy than feels more widely recognised than league positions alone. So it matters, all the more so for the fact that Worthing haven't been this far in the competition in a generation. Add this to the potential to earn a club-altering amount of money and for the players to show themselves off to potential future suitors, and the reasons for wanting to win this game become obvious.

The first half is a cagey affair, low on chances and with the home side creating the best of what is fashioned by either team. It’s to be expected that the game should be tight. There are only two places between the two teams in the league table, after all. But Worthing control possession better in the middle third of the pitch and finish the first half the stronger of the two teams.

The game ultimately pivots on five minutes early in the second half with two goals, both scored from close range by, as the public address system wanted to make absolutely clear on both occasions in the loudest possible terms, “NUMBER 28, DANNEEEEE CASHMANNNNN”. And Bath…. really don't have much to offer in return. It's a little surprising, really. The effort is all present and correct, but the incisive thrust required to force their way back into the match is primarily conspicuous by its absence.

At such points, you have to find your own entertainment. Fortunately, such a mini soap opera plays out right in front of us, where a small boy is amusing himself by twanging the elastic on one of his dad's friends jackets to the point that his dad goes to buy the kid a little tube of Pringles to give him something else to do, a ploy which somewhat backfires when the kid heroically crumbles them into a fine dust and then chucks the crumbs all over the floor before, as a final coup de grace, chucking the empty tube over the barrier. His dad ends up dangling him over the barrier so that he can pick it up himself. It's an entertainingly diverting sideshow as the match itself starts to run out of steam.

The draw for the First Round (Proper, if you're that sort of person) follows the following day at 2.30. Local attention has already been claimed by another local club. After losing to Horsham—who we saw getting through the last round a couple of weeks earlier—the Dorking Wanderers owner and manager's expletive-ridden rant about his team's performance has gone viral, with many thousands watching on as he threw his team under a bus, which may be entertaining for the neutral but is unlikely to endear him very much to his players.

And when the draw comes around…. it isn't particularly enervating. Worthing are drawn away to Alfreton Town, who are in tenth place in the National League North, not far below the same position that Worthing occupy in the National League South. This isn't a tie that will be selected for live television coverage and neither team will make a fortune from it.

But while there will likely be a feeling of disappointment at their first First Round appearance in such a long time resulting in an away trip to a non-league club, the consolation is that this is a winnable fixture and that winning would put them ninety minutes from a place in the Third Round, the point at which shit really starts to get real.

In the meantime, the fixtures will keep coming thick and fast. Worthing may be in fifth place in the National League South, but they're only three points off the top of the table and they are at home to league leaders Yeovil Town next Saturday. A win, in theory, could even put them top. It will certainly be a test. A result from this fixture will surely consolidate the feeling that they could challenge for the league title this season.

Worthing reached the play-offs last season and the team has started this season well. A week after the Yeovil game they're off to Twerton Park themselves to play Bath City again in the league, a match which itself could prove to be important in the race for league title. With just six points separating the top ten in the division, it does feel as though there's a very long way indeed to run in this particular title race.

Whether Bath will still be in the running by the end of the winter is somewhat open to question. They're a good team, and there was little between the teams for much of the first half of the Worthing match. But having ceded too much possession in the middle of the pitch during the first half, defensive lapses allowed the home side to ease themselves into a comfortable position, and when Bath needed to significantly up their game during the second half they simply found that they didn't have anything in the tank.

There's a definite chill in the air as we walk out of Woodside Road at the end of the match. The shadows have been a little longer all afternoon than they have all summer, a reminder that this cup-intensive time of the year will soon be starting to thin out, with the league starting to occupy an increasing amount of people's time and thoughts. And from a personal perspective, I have a small amount of satisfaction to take from this year's qualifiers. This was my sixth FA Cup match of the season. For (I think) the first time, I've managed a match in each round of the competition.

Will I keep going with it? Sure, why not? Alfreton is near Derby and Leicester in the East Midlands. That might be a bit of an ask for three weeks time. But there'll be other games closer to home, and until the biggest clubs step in with their complaints about how all this cup football critically disrupts their bid to finish 11th in the Premier League rather than 13th you can still close your eyes and imagine that there's still magic in the air.

None of this is to say that the league doesn't matter. Realpolitik is as realpolitik does, and everybody knows that the bread and butter of the game, the targets set by the club's recent ambition will be decided by league position. But at this level of the game the FA Cup does still matter. The money may not be transformative yet but it all counts, and getting to the First Round is validation, an achievement in and of itself. And regardless of what happens in Derbyshire in the next round, Worthing will be desperate for it not to take another quarter of a century before they get this far again.