Darts shooting blanks as Halloween bites

Dartford FC almost made it into the National League a couple of years ago, but their decline since then doesn't seem to have quite ended yet.

We say goodbye at Liverpool Street Station shortly before twelve. She has an appointment with a boozy night dressed as a vampire which necessitated an emergency visit to a wig shop this morning and which will necessitate a four-hour trip back to London tomorrow involving both a train and a rail replacement bus, all with a hangover the size of Mount Olympus for company. Sooner her than me. I have an appointment about fifteen miles away on the south side of the Thames, in that there Kent.

I remain as surprised as ever that I haven't done Princes Park, the home of Dartford FC, before. I did their old ground at Watling Street about three and a half decades ago, but even though their new home opened to considerable accolades in 2006, it's remained just off my radar.

But today is an opportunity to put that right. Liverpool Street to London Bridge is an achingly slow but pleasingly straightforward journey on the bus. I'm there in plenty of time to stand around outside the railway station glowering at The Shard, that gleaming monument to the shittiness of 21st century capital which looks like nothing so much as a raised middle finger pointed at the city it calls home.

As ever, I've done my research, but I booked my train ticket to London from the south coast before I even knew where I was going on this particular Saturday afternoon, and my train back to where I live on the coast tonight is at 18.45, which feels tight for getting back to Victoria station from Kent. Well, at least it'll add a splash of jeopardy to the afternoon.

It's forty-odd minutes from London Bridge to Dartford, and it's as grey and drizzly there as it was in the capital when I alight from the train. I have high-falutin’ ideas this afternoon which involve walking up to the Thames and taking a look at the BLOODY MASSIVE BRIDGE which complements the considerably more famous tunnel which connects Kent and Essex.

But Dartford has a lot of signs in the town centre, and one of them is very precise in telling me that it's a 52 minute walk up to the river from here and, with the best will in the world, an hour plus round trip to look at a bridge, even if it is a BLOODY MASSIVE one, isn't really something that I can justify, especially as it means I'd not get to the ground, which is about a twenty minute walk in the opposite direction, until the middle of the first half.

The town centre is the same as so many others in this country. The same old names as you see everywhere, though I am delighted to note the presence of a Wimpy; regular readers will already be aware of how happy I am to see that. But there is one particular monument of note in the town centre. The Glimmering Twins sounds like a half-forgotten shoegaze band, but in this case we're reaching into a little bit of local history. These twins aren't twins, of course. They're Mick Jagger and Keith Richard, Dartford's most famous sons, honoured with statues in the town centre.

And of course, because they're fairly modern statues they look slightly mad, though I'm somewhat disappointed at the lack of imagination at not making them animatronic so that we could be treated to Robo-Jagger dancing his pre-programmed STRUT-STRUT-STRUT-STRUT and TURN and ADMONISH-ADMONISH-ADMONISH moves while a midi version of Gimme Shelter plays out from a speaker inside his mouth.

While there are signposts a-plenty in Dartford town centre, there don't seem to be that many to the football ground. That's not a huge problem. The map shows it to be not a particularly long and a fairly straightforward route. There is a point at which I'm walking up quite a main road and wondering if I've got my norths, souths, easts and wests mixed up, but eventually there are others joining me and I'm at a turnstile by 2.30.

By the time I'm inside the ground, I'm absent my toothbrush, toothpaste and deodorant. It's the can of Sure that’s the problem for the security man. Presumably he thinks I'm either going to stick it up someone's bum or ignite it to turn it into some sort of Sea Mist-scented flamethrower. Or perhaps both. It's the first time I've ever had anything confiscated at a football match. I can have it back at the end of the match by picking it up from a food hut, but otherwise I guess I'll just have to stink the place out this afternoon.

Dartford's recent decline has been surprisingly rapid. They were regular contenders for a National League South play-off spot for a few years, and two seasons ago were runners-up and only beaten on penalty kicks by St Albans City in the play-off semi-finals. This loss seems to have hit the club hard. They were relegated at the end of last season, and now back in the Isthmian League Premier Division they've hardly been tearing up trees. Ten games in, they've only won four and they go into this match in 14th place in the table.

And their opponents on this overcast afternoon are Cray Valley PM, where the ‘PM’, of course, stands for ‘Paper Mills’. They only stepped up from intermediate to senior football in 2001, and were in this division for five years before winning the Isthmian League Division One South East title at the end of last season.

It's FA Cup First Round day today and this time last year they were making headlines by drawing 1-1 with Charlton Athletic. They lost that replay 6-1, and this year's FA Cup run came to an abrupt halt in the Second Qualifying Round with 2-0 home defeat against Alex Horne's Chesham United, while their chances of reaching Wembley this season ended last Saturday with a 4-3 defeat against Brentwood Town. They're in 5th, a decent start to life at this higher level, and they've brought a clutch of travelling supporters who may have had a light ale or two on their way across South London to get here. I’ll put it this way; at one point, they’re singing the opening theme tune to Only Fools & Horses.

And the plaudits weren't lying. Princes Park is a splendid ground. It's impressive to see the living roof and solar panels visible from outside, and on the inside everyone's under cover and there's a bar from which you can watch the match should you choose. There's also an extremely tall wooden man in one corner, his arms outstretched as though imploring a twenty foot tall wooden referee to send off an opposing player.

So much 21st century architecture is done on the cheap that it takes barely a couple of hours to start decaying, but this ground has weathered it's 18 years nicely. The only real sour note—for me personally, your mileage may vary—is pitch side advertising that reads, “Built by a CONSERVATIVE council”. Those were the pre-austerity years, weren't they?

But that huge wooden guy is also necessary, because the ground is so symmetrical that when I emerge from the bar five minutes before kick-off I'm momentarily completely disoriented, and it's only when I spot him that I get my bearings back and work out where the entrance is that's holding my toothbrush, toothpaste and anal flamethrower for safekeeping. The teams take to the pitch to I Just Can't Get Enough by Depeche Mode, which is at least two tiers above the tyranny of Right Here Right Now. Dartford are in white and black, and Cray are in a sky blue and white striped change arrangement which looks like a Coventry City kit from about five years ago.

And… there probably isn't really a polite way of saying this, but this game just isn't very good, to the point that I don't recall so much as a particularly close attempt at goal. The applause as the teams had taken to the pitch had seemed a little threadbare for a crowd of just over 900, and it's not difficult to see why. Dartford are, it's fair to say, direct, and by that I mean that every time their goalkeeper picks up the ball he absolutely welps it as far from his own goal as he can muster, like it's a bomb with a rapidly burning fuse that he needs the hell away from him as quickly as possible. Cray Valley look a little more purposeful, but lack a final ball of note.

It's goalless at half-time and goalless by full-time, not that I get to hear the final whistle. I promised you on Friday that, “I’ll be at best like Michael Caine in The Fourth Protocol, and at worst (and, let’s face it, considerably more likely) like John Cleese in Clockwise.” I have to be at Victoria for 18.45. There are regular trains from Dartford, but there are only two that give me any chance whatsoever of getting to London Bridge in time to hop across to Victoria, one at 17.20 and one at 17.25.

And I have to pick up my toothbrush, toothpaste and rectal molotov cocktail from a food stall next to the turnstile first, of course. The girl behind the counter gives me quite a look, and the haste with which she finds and gives me the bag indicates that this may have been the subject of some conjecture between the staff throughout the afternoon.

I take one last look at Princes Park as another Cray shot sails harmlessly high, wide and handsome of the Dartford goal. “I’ve seen enough”, I mutter to myself. I leave the ground on ninety minutes. It feels as though these two could carry on for another 90 hours without scoring. The walk to the station doesn’t take as long as I’d feared, and I’m at London Bridge with fifty minutes to get to Victoria. Three stops on the Jubilee Line to Westminster, switch onto the Circle & District for two stops to Victoria.

Except it isn’t that easy. The train is packed in such a way that it wouldn’t be legal to transport cattle, and every other person on it is dressed in Halloweeen fancy dress. When I get off the sweating, heaving train at Westminster and big sign tells me that the Circle & District is not running. Fortunately, I have a back-up plan. I hop back on the same train, go one stop further to Green Park, and then get the Victoria Line back to the railway station. My London Underground muscle memory is coming back to me.

I've also added an extra layer of jeopardy by failing to fully charge my phone battery this morning; my train tickets are on my phone only and by the time I get to the barrier at Victoria the level is at 5% and still falling. Fortunately, the Southern train home has a charging point. I’m home by 8.20. Not bad, all things considered.

This is the first goalless draw I've had since Brighton & Woking absolutely stank out the Withdean Stadium on this weekend in 2010, ironically enough in the FA Cup First Round. This wasn’t quite as bad a game as that. For one thing, it wasn’t chucking it down with rain and I wasn’t sitting in a rickety temporary stand, exposed to the elements and about three and a half miles from the pitch. But it was pretty bad, and I’ll be going some to see a worse one again this season.

But… you know? It doesn’t really matter. I got to go to a place I’d never been to before, I saw a couple of statues, had a couple of beers and made all my trains home without major incident. The house is empty when I get home, but that’s not so bad. I spend my evening pottering around, fixing up photos, writing this and making myself useful to no-one but myself, which is plenty for one evening. And no hangover the size of Mount Olympus for me, tomorrow morning.