Fail to prepare, prepare to fail: Ferring, Storrington, and why it pays to double-check

It felt like everything was going wrong this week, to the point of this Saturday feeling cursed, but we got there in the end.

As this season has progressed, I’ve noticed certain unnerving habits in my weekly football match preparation. Is it overkill to be looking at the time of trains three days before a match is due to be played? What does it say about me that I often buy a match ticket and a train ticket days before a match is to be played as a show of commitment, so that I can’t peer out of the kitchen window on the Saturday morning at the rain and decide that, “Actually, I definitely cannot be arsed with this today”. 

This weekend, I did not prepare. Well, I kind of did. I picked a fixture–Bognor Regis Town vs Billericay Town in the Isthmian League Premier Division was the match you could have won–looked at train times and costs and then… Well, I kind of knew this was coming. In the middle of the match at Chichester last week, my ex-wife messaged me to say that she’d come down with something and didn’t know whether she could look after the kids, who stay with her at weekends, any longer. So, having got back to Worthing, I picked them up from her apartment and brought them home.

By Wednesday, the situation appeared to be worsening to the point at which she might not be able to take them at all this weekend. Now obviously I had no objection to having my kids for the weekend, but that did significantly alter the distance I was prepared to travel for a football match. Forty minutes on a train and a twenty minute walk on my own is no bother. The same journey with two kids who’d probably rather be sitting in front of the television playing Minecraft, though… I had to conclude, “Bugger Bognor”.

It was only by this morning that a new plan started to hatch. She was well enough to have them on Saturday, but by this time m’podcast co-host and I have decided on something a little more rustic than the big city vibe of Bognor; Ferring vs Storrington in the Southern Combination Football League Division Two. His wife would even pick me up and drop us at the ground. “The perfect plan”, I cackle to myself–for some reason–in the manner of Dick Dastardly. 

Except it isn’t. She drops us near the ground about half an hour before kick-off, we walk round to what we’d taken it to be from a map and… nothing. There’s a small and dilapidated looking stand. There’s a bar, which appears to be open. But there are no goals. There are no pitch markings. There’s no… pitch. Whatever is taking place in Ferring this afternoon, it certainly isn’t a football match. 

I scramble for my phone and find the Storrington FC Twitter account. The match, according to that, is being played at a place called Palatine Park, a mile and a half’s walk from where we’ve ended up. We cross the road in Ferring village and walk up to a level crossing, only for the barriers to come down. I take the opportunity to run to the nearest corner shop to grab a can of drink. By the time I get back to the crossing, the barriers have risen and are coming back down again.

We walk along a country lane out of town and onto the Littlehampton Road, a dual-carriageway that runs out of the west side of Worthing. At one point, our pathway stops and we have to cross a footbridge over the dual carriageway, even though Palatine Park is on the side of the road that we’d originally been on. By the time we get there, they’re midway through the first half.

Palatine Park is by some distance the most basic facility I’ve been to this season, a 3g surface covered in lines of multiple different colours, in a cage adjacent to the building that houses Worthing Town FC, Worthing’s other, other club. There are floodlights, although they’re not switched on even though it’s a little gloomy by the last few minutes despite a bright blue sky, there are 14 goals arranged around the pitch, there are two dugouts and… that’s about it.

But there is a crowd, which I manually count to be 65. Not even my lowest of the season. This is easy to do because only one side of the ground has any access for spectators, with the rest just a pitch surrounded by a fence, and you can only get three-quarters of the way down the one side that you can watch from. They can’t charge for admission, because you could just stand on the other side of the pitch and watch for nothing through the fence. But there’s a crowd. Some of them have brought bottles of beer with them. 

Much of my first half is taken up with the drink I bought from that corner shop. Warheads Sour Black Cherry Soda has a paper sticker over the ingredients, which I find somewhat ominous, and when I take a sip from the can the inside of my mouth immediately contracts like I’m a grandmother in a 1950s cartoon whose false teeth have just fallen out. It is, without doubt, the sourest thing I’ve ever tasted in my life.

At least I can’t claim false advertising; the cartoon guy on the front of the can has a mushroom cloud coming out of his head, and this does taste like Fanta Radiation. M’podcast co-host tries a sample and has exactly the same reaction as me. I eventually find that by throwing it over my tongue I can avoid the worst of this scorching and give myself esophageal cancer, but the can is less half-finished by the time it finds its way into the bin. 

There’s no score when we get there–although I don’t actually find this out until I check the Storrington Twitter account at half-time–and it takes a good ten minutes to figure out who’s wearing what colours. Storrington are second in the league, only one point behind the leaders Bosham and with three games in hand. Ferring are fourth from bottom, but have only played eight league games so far this season. The Southern Combination Football League Division Two moves in mysterious ways.

The match itself shifts slowly on its axis. Storrington dominate the second half of the first half as we might have expected. They have, after all, won their last five games while Ferring have only played four times since the end of November. But Storrington waste chances, and when the Ferring goalkeeper makes a superb double save midway through the second half it does feel as though the home side get another wind behind them. 

Throughout the closing twenty minutes Ferring come back into the game, with the referee attracting the ire of the supporters after a series of decisions that range from the fifty-fifty to the highly questionable. In the closing minutes a Ferring forward breaks through and is quite clearly fouled by a Storrington defender. The only question seems to be whether it was outside the penalty area and therefore warrant a free-kick and a red card or whether the foul continued into the penalty area and should therefore be a penalty kick and a yellow card. But the referee brushes aside the industrial language coming from the sidelines, and we continue.

The matter of goalless draws has been increasingly bothering me over the last few weeks. I’ve not been at a goalless draw that I remember since seeing Brighton play out a goalless draw against Woking at Withdean in the First Round of the FA Cup in 2010. I’ve had a couple of close shaves in recent weeks. At Worthing United in December, Arundel scored a stoppage-time winner to snatch a 1-0 win. Just a couple of weeks ago, Crawley Town and Salford City looked as though they could play until 2034 without scoring until some calamitous defending with ten minutes to play secured a win for Salford. 

Time is running out. Furthermore, with the match having apparently kicked off a little late (the first half finishes at seven minutes to three, and it seems unlikely that eight minutes would have been added from the first quarter of the game, which we missed) no clocks anywhere and no idea how long the referee is adding for stoppages, we have no idea of even roughly when the second half is going to end.

But then suddenly, from out of nowhere, there comes a breakthrough. The Ferring number seven hasn’t done great deal to stand out over the previous hour and fifty minutes, but in one moment of grand inspiration he collects the ball on the left, cuts inside past a defender and, with the ball starting to run away from him on the slick artificial surface, toe pokes the ball firmly past the goalkeeper and into the corner of the goal to win the game for the home team.

It turns out that there are three minutes still to play, but the match is already decided. Storrington, you get the feeling, had their chances earlier in the game and their failure to take any of them–particularly early in the second half, when it felt as though one goal might open some sort of floodgate–has hit them hard. There’s no comeback coming here. Ferring hold on comfortably for the win.

Bosham (which, I learn, is pronounced ‘bozz-em’ rather than ‘bosh-em’, for those who were wondering), it later turns out, have won their game 4-0. By the final whistle blows at Palatine Park, they’ve extended their lead at the top of the table to four points. Ferring are up to seventh place in the table, but they’ve still only played nine of their 22 league games for this season. They have seven games in hand on Bosham and are 18 points off the top of the table. They’d still be five points adrift of Storrington if everybody won all their games in hand, but no matter how unlikely this scenario may seem this was a very good result and they may just feel that they’ve got a chance of continuing to push up the table still further. 

The 2.00 kick-off time means that everybody else is still playing as we leave. The big local team, Worthing, are at home to Torquay United this afternoon. There’s 2,300 people at this game and I suggest that we do have the option of heading to Woodside Road for the second half of that match, but it’s breezily waved away and I’m home by the time that Soccer Saturday is heading towards its hysterically squawking climax. So this is how it feels to have been at the lunchtime TNT Sports match.

Next week I’ll definitely be making sure I’m better prepared first. This was a match of little consequence to us, so there was none of that gut-wrenching feeling that you get when you do something as stupid as turn up at completely the wrong place. But cage football with the most basic facilities possible isn’t, I have to concede, for me. M’podcast co-host, his ears pricked by that whole ‘free admission’ thing, is thinking of going every week. He’ll be busy. With only nine league games played all season, it turns out that Ferring are at home every Saturday throughout February. All he’ll have to do is double-check where they’re playing first.