Much ado about Dorking: Ebbsfleet bring some truths home to roost

Dorking Wanderers have risen from the bottom of the league system to the National League, but is the professional game a step too far for them?

With a quarter of the season still to play, it’s reasonable to say that the bottom half of the National League remains somewhat congested. Thirteen clubs are still circling this particular event horizon, some closer to getting sucked into the black hole of regionalised football than others, but with just seven points separating the middle of the table from the relegation places. There are esteemed names in there. Southend United, Oldham Athletic and York City. And there are disruptor clubs, too. AFC Fylde, Dorking Wanderers, and Ebbsfleet United.

On this drizzly Saturday lunchtime, I’m on a train from Horsham to Dorking with chickens on my mind. I have to admit that I don’t much like them. Once you understand how direct their lineage is from the Tyrannosaurus Rex, they become markedly more difficult to trust. But they sure do love them up in this neck of the woods. The Dorking chicken is an internationally recognised five-toed breed, named for the town.

Dorking is small, with a population of just over 11,000 that grows to 17,000 when you take into account its surrounding villages. Twenty-odd miles south of London, it sits at the foot of the North Downs, at the intersection of the Mole Gap and Vale of Holmesdale. The River Mole passes through here. The hills visible in the distance aren’t as high as their southern cousins, with whom I’ve become so familiar this last few years, but they still dominate the landscape from most angles.

I turn left from the railway station and walk in the direction of the town centre. It’s 1.30 on a Saturday lunchtime and I’m starting to wonder how I’m going to pass the best part of an hour and a half without ending up drunker than a 51 year-old man probably should be at this time of the day when I hear an extremely familiar noise carrying in the wind, the peep-peeping of a whistle followed by a garbled melange of men shouting. This can only mean one thing; bonus football!

I follow a pathway that runs adjacent to the railway line, past some allotments, and eventually arrive at Pixham Lane Sports Club, the home of Dorking Cricket Club and a couple of football pitches. A team in yellow and green is playing a team in black and white stripes, so I initially presume it to be Norwich City vs Newcastle United. The standard of play isn’t very high. There are several players on both teams who you’d struggle to describe as ‘athletic’ in any meaningful sense. The referee is wearing sunglasses and has a handlebar moustache. There are no linesmen, so there is effectively no offside.

There’s a park bench that I can perch myself upon, and the sudden arrival of a clearly middle-aged man taking photographs and barely unable to contain his glee at having found surprise football doesn’t seem to ruffle anybody’s feathers too much. Norwich City even have the good grace to score a couple of minutes after I get there, their number nine chasing through and scoring a one-on-one against a goalkeeper who I presume to be Martin Dubravka.

Otherwise, Newcastle have the lion’s share of possession, but I can’t really be staying to find out the final score. After about ten minutes, I have to wend my way back along the pathway and back in the direction of the bright lights of Dorking town centre. For one thing, while Dorking may be small—looking at a map of the town centre, it doesn’t look like there’s anything that is more than a ten minute walk away from anything else—but I haven’t been here before and there remains a possibility that I could contrive to find a way to get myself lost, somehow or other.

And for another, my spider senses are telling me that this is starting to get a bit…weird. I’ve spent this season increasingly having to remind myself that I’m not that guy, but here I am again, not for the first time in the last few months overstepping that fundamental yet invisible demarcation line between someone who will watch any football match and someone who will watch any football match. There comes a point at which it starts to feel like a fetish.

(I eventually establish that—following frankly too much time trying to find out—that the team in yellow and green were not Norwich City but are probably one of the Dorkinians FC teams who play in local amateur leagues, though which one remains open to question. They run eight men’s teams and a veterans team, after all.)

Dorking town centre isn’t a great deal more than a High Street and small pedestrian precinct, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t much to recommend it. The first significant building that you come across is the striking art deco Dorking Halls cinema, complete with a Vaughan Williams statue outside. A hundred yards up the road, somewhat ominously for the town’s most famous current residents, there’s a branch of KFC.

You can almost smell the money as you walk along the High Street. There’s a queue outside the artisan bakers and the Wimpy—a rare example of an inland Wimpy—is up for sale. This afternoon’s game is a big one, and there are plenty of Ebbsfleet supporters around and about. These two teams are only separated by a single goal on goal difference after they beat Woking 1-0 the previous Tuesday night, with Dorking in the relegation places, albeit having played two fewer games. But there’s little actual tension around the place.

I stop off in a pub at the other end of the High Street for a pint. Vice, the long-standing culture website, sacked its workers this week because media worldwide is fundamentally broken, and as part of its online wake this incredible article about one man’s obsession with The Boys are Back in Town by Thin Lizzy went particularly viral. As I sit down with my drink, Whiskey In The Jar pipes up over the speakers and I laugh aloud to myself for a full two minutes before regaining my composure. After finishing my drink, as I walk up into town I reflect upon the possibility that my attempts to pass myself off as A Completely Normal Person might not be going particularly well.

From recollection, I’ve only seen Dorking play once before, getting a can of 7-0 whoopass opened on them by St Albans City in some cup competition or other, probably the Isthmian League Cup, in the late 1980s—if you watched the Saints team of that time, 7-0 wins tended to stick in the memory—but it wasn’t quite this Dorking. And this is where things start to get complicated.

The story of how Dorking FC, formed in 1880, ended up consigned to the dustbin of history and usurped by Dorking Wanderers is, to say the least, muddy. They’d played at Meadowbank since 1953, having moved there from the ground on Pixham Lane at which I’d seen my bonus football earlier. But by the middle of 2010s, Meadowbank had fallen into disrepair and according local football grounds history wallah David Bauckham:

During the 2014 close season it was announced that due to health and safety concerns at Meadowbank, the club would ground-share at Horley Town until remedial work was completed. Mid-way through the 2015-16 season however, it was announced that the ground would not be ready until 2017, which put the club under considerable financial strain. In March 2016, a new ground-sharing arrangement was announced, this time with Dorking Wanderers …

Having laid derelict for two seasons, rather than simply ‘mend and make do’ it was decided to knock everything down and start again. The original intention had been for both Dorking and Dorking Wanderers to share the facilities, but by the time the ambitious £5m development was finally ready earlier this year, with the opening match a friendly against Sutton United on 17 July, there was only one club - Dorking having been absorbed into the Wanderers.

Dorking Wanderers, of course, have their own origin story. Marc White was a disaffected Wimbledon FC supporter in 1999 when he decided to form a team of his own, and that team has risen from the amateur intermediate leagues to the National League. White is the manager-owner-God-Emporer at Meadowbank. Entering the ground, the first thing you come across is a small merch hut advertising “limited edition” signed photographs of him; a snip, at thirty quid a throw.

Whatever its history, Meadowbank is smart and tidy nowadays, though it does feel a little cramped. Behind the near goal are two stands, one seated and one standing, and along the near side touchline is another seated stand, a reportedly well-appointed bar (I say ‘reportedly’, because when I try to check it out at half-time I’m prevented from entering by stewards because it’s “at capacity”), and a small length of covered terracing for away supporters, who also have the far end to themselves. But that end of the ground, along with the far side, are almost completely undeveloped, two long strips of tarmac from which your view will be blocked unless you’re right by the perimeter fence round the pitch. Along that side, two huge dug-outs also block the view still further.

When the teams take to the pitch, I’m expecting ‘Right Here Right Now’ to be playing. It’s playing until a few seconds before they emerge from the tunnel, this 21st century equivalent to ‘Simply the Best’ as a musical fallback for teams to run (or rather walk, these days) out to, but a last second bait and switch sees them switch to ‘Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now’ by McFadden & Whitehead. What is notable is that this is a clash between the best and worst kits I’ve seen this season. Dorking are dressed as Paraguay; red and white striped shirts, blue shorts and red socks. Ebbsfleet, on the other hand, look like a team of stewards, in luminous yellow shirts, white shorts and white socks.

It turns out that there is quite a considerable amount of stoppin’ Dorking Wanderers. Ebbsfleet are the better team, and it’s against the run of play when Charlie Carter, who I’m dismayed to learn is not nicknamed ‘The Cat’ (what do they teach in schools these days?), gives them the lead midway through the first half. It’s not a lead that lasts for very long. Rakish Bingham brings Ebbsfleet level off the post six minutes later, and four minutes from half-time a Luke O’Neill free-kick from the edge of the penalty area flies past the excellently-named former Worthing goalkeeper Harrison Male to give Ebbsfleet a 2-1 half-time lead.

Of course, it would be tempting to start thinking at this point that Marc White could be approaching The Peter Principle in the National League. The jump from the National League South to the National League is one of football’s tipping points, at which the largely semi-professional game becomes the largely professional game. But it remains the case that his team held its own at this level last season (they finished 16th), and whatever he says at half-time does seem to make an appreciable difference to his team.

For the first fifteen minutes of the second half, Dorking come out as though they’ve been threatened with their P45s should they not get back into this game. They dominate possession, although a couple of shouts for a penalty kick seem a little on the optimistic side. But then, on 63 minutes, their world caves in when Tony Craig goes in for a challenge with a high boot. Already on a yellow card, there’s little questioning the decision to send him off.

The defensive gaps that may or may not have been there before are in plain sight, now. Even a point apiece would be of little use to either team. Dorking have to throw players, even if it does mean leaving big gaps at the back. Bingham adds a third goal with seventeen minutes to play. Dominic Samuel removes all remaining doubt with three minutes left and the home crowd already starting to thin out. The final score is 4-1 to Ebbsfleet, whose players celebrate at the end of the match as though they’ve survived the drop.

This isn’t the case. Not yet. The bottom half of the National League table remains as congested as it was a week earlier. Boreham Wood are in 12th place in the table, but they’re only five points above the relegation places. At the very bottom of the table, Oxford City are probably doomed. They’re now eleven points adrift and have lost three of their last four games 7-1, 5-2 and 4-0.

But anybody above these teams could survive, and that does, in spite of a real setback from this match, include Dorking Wanderers. Were they to win their games in hand, they’d still be above Ebbsfleet again. And while their form has been up and down since the new year, this was their first real hiding of 2024 in the League (they did lose 5-0 at Macclesfield in the FA Trophy too, but that’s another story).

It’s fair to ask how thick the glass ceiling is into which Dorking Wanderers may be smacking their heads this season. This is, after all, a town of less than 20,000 people, and it might be considered an achievement that they’ve gotten this far. The set up is tidy, the people were—as ever; I haven’t come across that many grumps at all this season—very friendly, the food was good (they even, another first for the season, had guacamole on the condiments table next to the food stand), and I got to see five goals (six, if you include the one from the other match) and a red card. And even after the game, the entertainment kept coming.

With 89 minutes played at Meadowbank, I’m a little disappointed to see Manchester United equalise against Fulham, but about twenty minutes after the full-time whistle I walk into the pub by the railway station and on the TV in the corner of the bar the BBC are interviewing a Fulham player who has a smile on his face. I open my phone, head for the BBC's results page and, for the second time that afternoon, laugh loudly to myself for a full two minutes before regaining my composure again. Manchester United, it turns out, are an even bigger a bunch of chickens than Dorking turned out to be.