One in the eye for Hastings in The Castle Derby

It's off to East Sussex for a battle more that's about local pride than conquering nations.

(If you’re an email subscriber, you may need to open the page in a web browser to be able to see all of it. Apologies for this, but it turns out I had too much to say on this match.)

Was it always like this? Were Saturday mornings always filled with this feeling of impending doom, that if you didn’t spend every five minutes checking you might end up wasting a whole load of time (and probably money) on a football match that wasn’t even taking place? Because it certainly feels like it, these days.

This season, I’ve started to feel like a stuck record. Every week, swathes of matches seem to fall foul of the weather. “MATCH POSTPONED”, “MATCH OFF” or other variations on that theme trend on social media every single week. What’s going on here? Is this an evitable knock-on effect of climate change? Are referees more fussy? Or do we all just have considerably higher expectations of what constitutes a ‘playable’ pitch now than we used to?

I’m not certain that I’ve ever, in four and a half decades of watching football, turned up at a ground only to find that a match has been postponed. This isn’t pure providence. In the pre-digital age, if you were calling a match off, doing so on the day it was due to be played was the option of absolute last resort. There was little chance that many people would be able to find out before setting off themselves, so matches tended to be called off a day or two earlier. But these days pitch inspections seem to be very fashionable, meaning that it’s increasingly difficult to even know exactly what matches are taking place until two or three hours before kick-off.

So it is that by about 10.00 on Saturday morning, I’ve got steam coming out of my ears. A couple of hours earlier, I was finalising plans. It’s 47 miles from Worthing to Hastings and that’s a two hour train journey. I check the Facebook and Twitter accounts for both Hastings United and their opponents today, Lewes. There’s no mention of a pitch inspection anywhere. This is a local derby and I’ve already been warned that they’re expecting a big crowd so, satisfied that the match will be going ahead, I head for the home team’s website and book myself a ticket and pick a train that will give me time to have a wander round a town that I haven’t explored enough before first.

But then, at 9.30, an announcement. There will be a pitch inspection at 10.45, the exact time that I’d been planning to leave the house to go to the railway station. GODDAMMIT. I sit around watching a documentary on the Battle of Hastings and refreshing Twitter with the slowly increasing mania of a younger, sexier, less racist Elon Musk until the notification comes through that the match is going ahead.

I do understand the mechanics behind this. Sudden downpours can be ruinous for the state of a football pitch, and while there might not have been any rain since the previous evening in West Sussex, I can’t say with any confidence that there wasn’t in the adjoining county. But eventually the green light is given. All that swearing at no-one in particular, and we’re on after all.

In my head, this particular battle of Hastings is already lodged as ‘The Castle Derby’. Coastal areas used to need their fortification, and in Hastings the castle sits atop a hill overlooking a town still famous for the events of one day almost a thousand years ago, while Lewes are proud enough of theirs to have it on their badge and as their nickname, The Rooks. Ironically, a week earlier I was watching Pagham, the team from the village that marks the final resting place of Harold Godwinson. This week I’m in the area where his problems started in the first place.

Hastings, it’s reasonable to say, has a patchy reputation. Drug addiction has been a major issue in this town for years, and the situation doesn’t seem to be improving that much. But while there is a bit of a waft of weed drifting across the front of the railway station when I finally emerge from it (there’s a sculpture in the nearby shopping precinct called ‘The Spirit of Cricket’ - the player is unnamed but judging by the smell round the station I can only assume that he plays for the West Indies), the biggest issue I have with the town centre is the almost hilariously ugly high rise building that blights the view from just about every angle. I walk up through the old town, which is rather lovely, rueing the fact that I didn’t just take my chances and get on that earlier train so that I’d have a bit longer to nose around.

It’s been almost a decade and a half since I made my last trip over here and yes, I had forgotten just how hilly it is. Even for someone who lived in Brighton for eight years, the shortcut that I end up taking feels like climbing the north face of the Eiger. By the time I get to the top of it, my heart is doing about 120 BPM and it feels like it might explode out, Alien-style, through my rib cage. After a restorative five minutes rest on a park bench, silently bemoaning the rapid advancing of the years, I continue my way down to the ground, where my foresight in grabbing a ticket this morning has paid off. While a lengthy queue snakes up the road, I’m waved through with a flash of a QR code.

The Pilot Field has barely changed since I was last here (for the first Non League Day, all the way back in 2010, when my hair was brown and the world felt considerably more sane), and it’s all the better for it. This is an old ground. The cavernous main stand must be frighteningly expensive to maintain but still looks glorious, while the cowshed style covered terrace at the near end of the ground also has—no smoking signs excepted—that distinct feeling of a bygone age about it.

It’s also pleasingly chaotic. There’s a big grass bank running along one side of the pitch and detritus everywhere, including a van parked up behind the far goal with tyre tracks behind it which suggest that it might have been parked by one of the Dukes of Hazzard. One of the main viewing obstructions is the position of the floodlights, which are inside the perimeter fence around the pitch. Hastings United have been trying to get a new ground for a while now, and I’m glad to be seeing it one more time before the inevitable wrecking ball of progress condemns it to the history books.

Pleasingly, the teams take to the pitch to the parping refrains of the county anthem Sussex By The Sea. It should be mandatory for all Sussex teams to take to the pitch to this, but very few actually do. Who knows? Perhaps Right Here Right Now will be the Sussex county anthem in a couple of decades time. There is, of course, more than local pride alone resting on this game. Hastings are fifth in the table, the final play-off spot. Lewes are 11th, but this isn’t the Premier League so they still have a decent chance of making the top five, with a third of the league season still to play.

I have to concede that I can see more or less immediately why a pitch inspection was necessary, and why it only might just have passed. The surface looks bumpy to start with, and there are puddles on the other side of the touchlines. It’s been fine drizzling since I got here, and about midway through the first half that rain gets heavier, leading some (including me) to scurry for cover. But while Hastings start strongly, there’s an immediate problem which turns out to be recurring throughout the entire ninety minutes.

Their final ball has gone absent without leave, and it is endlessly frustrating. Hastings move the ball quite nicely around the midfield, but when they get to around forty yards from goal it feels as though somebody has turned off their competence supply. Crosses are passed straight to the first defender or ping high behind the goal. And then midway through the half, Kalvin Lumbombo-Kalala scores for Lewes and Hastings’ afternoon starts to fall apart.

It’s understandable to start getting furious when refereeing decisions start going against you, but as a player you really have little option but to put them to one side and get on with things. It’s something that Hastings’ Jack Dixon might do well to keep in mind. He picks up a first yellow card for dissent after what looks—admittedly on my part, from a distance—like a pretty stonewall penalty. Only a couple of minutes pass when he picks up a second one, apparently again for something said to the referee. The guy standing next to me is a Lewes supporter. “He used to play for us”, he tells me. “Had issues with his temper then, too”.

As all concerned leave the pitch for half-time, there is a real feeling of anger in the air around The Pilot Field. An extendable tunnel has been pulled out for the officials to disappear down but behind this, even though I can't make out what they're shouting, the facial expressions of those berating the referee make what they’re saying perfectly evident. Perhaps in celebration of his 50th birthday, perhaps to pacify the crowd a little, the PA plays the theme music to Bagpuss.

As the teams come back out for the second half, the theme tune to Joe 90 (and you definitely need to be of a certain age to be able to remember that little slice of Supermarionation weirdness) is playing. A few yards to my left stands a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (with the wrong hair colour to be Dudley Do-Right, alas), drinking a pint. Good to see they get some downtime.

If the intended aim of the Bagpuss music was to pacify the home crowd, it doesn’t last for very long. We’ve only been restarted for ten minutes when John Ufuah is hauled down inside the Lewes half. He scrambles to his feet and continues the chase, only to be upended again by another defender. When both of the Lewes players are given yellow cards for their intervention, even the saggiest, baggiest cloth cat in the whole wide world wouldn’t be able to calm things down entirely.

For my part—and I should add that I haven’t seen either of these tackles again since, because at the time of writing there’s no video footage available—they both looked like yellow cards, even though they came one quickly after the other with the referee correctly playing an advantage inbetween. A few minutes later, Lumbombo-Kalala adds a second Lewes goal and it looks like Hastings have run out of arrows.

But there can also be something galvanising about a sense of injustice and Hastings up their game, finally starting to dominate possession again as they did throughout the opening stages, and with thirteen minutes to play they finally are awarded a penalty by Professor Yaffle, which is driven in by Davide Rodari. Hastings continue to push and push, but they don’t create a great deal, even with six minutes of stoppage-time. Indeed, a couple of minutes into that, Lewes break on the right and Archie Tamplin scores from close range to sew up the points for the visitors. Behind the goal, as the players cavort with the travelling supporters, a rainbow peeks down through the clouds.

A collective grumble reverberates around The Pilot Field upon the final whistle, the sound of a script not having been followed. Walking back down towards Ore railway station, I’m about ten or twelve paces behind a small group of Stone Island clad youth. They’re discussing how beautiful the sunset away to our right looks. That’s the thing about non-league football; it does tend to give you a sense of perspective. It’s only when I sit down on the train with a squelch that I realise just how wet I’ve managed to get over the course of the afternoon. Totally worth it, as ever.

Hastings stay in fifth place in the table, but this is primarily because of cancellations elsewhere. A place below them in the table are Enfield, whose home game against bottom of the table Kingstonian fell foul of the weather. Hastings lead them by a single goal on goal difference, but the Towners now have two games in hand on them. Two points behind these two are Bognor Regis Town, who also have two games in hand on them.

A little lower down and five points behind are Horsham, whose FA Cup run means that they have five games in hand. Lewes, for their part, have nudged up a couple of places in the table to 9th. They’re four points behind Hastings with two games in hand. It’s fair to say that it’s getting somewhat congested in that part of the league table. At the time of writing, there remain about seven clubs below the play-off places who could still harbour a realistic hope of making the top five with a fair wind and a run of good results.

And for all the unhappiness at the full-time whistle, there is one cause for genuine optimism for Hastings United’s supporters. The crowd for this match was 2,712, an astonishing figure for 5th vs 11th in the regionalised seventh tier of the English game. Even more astonishingly, it wasn’t even the highest crowd in the division that day; there were 2,875 at the match between Dulwich Hamlet and league leaders Hornchurch. Both of these crowds were bigger than the average attendance of three League Two clubs, playing three levels above them. Hastings United may not be building a new ground at the moment, but they’re building something at The Pilot Field.