Shellfish till they die; Shoreham edge Varndean as Christmas appears on the horizon
As Christmas decorations start to go up, at least the weather in Shoreham-by-Sea is suitably festive.
There can be no denying it, I made a pitch inspection the night before the match. True enough, it wasn't the pitch at Middle Road in Shoreham-by-Sea, and true enough, it wasn't actually a football pitch at all but m'podcast co-host's back garden, but it was a patch of grass no more than a mile and a half from their ground and, a frankly alarming amount of cat shit notwithstanding, it was as near to a football pitch as I was likely to get at ten o'clock on a Friday night. “It'll take a stud”, I thought to myself as I touched my foot down gingerly amid the feline effluence.
And sure enough it would. For once, I don't spend the morning frantically checking social media for signs that I might spend the afternoon in my living room playing FIFA and feeling a little bit sorry for myself. This weekend, “GAME OFF” belongs to other people and not to me, all the better when I'm getting a lift to the match rather than having to negotiate Southern Trains and what passes for their freewheelin’, make-it-up-as-we-go-along weekend “timetable”.
Mist has descended over the River Adur as we cross it, but it's an otherwise bright, sunny afternoon. Not quite perfect conditions for football, as we'll see, but at least this weekend my boots aren't dirtied by having to walk through a small forest (hello, Eastleigh) or having to negotiate my way round a leisure centre while trying not to look like a wrong ‘un (hello, Brighton Electricity).
A flick through the programme—which comes complete with a frankly frightening artistic rendition of a man with a mussel for a head—reveals a litany of woe. Shoreham are bottom of the Southern Combination Football League Premier Division. Their top scorer had nine goals in the league, but his name was italics and removed to near the bottom of the list, meaning that he's already scarpered. This season's fixtures confirm that he’d scored a hat-trick in a match they lost 4-3 a few weeks earlier. It's the sort of stand-out statistic that makes his departure seem somewhat less surprising.
But it's not all gloom and doom at Shoreham at the moment. Crowds seem to have gone up since the start of the season, which is somewhat surprising, considering that they go into this match having already conceded 48 league goals this season. They come into this game against AFC Varndeanians (to whom, m'podcast co-host reminds me, he once recommended that I present myself as their new mascot, “Varndean Ian”) off the back of an actual, real-life win a week earlier, 3-1 away to Uckfield Town. And by the look of the table league table, Varndean could do with the idiosyncratic dance stylings of Varndean Ian this season. They're only three points and four places above Shoreham at kick-off time. The other team to play their home matches at Withdean aren't going so great themselves.
The SCFL has come to feel like a second home for me this season, and one day I will look back upon all of this fondly, but it's a bit difficult to feel that way when the weather is as cold as it is this afternoon. The temperature is below freezing, and without a cloud in the sky to trap the warmer air your lungs are scoured every time you breathe in and your fingers start to feel as though they'll snap off if you pull them out of your pockets too quickly.
And it remains the case that Middle Road is one of my favourite local non-league grounds. There are some football clubs at which you arrive to feel as though actually yes, you are at a football “club”. The bar is warm and inviting—at half-time it's by some distance the busiest I've seen any club bar this season, as practically the entire crowd of 164 pack in to escape the elements—and the whiteboard confirms two teams packed with pleasingly unusual names.
Was Alfie Proto-Gates to be replaced by Alfie Actua-Gates in the second half? Would Fred Night be greeted by “Fred Night sweetheart, till we meet tomorrow” or “Fred Night is a long way from home” if he came on from the bench? I quickly dismiss the thought that the player in the Varndean team with the same name as the girl who I had a debilitating and unrequited crush on when I was at school could be the same person. She'd be 50 by now, for one thing.
There's a pleasing amount of eccentricity about the ground. The club's nickname is The Musselmen, and behind the goal at one end of the pitch there's a flag at the top of a pole with “SHELLFISH TIL WE DIE” printed across the middle of it in a Iron Maiden typeface. There's cover behind both goals, and seats—73 of them; yeah I counted—behind one. The media platform can only be accessed by ladder and looks as though it may just collapse if anyone actually tried to access it, and the main stand, a small, squat construction which runs along one side, may be haunted. The men's toilets have an unused (and unlocked) changing room next to them, perfect for if you need to give yourself a pre-pee pep talk.
And Shoreham don't play like a team that's bottom of the league. They hit the post early on, and score with a header midway through. Varndean bundle in an equaliser with a header from a corner three minutes from half-time, but you can't ignore the evidence of your own eyes. But as ever at matches at this sort of level, your attention often ends up getting drawn elsewhere drawn elsewhere, and in this case it's towards Shoreham's propensity to attract celebrity lookalike linesmen. When we were here earlier in the season, we had Pete Waterman running the line, and they've gone one better this time around, with Father Jack Hackett from Father Ted on the red and yellow quartered flag. Offside? That would be an ecumenical matter.
It's amazing, the effect that squeezing in a pint in fifteen minutes at half-time can have on a crowd. The atmosphere during the second half is more rambunctious than during f the first. For a brief period, there's even a small group of Shoreham supporters who know they know they are and are sure they are shellfish till they die. Varndean win a penalty, a little against the run of play, which is saved by the Shoreham goalkeeper, and at 4.47 the home team bundle the ball over the line from a free-kick on the left for what turns out to be the winning goal.
But how long is there left to play? There are no LED boards showing how much stoppage-time there will be and there's no electronic scoreboard telling you how long they've been playing for. This small rule change to the rules, having announcements made of how much stoppage-time there will be, never seems to be considered when we talk about the ways in which football has changed over the years.
There was a time when no-one in the entire ground apart from the weirdo in black with a whistle round his neck knew even roughly what time the full-time whistle would blow, and this added a strange jeopardy to the end of the match. At 4.47 in the afternoon, you might be forgiven thinking there were only three or four minutes left to play. On this occasion, the game ends at 5.01. I still have no idea how much of that last 14 minutes was even beyond the scheduled 90, and in a sense it doesn't really matter. But it is really noticeable when it's taken away (and you don't have to go much higher up the pyramid before they do start announcing it), just how much you've come to rely upon it.
The win isn’t just enough to lift Shoreham off the bottom of the table. It lifts them away from the relegation places and even above Varndean, to fourth from bottom in the table. When we were here earlier in the season, they were beaten 4-0 at home and they looked like a bottom of the table team. That certainly seems to have changed this time around, with a far more cohesive performance which indicates that they should be strong enough to pull clear of the relegation places. Shellfish till they die? Rumours of their death may have been exaggerated.