Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind?
We enter the Christmas football period full of excitement at the platter laid before us, but by New Year's Day it's starting to repeat, a little.
Christmas and New Year Bank Holiday matches bring a special feeling of jeopardy. Which leagues are playing on the Saturday, and which are holding themselves back until the Monday? Who's kicking off at lunchtime because of the likelihood of the local Stone Island clad scrotes drinking for five hours first and trying to kick off in a whole other way? What will the now apparently perpetually inclement weather do to local pitches that aren't made of artificial fibres?
Littlehampton and I have been doing a pas de deux since the start of the season, dancing past each other with an array of postponements and other matters which ended up taking a greater priority. But here we are nevertheless on New Year's Day, lined up on the platform at East Worthing railway station, the kids inexplicably excited at the idea of standing adjacent to a muddy pitch, listening to ruddy-faced men unloading both barrels at footballers (and the nearest linesman) who'd likely rather be curled up on the sofa in front of Homes Under The Hammer with a hangover.
It's the end of the holiday rush. Saturday, Boxing Day, Saturday, New Year's Day. And there's a little fatigue in the air. Littlehampton Town vs Chichester City in the Isthmian League Division One South East should be a local derby. There are only thirteen miles between the two clubs, after all. But the weather is grim, it's cold, and we're all due back at work in the morning. The breathless giddiness of the Saturday before Christmas has been usurped by a feeling of vaguely wiped out, post-holiday-season frazzledness.
Littlehampton town centre is practically deserted. Like a lot of town centres these days, it's mostly vape shops and takeaway joints around here. Greggs is open and offers the almost warming treat of vegan sausage rolls, so we cower from the somehow horizontally falling rain under a cover next to Starbucks, one of the few places that has bothered to open this New Year's Day. A few feet to my right, a late middle-aged man sits on his own outside the coffee shop, occasionally manically laughing to himself at, so far as I can ascertain, nothing whatsoever. Still, this trip is local enough to ensure that even taking into account this particular pit stop, we're at The Sportsfield a good half hour before kick-off.
And when they say “Sportsfield”, they mean “Sportsfield”. Littlehampton Town's ground is, part of a mildly bewildering sports complex which also contains a cricket pitch, a bowling green and a social club. The football pitch itself is shared with the adjacent cricket pitch separated only by some wire fencing. Perhaps appropriately, the club has put all of its amenities to the other side, two long, low covered terraces - just the two steps of terracing - on either side of an ancient, crumbling, primarily wooden stand which is of obvious interest to aficionados of old football ground architecture but which is otherwise almost entirely unfit for purpose.
The front two rows of seats have around two-thirds of their view blocked by dugouts in front of them. Sitting anywhere else in it is like peering at a football match from the cockpit of a World War One biplane. This stand has stood here for more than a century, but soon it will be gone. Work is due to start on a replacement in a couple of months, which should be complete by the summer. Its replacement will likely be functional and not as well loved as its predecessor, but it should offer supporters a better view of goings-on on the pitch.
And sharing a pitch with the local cricket club does make for some curious idiosyncrasies. The cricket scoreboard sits behind the near goal, but facing at a 90 degree angle away from the pitch, as though it can’t bear to bring itself to watch football during the winter, while one of the four floodlight pylons is at least 100 yards from the football pitch itself yet still somehow manages to light the corner of the pitch nearest to it. Whether they’ve just turned the brightness up to compensate for this distance is a question that I can’t answer, but it certainly feels brighter to be standing underneath it.
Whether the good people of Littlehampton, who one rather suspects have turned out more from a sense of duty than anything else, actually wanted to see through the struts of the main stand or the harsh glare of the distant floodlight is somewhat debatable. Town were stalwart members of the County league for almost a century before promotion in 2022, a season that they ended at Wembley in becoming the first Sussex club to reach the final of the FA Vase, before losing 3-0 to Newport Pagnell Town. Their first Isthmian League season saw them finish in 12th place, but this season hasn’t been going according to plan. They go into this match in 17th place in a twenty-club division, despite having won their previous match 6-1 at bottom-placed Beckenham Town.
As for their opponents today, Chichester City, well… it’s complicated. The original Chichester City FC were founded in 1873 and merged with another local club to form Chichester City United FC in 2000. That name lasted for nine years before it was agreed that changing it back to the original club’s name made more sense. Like Littlehampton, they were stalwarts of the County league for decades before winning promotion into the Isthmian League in 2019. Getting promoted at this time meant that their first two seasons at a new level were both truncated by the pandemic. They’ve been mid-table for the two seasons since and enter this game in 10th place in the table.
Just a quick scroll through their FA Cup record hints at the richness of 150 years of history. There was an 11-0 defeat to Bristol City in their first appearance in the FA Cup First Round, in 1960. Sixteen years later they lost 11-0 to Basingstoke Town in the First Qualifying Round, while in 1992 their Preliminary Round match against Whitehawk was ordered to be replayed after the referee played extra-time in error and in 2019 they received a bye into the Second Round of the competition after drawing the effectively defunct Bury in the First Round.
(The season after that, for the record, they played Basingstoke in the Cup for the first time since that 1976 meeting and beat them on penalty kicks. There’s always history, if only you’re prepared to go looking for it.)
The rain comes and goes throughout the rest of the afternoon, but it says something for the state of modern pitch husbandry that at no point do we see a repeat of the mudbath that unfolds on the touchlines near the middle of the pitch. Not that even the best efforts of the home groundsman can do much for his team this afternoon. Littlehampton are poor. They’re a goal down in seven minutes, and the response is… doughy. There are no major problems. There’s nothing you can point at and immediately say, “Now, that’s where they’re going wrong”. They’re just beaten to the ball a little too easily, sometimes a bit rustic with their tackling, and struggle to create any really clear chances.
Ethan Pritchard grabs his and Chichester’s second goal, five minutes into the second half, and it’s really the same story as the first half. Half-time is an opportunity to pause for breath and reset the clock, if things aren’t working out. You’ve had 45 minutes against them. Regroup, plug any tactical gaps, then go back out and claw your way back into the game. Except that opportunity feels as though it’s been put to waste when you concede after seven minutes in the first half and five in the second. Again, Littlehampton huffed and puffed, but Pritchard was on hand to complete a hat-trick with six minutes to play, and that was essentially that.
Littlehampton stay fourth from bottom in the table, with 15 points from their 18 games played. They’ve conceded the second most goals in the division - and a big shout out at this juncture goes to Phoenix Sports for having conceded 57 in 20 league games so far, including a 9, a 7 and a 6; if you’re going to lose, lose hard - and they’re four points above the two relegation places. And at least they don’t have the issues that the team one place below them in the table, Erith & Belvedere, have in front of the goal this season. They’ve only scored ten goals in 18 games. They probably won’t get relegated this season, though that may depend on the teams below them not improving.
Chichester City, meanwhile, go up a place in the table to 9th. They’re only six points off the play-off places, a position which makes sense given their performance in this match. They did… enough, and they had a Player of the Match performance from one player. Against limited opposition, that can be all you need. Their chance of winning the league title has long gone. Ramsgate are 19 points above them at the top of the table, attracting crowds that have reached into four figures - this is the fourth tier of non-league football; clubs in this division are as far from the National League as League Two clubs are from the Premier League, and with fewer promotion places - and are showing no signs of letting up. But they’re only six points off the play-offs, and with half the season still to play.
Non-league rivalries are strange things by their very nature. Below the EFL, the game can have a somewhat transient feel at times. The likelihood of staying in the same division as your local rivals for decades and decades is slim to none, and the result of this is that local rivals come and go, like ships that pass in the night. Of course, this means that two clubs meeting as equals again for the first time in years will only have its spiciness intensified, but it also means that you have to hop from club to club if you’re looking for antagonists.
And this match didn’t really feel like a local derby. The crowd was 261, about a third up on normal, but there was only a relatively normal looking sized contingent who’d made it over from Chichester and the match didn’t have that crackle in the air that local derbies, when local grievances should really be hitting the fan, normally have. That little frisson. That extra edge. In contrast, this felt like a common or garden league match. A diverting enough way to spend an afternoon, but a match which perhaps fell victim a little to the week and bit of letting it all hang out which preceded it. And that’s not even really such a terrible thing, when you consider the little nerks in their knock-off Stone Island who’ve been on the nose since 10 that morning.
