Sun, chips, drink and football: Worthing & Wimbledon on a Sunday afternoon

The kids needed to get out the house for a couple of hours; what better a way to do this than with some live Sunday afternoon football?

Perusing my otherwise doom-laden social media timeline on Sunday morning, I note with interest that Worthing are due to be playing Wimbledon in the Third Qualifying Round of the Women’s FA Cup. Tomorrow is the first day of half-term week and the kids are already getting antsy. They need to get out of the house for a couple of hours.

This will be inexpensive, and there’s no reason to believe it won’t be entertaining. They’ll get a much-needed afternoon in the sun, some chips and a drink, while I get to watch a football match with a beer in my hand. 24 hours earlier I was wondering whether I’d make a game at all this weekend, but now I’m looking at my second in two days.

This sort of situation doesn’t often present itself, but sometimes rail replacement buses have their uses. We live a five minute walk from a railway station which is a three minute, one stop journey to, well, a bit closer to the town centre. But Worthing’s ground is no more than a ten minute walk, and there are no buses that pass near there.

The journey to the ground is marked with a bit of a history lesson. My kids are 8 and 6, and have no comprehension of a world in which there’s a difference in the way in which sport played by men and sport played by women are treated. How do you even begin to explain that? Women have played football professionally, on the television and in big, all-seater stadia for as long they’ve been alive. The very idea that a sport could not be ‘a woman’s game’ is utterly alien to them.

So I explain as best I can, for their level of understanding. The crowd today will be smaller than if we went to see the men’s team, but a lot of women’s teams haven’t been around for as long as the men’s teams. They’re catching up. ‘Is this game going to be on the TV?’, my older one asks. “Not the TV TV”, I reply, “but I think it’ll be on YouTube, so we might be able to watch it on the TV.”

They, of course, don’t understand what I mean in the slightest.

You really see the benefit of 3g pitches on an afternoon like this. The men were playing on this pitch less than 24 hours earlier, valiantly losing to a 97th minute goal against Yeovil Town in the National League South. Some pitches in this country are literally underwater, while scores of others have been waterlogged over the weekend by torrential rain. Just a couple of miles from here, Worthing United’s match fell foul of the weather a day earlier. Yet here they are, kicking off another match, on a perfect playing surface, in perfect conditions.

There’s about 200-odd people present, not far short of half of whom seem to be supporting the away team. There shouldn’t be much between these two. They’re in the same division—the FA WNL Division One South-East, the regionalised third tier of the women’s league system—with Wimbledon top of the table and Worthing third, albeit with a game in hand and just three points behind them.

The game takes a while to get going, but that’s not for a lack of quality. What’s really striking, and this is really a feeling that has been building inside me since the start of the season, having seen a lot of football from what is something approaching the nether regions of the men’s game so far this season, is just how good at football young people are, these days. Everybody tries to keep the ball on the ground. There are nice touches all over the place. All teams of substance go out with clear plans. Standards have improved enormously, and across the board.

Wimbledon take the lead just after the half-hour, a header from close range by Emily Donovan after Ashlee Hincks has a shot pushed onto the crossbar, but Worthing don’t take long to respond, and when they do so, they do so with style, Becky Bath curling a twenty-yarder inside the left-hand post with a sense of style that wouldn’t have looked out of place at a higher level. The teams are level at half-time.

We watched the first half from the back of the main stand. Younger kid’s birthday was last week, and one of his presents was a Sonic the Hedgehog hat with ears which wiggle on demand. He promises before kick-off that he will wiggle his ears every time somebody scores a goal. This turns out to be a promise that he comes good on.

In the second half we go and stand opposite the stand, just behind one of the two park benches which remain inexplicably bolted to the terraces at Woodside Road. Every August I turn up to my first game of the season here expecting them to have been sacrificed at the altar of modernity, but there they remain. It’s not so long since we turned up for the first game of the season only to find that they’d been given a fresh lick of paint. It’s difficult to believe that they will be there for much longer, so I cherish these weird interlopers from another time with open arms.

During the first half, what felt like a pattern had emerged. Wimbledon dominated possession but left a gap or two at the back, and Worthing looked dangerous on the break. The second half is much of the first had been, but with one significant difference. That half-time Wimbledon team talk seems to have plugged that defensive gap. But Wimbledon’s second goal doesn’t come from sustained pressure. If anything, quite the opposite. Ten minutes into the second half, Ellie Dorey has one of those moments when you start to wonder, “Well, if it was that easy, why didn’t she do it earlier?”, bursting between two defenders and calmly planting the ball into the bottom corner.

With 15 minutes to play, it feels as though the game has been put beyond reasonable doubt with quite possibly the best goal I’ll see all season, when Dorey crosses into the penalty area for Hincks to perfectly place a volley over the goalkeeper and into the corner of the goals. Hincks has been a ball of hustle and bustle all afternoon, engagingly entertaining with some most unladylike language every time she strays offside, fouls somebody, or is fouled herself. She certainly deserves her goal.

But this match isn’t quite over yet. With five minutes to play and the Wimbledon defence looking a little leaden-footed, Gemma Worsfold chases a long ball through and toe pokes it past the goalkeeper to reduce the deficit to one. With a little self-belief reinstilled by the goal, we’ve now got a game on our hands. The tables have been turned a little, but two excellent saves from the Wimbledon goalkeeper Lauren Allen. There’s even time for a little late shithousery when a Worthing player is injured, ends up off the pitch, and then rolls back onto it to ensure that play doesn’t continue without her. Wimbledon hang on to win 3-2 and they deserve their place in the next round, but it was a close call, in the end.

By the point of the late drama, the kids have long since lost interest and are rolling around on a conveniently located patch of artificial grass behind the terrace. I don’t blame them. I didn’t really start understanding football until was older than my older one is now. They’re having a nice afternoon, and that’s what really counts. We walk back to the railway station for a replacement bus back to East Worthing. They may turn out to be a nightmare this week, but that’s for another time. For now, there’s a promise of the last of this year’s birthday cake when we get home.

It’s a strange thing, this notion of ‘quality’ in football. I’ve been pretty lucky with my matches this season. This was my eleventh. I’ve seen two penalty shootouts and no goalless draws. Whether the crowd has been a couple of hundred or a couple of thousand, I have been entertained, and this has been entirely contained in non-league football, and now in the middle-ranking of the women’s game. It’s tempting to wonder whether all those blowhards who spend their time complaining that nothing’s good enough for them even like the game in the first place.

There is a very curious irony to the fact that, even as people seem to complain about the ‘quality’ of what they’re seeing all the time, the truth at ground level is that standards in both the men’s and women’s games are higher than they ever have been before. Partly, this is environmental. Equipment is of a higher quality. Pitches are almost always excellent. But it’s also about the way both coaches and players thing about the game. Even at this level, in front of a couple of hundred people in the qualifying rounds of a cup competition, the natural impulse of the modern football is inclined towards neat passing, good movement and the occasional moment of flair.

And yes, kiddo. Turns out it is on the television. You were right all along. We’ll watch it tonight, before you go to bed.