When a last-minute equaliser makes all that travelling worthwhile

Travelling 80-odd miles from Hertfordshire to the Sussex coast two Saturdays before Christmas to see your team when they're 23rd in the league requires a certain state of mind.

Me: “Well, where are you, then?”

Him: “We’re in Worthing. We’re heading towards the sea. We don’t get to see that very often.”

Me: “Ooookay… well, what can you see at the moment?”

Him: “Houses, mostly. Oh hang on, what does that say? It’s a street sign. It says Cambridge Road”

Twenty minutes and three phone calls later I finally find them holed up in a pub off a sidestreet that even I, after nine and a half years of having lived in this goddam town, hadn’t previously realised even existed. The moral of the story here is; never try to meet a moving target. You’ll only ever turn up where they were a few minutes ago.

It’s 80-odd miles from St Albans to Worthing, but even in the middle of December there are dozens–possibly as many as a couple of hundred–who’ll make the journey down to the south coast on this cold Saturday afternoon. City have been pretty much uniformly terrible so far this season, one place off the bottom of the National League South, with two wins from twenty games, so far.

Yet still they make the journey, and I understand the motivations for doing so. It’s messy and no two people are the same, but there is a spectrum of motivation for doing this sort of thing which ranges from simply having to see every match to having next-to-no interest in the actual football and being there primarily for the day out.

I have always fallen towards the later end of this spectrum. I’m a firm believer in the mantra that the journey to and from the match is always more fun than the match itself. To a point these matches only exist as a conduit for train cans, getting lost, eating terrible, terrible food, and being bumbling idiots. Some of the best away days I ever did were wrapped around five or six-goal defeats. It would be a lie to say that the result was never the point, but it certainly didn’t feel like it a lot of the time.

My interest in this game is vested. I lived in St Albans more or less from 1982 until 2001. I’ve had a strangely rootless life, but this was the city in which I went to secondary school and college, in which I had my first job and my first girlfriend. It’s the city that was one of those that could qualify as home, and I was a home away supporter of the local football team with varying degrees of enthusiasm until I moved out of the area. Even now, I try to make an away game or two when they’re playing on the south coast. Today is one such day.

I leave the pub and walk up to the ground a little earlier than the rest of them, because I have another meeting to make. M’former podcast co-host and I started going to matches together down here almost the moment I moved from London to Brighton in 2006, but we haven’t done so for quite some time now. He is ill, quite seriously ill, awaiting a liver transplant over an auto-immune condition.

But on this occasion, he’s in the mood for some football. I’ve known him for long enough to know the patterns with which he messages me, and I know well enough that if he’s messaging me on the day that I’m going to a game that it’s feasible for him to get to, it’s because he wants to go as well. When you;’ve known someone for more than twenty years, you get to learn these quirks. He is also one of the more punctual people I know, so meeting him on the corner near Worthing’s ground is extremely straightforward.

It’s been three months since I was last at Woodside Road, and the final stage of its recent redevelopment has now been completed. First of all, the tin shed and crumbling terracing behind the far goal were replaced by first a strip of tarmac and then a smart red cover with a handful of metal steps. And then came the bigger job, a large covered terrace to run the length of the pitch opposite the main stand.

This turned out to be a longer job than had been anticipated, overrunning into the new season. When we were last here in September, the new terrace was still a skeleton and the capacity was limited to 1,500. This actual fixture was one of those that was rescheduled because of this work, the matches switched so that they could play each other at Clarence Park in St Albans in August. They drew 2-2 that day.

But four months on, the two clubs are on fairly divergent paths. Worthing go into the game in third place in the table, and just three points off its summit in a division that remains remarkably open. They have, in some respects, had a tough year, having lost manager Adam Hinshelwood and a handful of their best players to York City, but they’ve managed to steady their ship and still have much to play for this season.

As for St Albans City…well, it’s complicated. David Noble took over as the manager of the club in November 2022, they ended his first season in charge in sixth place before losing the play-off final to Oxford City. Last season saw them finish 11th, but Noble left in January for Wealdstone. But he only lasted 73 days in that position and returned to Clarence Park at the end of last season, only for things to turn completely sour on the pitch this season and the team’s form to collapse.

And relegation doesn’t happen to them very often. They’ve only been relegated twice in the last forty years; back to the Conference South after one season in the Conference National in 2007, and from the Conference South in 2011, which they bounced back from after three seasons in the Southern League. Furthermore, no-one seems to know quite where this sudden decline has come from. On my walk into town, I pondered to myself whether there was just something that I’d missed, but further conversations in the pub before the match seem to confirm that no, the regulars can’t work out why they’ve been so bad this season, either.

Noble’s second spell with the club ended last month, but there didn’t seem to have been much of an improvement since then. The team lost twice in the week following his departure. The replacement turned out to be Ian Culverhouse, formerly of Boston United and Kettering Town (and a UEFA Cup winner with Spurs in 1984), with Paul Bastock as his assistant. For supporters of a certain age, Bastock is City royalty. Better known for his 500-odd games for Boston United, the former goalkeeper also played the best part of 300 games for the Saints in a career that amounted to well over 1,000. There is little question that he’s the best goalkeeper they’ve ever had.

But former playing credentials count for little when it comes to management, and it would be a stretch to say that things had improved that much over their first two games in charge. A 1-1 draw at Maidstone United was a reasonable enough result, but the second match ended in a fairly thorough 3-0 defeat away to local rivals Boreham Wood, not the sort of result that was going to impress a support which has seen enough of that sort of thing already this season, thank you very much.

And it is… a pretty terrible game. Worthing are wearing a special lilac kit to champion disability inclusion, and the low sunlight bathes the pitch in gorgeous colour, but the actual football itself really fails to catch light. Last season, these two teams drew 4-4 here in the league. The year before, City won 5-4. It’s fairly evident from fairly early on that there will be none of that nonsense on this occasion.

There’s plenty of space for nonsense on the terrace behind the goal, though. I doubt that anyone can precisely recall the first time that City supporters first sang Do They Know It’s Christmas? from start to finish, with only the ending changed to reference having sympathy for the residents of Hemel Hempstead rather than Africa, but it’s a timespan that can be measured in decades. It may well stretch back as far as the previous century. There is a certain irony to hearing it less than a fortnight before Christmas when I know fully well that this lot are just as capable of singing it in April or August.

With every passing year, there are fewer and fewer faces that I recognise at these away games. But there are still a handful, one of my closest friends from when I was in my 20s, and a handful of guys that I used to ineptly play football with. We’re all older, more weathered and greyer than we used to be, but it really is surprising just how quickly you can fall into conversational habits from years and years ago. We run a quick check in the pub before the match, and although there are fewer faces that I recognise, we can still confirm that our friend group from 25 or 30 years ago are at least all still alive.

It’s no huge surprise when Worthing take the lead with a couple of minutes to play before half-time. Chances have been thin on the ground–the best falling to St Albans, when a clipped ball through the Worthing defence couldn’t quite be turned past the goalkeeper–when Nicky Wheeler picks the ball up on the left-hand side of the penalty area and absolutely thunders it into the top corner.

Worthing have chances to make the win safe in the second half; a break on the left that results in the goalkeeper saving with his feet, a header flashed over from six yards out and a long-range shot from 35 yards out, hit Ronnie Radford style, which smacks out off the left-hand post, hits the goalkeeper, and then bounces narrowly wide again. But the chances dry up, St Albans even manage to create a couple of their own, and then, in the sixth minute of stoppage-time at the end of the game…

There’s been a bit of a running battle between the away supporters and the stewards over standing on the NO STANDING area directly behind the goal throughout the second half, but all semblance of order falls apart when a low across the penalty area evades everybody and is turned into an empty goal by Shaun Jeffers at the far post. Pandemonium. A surge forward and a race down to the corner where the players have congregated, all accompanied by a guttural, “ROAROAAGGGHHHURR” noise, which is instantly translatable as, “I have no idea exactly how what just happened did just happen, but oh my God will I take it because I really didn’t want to travel all this way just to watch us lose 1-0 again”.

There’s no feeling in football like a last-minute equaliser. If you could distil everything that is most perfect about it and bottle it, it would smell like this. It’s a high. It’s the reason why we do it in the first place. These travelling supporters have spent a lot of money to be here this afternoon, yet these moments of–YES–unexpected delirium are precisely why we do it in the first place. Everything is vindicated in the sound of the ball hitting the net and the minutes of disbelieving celebration which follow it. And it’s all the sweeter when your team have been lousy all season, when they’ve looked so thoroughly incapable of doing something like this.

Perhaps this result will be a turning point after all. City showed a bit of character this afternoon, against a team that is expected to be in a play-off position come the end of the season. Worthing didn’t take the chances that they did create, and St Albans came into the game more and more throughout the final twenty minutes. And when you’re in a relegation fight that collective character matters. It may even be enough to haul them out of the relegation places in the new year, although to do so remains a tall order.

There’s a group of thirty scrotes hanging round the back of Worthing station, all Stone Island, Burberry and attitude, apparently looking for a fight. “We gotta stand ahrr grahhhnd”, shouts one of them I walk through them. Good luck with that, lads. Firstly, waiting by the rear entrance at a railway station is completely useless when the supporters you’re looking to confront only know its front entrance. Secondly, some of these travelling supporters may be drunk and they may occasionally be belligerent, but they’re not fighters. Try to start a fight with them and you’re more likely to receive a look of disbelief at the idea that this ‘Football Factory’ aesthetic still has any currency in 2024.

There is a feeling of closure over this game. Chances are I won’t be living in Worthing by the time that these two clubs next meet in the league. A town that was never quite home won’t be the town in which I live any more. Time for another fresh chapter. But in the background, those guys who take up their Saturdays will continue to make these journeys, no matter the distance, because that’s what love does to you. They’ll continue to make these journeys whether they do down this season or not, because that love tends to be unconditional. And when things are going badly, a last-minute equaliser that you celebrate as if you’ve won the goddam league itself really does feel like vindication for all the times they’ve let you down in the past.