When the football can't save you from yourself

For the last few years, football has been my escape from a life that has become increasingly difficult. But now I can feel walls closing in from all angles, and it doesn't work any more.

I don’t want to talk about it, really. Just suffice to say that this week has been one of the worst of my life, a return to form for every insecurity I have, amplified by a foghorn of poverty that has been building again over several months. There have been points at which I’ve wondered whether the simplest thing to do would be just to sit back and let it all wash over me, to give up and make some other people in my life take some responsibility for it in the same way that I so frequently have had to take responsibility for others.

On a weekend like this, to what extent can football provide an escape? After all, you always take yourself with you wherever you go. I may be twenty miles from home this weekend, but I have to take my brain with me wherever I go, and my brain is stuffed with worries and insecurity. By the end of last week, I felt as though I’m actively glitching out. I spend three hours walking from room to room in the house on Friday, unable to settle and unable to work.

This year is going to be a year of change for me, I already know that, but on the bus from Worthing to Horsham late on Friday afternoon I feel shattered, and not in the ‘tired’ sense of the word. I feel shattered, as though shards of me are sticking out all over the place. I feel as though everything is fraying and everything is falling to pieces. I feel as though I spend my entire life supporting others while the only people there are for me are often too far from me to be there.

I’ve written before about how a cloud descends over me when I’m going dad-sitting, but this all feels more all-encompassing than that. Whether I’m sitting on the bus or walking up the street, all I feel is jealousy towards others and their content lives. None of them are worrying about how they’re going to pay the bills. None of them feel as though their entire life is a parade of Catch-22 situations which appear designed to guarantee a fundamental lack of satisfaction for the rest of their years. There are days when I wish I could care as little about the rest of the world as it can feel the rest of the world does about me.

Dad, of course, is fine, as scatty as ever but as he ever has been, built without a bad bone in his body. His dementia means that he lives more or less entirely in the present these days, and the shape of that means that he is essentially unaware of Spurs’ current tribulations in the Premier League, so that's something. We sit and watch darts on the television on Friday night. Every time there’s a commercial for the Brentford vs Spurs match he mentions it. Yes dad, two o’clock on Sunday afternoon, I say, four times. He doesn’t really know that watching Spurs matches on the television isn’t something that one really does for fun these days, unless you happen to support Spurs.

The fixture list for this part of the world was pretty self-selecting. Crawley Town were at home against Wrexham, which raised an eyebrow, while Roffey, the easiest walk of all from my dad’s house, were playing another home match ten miles away at Three Bridges on their new 3g pitch in order to protect their grass pitch. No, I don’t really follow the logic behind this either. All of this left Horsham vs Dulwich Hamlet in the Isthmian League, so that, I concluded, would have to do.

I’m offered a lift to the match with my brother-in-law, but opt instead for a long walk and to meet him at the ground. To get there, I have to walk almost the entire length of the town itself, winding through the town centre and then out, south on the Worthing Road to Southwater. The sky is the colour of rolled steel and there’s a chill in the air after a few mild days. Horsham town centre is bustling with people with more money than me, enjoying their comfortable middle-class lives.

I’ve spent a lot of time, this last week, feeling as though I wasted thirty years and that my current state is a result of that. What might I have had, I wonder to myself, had I applied myself better and younger? Why didn’t I have the confidence to follow my dreams and do what I love rather than what I thought people like me should do for so long? Why didn’t I see more of the world and experience more of it? How comfortable might everything have been for all of us, had I had the will to spin everything on its head then that I have now?

For me so far, 2025 has felt like a bit of a defeat. The only question is how terminal that defeat might be. I’ve always lived with a feeling that I’m not enough. Not enough for the people I love, who deserve so much better than anything I can offer. Not enough of an earner. Not enough of a partner or a parent. Not enough of a man. Not enough of… anything, a compromise for anybody who comes across me. I feel like a let down to my children, much of the time. Far worse kids than mine have far more comfortable lives than they do.

And a slide back towards poverty has started again. I’m losing work. £400 worth of copywriting in January alone. In terms of bills, I managed to pay the rent and nothing else this month, a situation which quite clearly and evidently cannot continue for longer than another few weeks. But there are few jobs out there that can accommodate me with my childcare requirements, and it is very, very clear that not enough people will pay me to write. That would be fine were I in any position to get myself back out into the job market, but I am a single dad to 7 and 9 year-old children. It’s not just about me.

I have to get them to school and pick them up every day and there ain’t no-one else doing that. I have to cook their dinner, and there ain’t no-one else doing that. I have to get them to bed, keep them entertained, and be responsible for their education, and there ain’t no-one else doing that. I’m alone with this, and it has become increasingly clear to me that, for all the fine words of support that get offered online, no-one actually wanted to help in the real world for years. Now there is one person, and I can't even have a normal “being with that person” relationship with them. On my better days I remind myself that this is temporary, but I've not had many of them recently.

There are days when this makes me feel bloody-minded about getting through it. But there are others when I do think, “What is the actual point of continuing in a world which has decided that I don’t deserve much beyond this perpetual struggle?”. On this particular Saturday I’m stuck exactly halfway between these two competing states of mind. I have a mask to wear for the outside world., but it's been slipping throughout the week and it’s only hanging half-on today.

The long walk isn’t clearing the cloud that’s hanging over me, but it clearly counts for a lot of people. It’s a mile and a bit out of town to The Fusion Aviation Community Stadium, and there is definitely interest in this game. The road starts clogging up about a ten-minute walk away, and by the time I get to the ground there are big queues at all the turnstiles. The ground holds 2,000 people, and while the average this season has only been just over a thousand, they’re easily capable of adding another 500 to that on a busy Saturday afternoon.

And this is match between two of the four best-supported teams in the division. It’s difficult to get your head round the scales involved, here. Dulwich Hamlet’s average home crowd is around 2,500, two and a half times the average at Horsham and fifteen times the 165 who regularly turn out at the division’s least-watched team, Potters Bar Town.

There are Dulwich supporters—easily recognisable, of course, from their distinctive pink and blue striped scarves—in town. There are Dulwich supporters wandering through the Sainsbury’s car park just to the south of the town centre and walking along the Worthing Road. It’s difficult to gauge how many of them have made this trip—Horsham’s ground, with its bar directly behind one goal and three small covered terraces, isn’t great for immediately identifying who’s supporting whom—but it's at least a couple of hundred.

Considering how bad their team has been of late, that there are many here at all might be considered a surprise. They come into this match in 17th place in the table, and only two points above the relegation places. Were they to go down come the end of this season, they’d have completed a journey from the eighth tier to the six and back in the course of a dozen seasons. They sacked their manager a couple of weeks ago. Brad Quinton, highly experienced following spells with Enfield Town and Braintree Town, is the new guy, but they arrive here off the back of five straight defeats and a difficult spring ahead.

Horsham have no such problems at the moment. They were turned over 3-0 at mid-table Folkestone Invicta a week earlier, ending a run of eight successive league wins stretching back to the middle of December. The top of the table is certainly congested. At kick-off, Horsham are in fifth place in the table and six points off the top, with the four clubs above them clustered together with two points between them. Much of the chatter around the ground is Brighton's 7-0 gubbing at the hands of Nottingham Forest at lunchtime. We may still be in Sussex, but this isn't a exceptionally Brighton-heavy town football-wise. The reaction to it is largely bemused amusement.

The difference between this afternoons two teams is obvious. Brad Quinton is a connected man. New players are starting to arrive at Champion Hill. But there is clearly a lot of work to do. Having not previously seen Dulwich play since September, I can’t tell you whether the team that takes the pitch for this match is a substantial improvement on their recent previous performances, but over the opening fifteen minutes it all looks a little one-sided, although the Dulwich defence copes reasonably well with Horsham pouring players forward in search of an opening goal.

I’m not alone, this afternoon. Instead, I’m watching with my brother-in-law, his brother-in-law and a friend of theirs. They’re regulars down here, and watching matches with them is a salutary reminder of how little I know. My brother-in-law knows who all the players are, and all their strengths and weaknesses. I would have been clearly able to identify no more than half a dozen of all the players from all the different clubs that I’ve seen this season. It’s the difference between people who go to the match to watch the match and those among us who go to the match to visit the place, I guess, though I do feel somethat as though recent years have taken something away from me, in this respect.

The first goal of the afternoon is proof of what I've been missing. Horsham spread the ball wide to the right, where it ends up at the feet of number eleven Ola Ogunwamide. “He's only got one trick,” my brother-in-law says with a smirk, “but it's quite a good one.” Ogunwamide makes like he's going to head towards the corner to cross the ball, but then steps inside, gets the ball onto his left foot, and bends the ball round the goalkeeper and into the opposite corner of the goal. Otherwise, the first half is largely event-free and almost entirely conducted in the Dulwich half of the pitch. It's still 1-0 by half-time.

This ground is pretty new, of course, so it's just about perfectly laid out for the modern supporter. One side has two small covers, one either side of a big media gantry which looks like it might have been a rejected prop from The Tripods. Opposite is a seated stand with open space on either side. At one end is a covered terrace and the world's brightest electronic scoreboard, while at the other is the bar, which has a balcony and which is strewn with netting, to protect nearly windows. I have a pint and briefly ponder the fact that looking at half-times on a big TV in a clubhouse makes them look more important than glancing at them on my phone.

The second half brings more of the same, though with the score still at 1-0 Dulwich do hit the Horsham post, a close shave which might have changed a lot of people's afternoons had it been a couple of inches to the left. But this doesn't happen, and midway through the half much more Dulwich resistance is undone when defender Ross Marshall absolute cleans Horsham's Reece Meekums out and is sent off for his troubles. Seven minutes later, Ogunwamide repeats his trick from the first half and Horsham are two up.

Dickson is one of those players who just wants to play football. He's forty years old now and this is his twentieth season in the senior game, a period during which he's stepped out for, including loans, a startling 26 different clubs. He's even made two appearances for the Ghana national team. He takes his chance as cool as you like, the sort of sangfroid which starts to feel like a second skin when you've been doing this as long as he has. It's his 19th goal of the season in all competitions.

It's also enough to finish off this game as any sort of spectacle. The few minutes left are supplemented by five minutes of stoppage-time—four of which can be accounted for by the hubbub surrounding the sending off—and the referee doesn't even bother with all of that. After four minutes and forty seconds of this nonsense he calls time on it. The players take the applause of the supporters who aren't already rushing for the exits in order to beat the rush for the park and ride and the car park.

I'm getting a lift back, for which I'm extremely grateful. I don't go in cars on Saturday afternoons often any more, and it's striking to me that the radio isn't immediately switched on the 5pm parpings of Sports Report. But I guess the world's a different place these days. We don't need to know the scores at this time on. Saturday any more. We already know them. I'm home fifteen minutes into Wolves vs Aston Villa, via the fish and chip shop. If nothing else, I do at least know the key to my father's heart.

I spend a quiet evening editing pictures as dad snoozes in front of Luke The Nuke depositing a mushroom cloud of darts on some poor unfortunate, and go to bed myself at midnight after Match of the Day despite there being a biopic of about Bert Trautmann on immediately afterwards, though I can't sleep for a couple of hours. This year of change is slowly starting to turn. I've already been putting in place some actions that are starting to change me. I need to keep myself motivated and pull myself back from these precipices.