When the technology fails in the village
Sometimes the technology fails. Here's a brief story about what happens when you suddenly become disconnected in an extremely connected world.
It all started first thing in the morning. Going to a football match of any persuasion in this day and age requires a certain amount of preparedness, and on Friday night the very last thing that I did before my head an extremely comfortable pillow was to plug my phone into charge. And in this day and age, it’s important.
Even if you’re going to a match in the First Qualifying Round of the FA Cup, it’s generally the path of least resistance to buy a ticket in advance and have it emailed to your phone. And then there’s train tickets, which can also be bought on an app and loaded so that I don’t have to stand in front of machine growing increasingly exasperated at ticket machine touchscreens that require you to punch them in order to register a keystroke.
Battery 20%. You fuckin’ what, mate?
I shove the probably defective cable into my bag nevertheless. Time is pressed enough already. I know that I have to be at London Bridge railway station at a reasonable time and that I'll have to be able demonstrate that I had a match ticket on my phone when I get to the ground. I therefore have to ration my energy use, sipping at it as gently as I can in the vague hope that a phone battery running at around a fifth of it's normal full strength. I save quite possibly a full 1% of precious, precious battery by buying a paper ticket from a machine, like a time traveller from the 20th century.
Dulwich sure is pretty. It's a quarter of an hour south-east from London Bridge on the Overground, and as soon as you alight at the railway station in East Dulwich it feels as though this is a part of London that has always rather than recently been gentrified. A mile or two in just about any direction and you are indupitably in a very large city indeed. Some might say, one of the world's great cities. But round here is somewhere for those who feel that London remains a collection of villages pushed—oftentimes, it feels, involuntarily—into each other. Dulwich is a village, of that there seems little question.
The problem is that I’ve ended up pretty ill-prepared for this. My discombobulating start to the morning has left me with little plan, and after deciding to take a chance and go out in a t-shirt and jeans with no long-sleeved option at all—people who know me well will already know just how out of character this is for me; not only does my effectively translucent skin require factor 8,000 sunscreen if I’m to not spend the end of a summer’s day looking like I’m extremely embarrassed by something, but I also value pocket space—it turns out that this isn’t going to be a lovely warm late summer afternoon after all. Clouds stick obstinately in the sky. The hairs on the back of my arms are standing on end.
Considering that their home is barely a couple of hundred yards from East Dulwich railway station, the ground is half-hidden by a myriad different names. It’s commonly known as Champion Hill, and this is an excellent name for a football ground. It’s also the name of the road that runs along the north side of the ground. But the address of this ground always used to be Dog Kennel Hill, which runs east to west along one side of it, and if you inspect the clubs’s website it confirms that the formal location is Edgar Kail Way, named for the legendary former amateur footballer who became the last non-league player to represent England when he played for them against Spain on their 1929 summer tour.
I have enough time to have a little wander round environs of the ground, but there’s no time to enter the Horniman Museum—I choose ignorance and that I’ll be the judge of what they keep in there—and the absolutely fascinating looking House of Dreams, a house-cum-art-project from the artist Stephen Wright which is only sporadically open in the first place and even then only with advance tickets. I’ll be back to take a closer look at that at a later point. And if you turn right out of the ground and walk up Dog Kennel Hill it’s only a few seconds before you get to the massive Sainsbury’s which occupies something like half the space that the cavernous older version of the ground which was demolished and rebuilt in the early 1990s.
The club’s website talks a lot about the need to get here early to avoid the queues, but that’s not so much of an issue this particular weekend. It’s the end of the summer and the football season still feels as though it’s only just awakening from its slumber and lumbering to life. And this is an FA Cup match, so it isn’t included on anybody’s season ticket. They’re easily capable of pulling 3,000 in for a high-profile league match round these parts, but there’s less than half that number here this afternoon.
Champion Hill is a curate’s egg of a ground. The large main stand that hugs one side of the pitch is a splendid structure which reflects something of the rich history of the club, but the rest of it feels a little threadbare. There’s some cover opposite, but on the three sides with terracing the steps are so shallow that they may as well not be there. The last time I was here, it was for an Isthmian League play-off semi-final against Enfield in 2017, in the smiddle of a period during which they always seemed to be poised to make the leap up into the National League South. They won that match 4-1. On that particular occasion, I had few complaints about the fact that I couldn’t barely see anything.
Battery 8%. I take two or three photos—about as many as I dare—and switch my phone off. By the time I switch it back on it’s ten to five and I’m sending my condolences to m’podcast co-host on Everton doing even more Evertonny things than they’d managed at Spurs the previous weekend.
The opponents here are Leatherhead, how are still regarded as “FA Cup giant-killers”, even though they haven’t actually slain one in well over forty years. They’re a division below Dulwich and haven’t had an especially bright start to their league season, having taken just a solitary point from their first three matches in the Isthmian League Division One South so far this season. If nothing else, this all makes for a very colourful Saturday afternoon, with Dulwich resplendent in their always impressive pink and blue kit, and Leatherhead in green and white.
Star of the first half was the Dulwich captain Jerome Binnom-Williams. Within ten minutes he slaloms into the Leatherhead penalty area past three defenders before being quite comprehesively felled by a fourth, before picking himself up to… drive the penalty wide of the post. Redemption comes before half-time, a rasping drive from 25 yards to give Dulwich a lead that they still hold by half-time.
But Leatherhead fight back in the second half. Six minutes in, Sebastian Karczewski bundles in a rebound to bring them level, and when he’s put through and scores from the edge of the penalty area midway through the half it feels as though a surprise of sorts might even be on. But with six minutes to play spritely winger Anthony Jeffrey hauls them back on terms by cutting in and firing a fine shot in from twenty yards to haul Dulwich level again. At the full-time whistle, it’s been difficult to separate the two teams. Dulwich might have been clear by half-time, but Leatherhead scrapped their way back into the match and way well have ended up feeling at disappointed at not having properly kick-started their season by holding out for those last few minutes. All back to Fetcham Grove on Tuesday night for a replay.
I’m due back in East London, and the trains are mercifully regular. When I get back, I dutifully transfer the couple of photos I rationed myself to onto my laptop, delete them off my phone, and collapse onto the bed. The next day, I open my laptop, only to find that it appears to have forgotten that it has a Solid State Drive inside it. After a lot of grappling, I manage to persuade it that yes, all my stuff is this laptop, but only by going back to a restore point prior to them having been uploaded. I’m advised that I can find the pictures in the trash. I find them. They’re shit, taken in an absurd hurry because I was in such a rush to get my stupid phone on and off again.
Sometimes, you just have to accept that the technology daemons are working against you.