Words & Pictures to Follow: another New Home Town versus Old Home City Derby... and maybe the last?
It's been exactly a year since I was last at this fixture; the lure of this particular derby has proved too much for me this time around, in the end. But for how much longer will that be the case?
Well, at least that feeling of burning out has cleared. In the end, we laid on the sofa and did as close to nothing as possible. We watched another in The Purge series of films, which are so daft as to call into question the extent to which they are satire and the extent to which they may not be. And we watched White Chicks, a film so ludicrous that it made me start to feel as though my brain was turning to mashed potato as we were watching it. Terry Crews is brilliant, though, isn’t he? Lights up any scene he appears in.
This weekend is, for me, most unusual. I’m at home. On my own. No girlfriend. No kids. Just me, a living room, a kitchen, three bedrooms and a bathroom. This used to be my routine every single weekend. I may have gone out on the Friday night. I may have spent from 9am until 9pm out the house in the pursuit of and return from some pretty mediocre football. But the house was quiet. It was, at least, an opportunity to reset.
Perusing this weekend’s fixtures left me with a lot of choice, and while there weren’t that many fixtures in London that appealed, there were a few closer to home. Bognor Regis Town are at home and they’re doing surprisingly badly. Lewes are at home, too. I looked at the possibility of Aldershot, which is a hell of a journey from West Sussex but which would at least also have kept me occupied all day.
But Worthing vs St Albans City appealed, and for obvious reasons. Some of these reasons are based on solid statistics. I was at this match more or less this weekend last year, and it was more than worth attending, ending in a 4-4 draw. The year before I was there, watching St Albans win 5-4. In last year’s corresponding match at St Albans, Worthing won 4-2, and they’ve already played a 2-2 draw this season. Obviously, there’s also a personal connection. I lived in St Albans more or less continuously for—subtract university and a couple of years in Hatfield—for about a third of my life. It’s a former home town (well, city, as the locals would extremely correct you) and I spent a lot of time following the local football team around.
There are fewer and fewer faces that I recognise when I do go to an away match, these days. In most cases, it’s because previously young men have found better things to do in middle-age. In other cases, though thankfully not among those that I’d consider my friend group, it’s because they’ve died. But even now, thirty years after I was still going to most matches home and away, there will still be faces that I recognise, almost certainly one or two to stand and have a chat with.
There’ll be a lot to talk about, because the Saints have become suddenly and quite unexpectedly abysmal this season. They made the play-off final in the National League South two seasons and were comfortable in the top half of the table last season, eventually finishing 11th. But this season has been pretty much an unmitigated disaster. At the time of writing, they are in 23rd place, with just two wins and 13 points from twenty games. They’re six points from safety, and have already sacked their manager and replaced him, to little apparent effect yet.
And of course, Woodside Road is convenient for me. I may live on the other side of town, but it’s only a half hour walk from my front door to theirs, and I do still feel a little tender from recent exertions. Christmas is a busy time of year around here, and I’m not getting any younger. I could have justified the time away from the house for some sort of adventure (though Aldershot wouldn’t really have been much of one, since their ground is more or less opposite the railway station; slim pickings for jeopardy there), but I couldn’t really justify the cost, having just dropped this week’s Substack money on Christmas presents for the kids (if you paid me anything this week, that’s what you paid for, so thank you).
Worthing are continuing to do Worthing things. Excellent at times, but still just lacking the consistency they need to launch a serious championship challenge. And should that persist, this season may well end up looking like a wasted opportunity. Because if you think the Championship looks tight at the moment, it’s got nothing on the National League South, where Truro City are now top of the table, a fact which is broadly irrelevant because there are just four points between the top eight teams. Worthing are sixth, three points off the top. If other results went their way, they could yet be top by the end of this year. All it needs is for one club to spread their wings and get a run going, but nobody’s seemed able to do it so far.
And there is also a possibility that this could be my last one of these, as The Ian Derby; a derby which no-one, I repeat no-one, gives a tuppenny damn about beyond me. This has been a year of not-significant change for me, and it seems at least as likely as not that this change will be continuing into 2025. I’ll have been in Worthing for ten years by next summer and I’d already been working here for six years when we moved over here from nearby Shoreham.
But it’s never been ‘home’. It’s only ever been ‘the place that I live in’. I live an atomised life, shorn of a proper social life of my own, and I miss that. I often feel that I only live here, and there have been points at which I’ve felt that I only existed here. My ex-wife is moving away next year, to Peacehaven, on the other side of Brighton. There are a lot of ways in which my life could yet turn out, but if it’s going to do so in the ways that I’d really like, we need to move on. There’s every possibility that this could even be the last match I see at Woodside Road as a resident of the town. Perhaps it’s appropriate that it should be against the city that I called home for so long.
Words and pictures to follow, on Sunday.
There will be no match next weekend, friends, as I’m at a wedding—no, not my own, as I have already been asked; Jesus Christ, I’ve only been divorced a couple of months. My Wellercut is still growing out!—but I’ll make sure that we get to a game somewhere on Boxing Day, though options may be limited, with there being no trains and all.)