Words & Pictures to follow: Dulwich Hamlet vs Leatherhead

It's one of the great names from the days of amateur football versus one of the greatest FA Cup giant-killing names at Champion Hill on Saturday afternoon.

Somehow or other, it was more than 34 years ago. It was my first time at Champion Hill. A Football League ground in a non-league setting was what I'd been implicitly promised by everything that I'd read about the place, and as the coach pulled into the car park the scale of it was immediately evident.

It's an afternoon that sticks in the mind because of the smell of damp rot. Dulwich Hamlet had been stuck somewhere between decline and purgatory for years, and it showed. The ground had been one of the great homes of non-league football, with a 20,000 capacity and a seated stand that ran the entire length of one side of the pitch.

But by 1990, it wasn't so much that the place had fallen into disrepair as that most of it was functionally unusable. There was a huge, cavernous covered terrace opposite and similarly large open terraces at either end. But we weren't allowed on them. From where we were sitting, you could see the extent to which the concrete was crumbling. There were plants growing between the gaps in the terracing.

Somehow, Champion Hill had fallen into such state of disrepair—and it's worth remembering that this was by the standards of 1990—that all the terraces were shut down off. The bar didn't look like it had had much done to it since the 1960s. Obviously, Dulwich won the game 1-0. The crowd wasn't much more than 120 or so. It was a dismal game won by a game team that would finish the season bottom of the table and relegated from the Premier Division of the Isthmian League.

Two and a half years later, the opening day of the season. Except it wasn't, quite. By this time the bulldozers were moving at Champion Hill. A new stadium was to be built on the site of the old one, and in the meantime Dulwich were ground-sharing at Bromley's Hayes Lane, and this meant a Sunday afternoon opening game of the league season because the ground's owners took priority.

Dulwich had been promoted back at the end of the previous season. But St Albans had rebuilt their team that summer, were—to my considerable surprise—good, and won 5-0. Dulwich finished that season in 14th, on fifty points. When they'd been relegated in bottom place in the table, they'd only managed two points fewer. City finished that season as runners-up in the table.

It's reasonable to say that the intervening years have been eventful, for Dulwich. Firstly and foremostly, they have supporters now. And a lot of them. They still play in the Isthmian League Premier Division, but that's now a level lower than it used to be. Despite this, attendances these days can easily reach twenty times the 120—probably half of whom had travelled down from Hertfordshire—who turned out for that match three and half decades ago.

They still play at the rebuilt Champion Hill, but this has been a close shave at times thanks to the nefarious interests of property developers. From memory, the ground is mildly unsatisfactory. I've visited several times, and while the main stand is an impressive building, the rest of the ground offers very shallow terracing, which might not matter if you're expecting 200 people to turn out—as may well have been the case when it was being built—but does if 2,000 have.

For all that they are one of the great names amateur football, Dulwich's FA Cup record is fairly modest. Since the end of the Second World War they've only made the competition on three occasions, in 1948/49, 1998/99 and 2019/20. They've never beaten a League club in the competition. Considering the scale of the club, this is somewhat surprising.

The same cannot be said for their opponents in the First Qualifying Round of this year's competition. If Leatherhead is famous for one thing, it's FA Cup surprises. Between 1974 and 1976 they knocked four League clubs—Colchester, Brighton, Northampton and Cambridge—out of the FA Cup, while their Fourth Round match against Leicester City in 1975 ended up as the main match of Match of the Day after a week during which Chris “The Leatherhead Lip” Kelly had told all and sundry of how they'd beat their opponents. They lost 3-2 in the end, but not before they'd taken a 2-0 lead first.

But this was just one concentrated period of time. After losing 5-0 to Exeter City in 1980/81, it took 26 years for them to get as far as the First Round again and they haven't beaten a League club in the couple of times they've got that far since. For forty years now, Leatherhead have been bouncing around this level of the game. Last relegated from the Isthmian League Premier Division in 2020/21 they finished third last season a division below Dulwich, but lost out in the play-offs.

There's just so much to sink your teeth into with a fixture like this. The history of the clubs—and there's a case for saying that in both cases it did end up hanging round their respective necks like a pair of albatrosses—gives it strange gravitas, and I'm even on a promise of another colourful afternoon out, with Dulwich wearing pink & blue and Leatherhead—presuming that they're not one of those infuriating clubs who insist on wearing their change kit for every away match—in green and white. It's fifteen minutes on the train from London Bridge Station, so there might even be a possibility of a little bit of a wander round a part of London that I've not seen much of. We shall see.

Words and pictures to follow, depending on *waves hands in the air* everything, on either Sunday or Monday.