Words & Pictures to Follow: Horsham YMCA vs Crawley Down Gatwick

This weekend's match plays out at a ground that I've only visited once before, but which has remained stuck in my head ever since.

The sensation that I could really do with a drink isn’t one that’s very been familiar to me in recent years. There was a time when it was, but at about the age of forty I landed—relatively speaking—on the wagon. It’s not that I became teetotal, needed to quit for the good of my health, or anything like that. As I approached my fifth decade, the hangovers became longer and more hassle than they were worth. I stopped enjoying the sensation of being drunk. So I kinda cut it from my life.

I’m still not that much of a drinker to this day, really, although a pint or two on a Saturday afternoon has become a part of my Saturday afternoon ritual over the last couple of seasons. There’s definitely part of it which is just habit. If you’re at a match with someone and you’ve just shoved your way through a turnstile, one of you will turn to the other and say, “So, wanna drink, then?”

It’s pretty much the same when I go to games on my own, a muscle memory which reminds me to find somewhere I can find a drink before I do more or less anything else. But last week at Ilford, a thought occurred to me after the match as I walked back to Seven Kings station; when was the last time I had a drink in an actual clubhouse after a match?

I’ve definitely had a drink after a match this season. After Walthamstow, we cowered from the rain in an alarmingly-decorated pub, we went to a Proper Spurs pub after the Women’s NLD, and to the pub adjacent to the Withdean Stadium for cocktails. But there is something very different about having a drink in a non-league clubhouse after a match.

Primarily, it’s the arrival of the players. Footballers at all levels of the game are fascinating to watch. Who’s got ideas above their station? Who’s already got half an eye on a long and heavy night out? Stay tuned to find out! And there’s also an element of open-endedness to it all. I’ve certainly seen people get punched spark out in non-league clubhouses, and when it’s happened it’s usually been after the game. Of course, if both sets of players are being entertained and especially if the officials are there, there’s always a possibility that something could be said.

This weekend, there’s a possibility that I might just soak up that atmosphere. I’ll be at Gorings Mead, home of Horsham YMCA, for their home match against Crawley Down Gatwick in the Southern Combination Football League Premier Division. There is an element of risk to this. The temperature around here is expected to get below freezing the next couple of nights, and the SCFL had almost all of its midweek matches called off this week. This neck of the woods has not been particularly good to me when it’s come to getting to matches which haven’t been postponed or moved elsewhere for no discernable reason, this season.

But let’s stay positive. Let’s assume that the YMCA have the league’s best groundsman and that the game is definitely going ahead. Horsham YMCA are another one of those ‘county league’ clubs which have just bounced along for decades, playing their game and not especially troubling anybody. This club joined the Sussex County League in 1959 and have been there ever since, barring three years in the Isthmian League earlier this century.

They used to have neighbours at their ground at Gorings Mead, nearish the town centre. Horsham FC’s Queen Street ground was adjacent to theirs, to the extent that one could peer through a hedge between the pair. But the other Horsham left in 2008 and now live a couple of miles outside of town, and they’re making progress. They’re right in the thick of the chase for a place in the National League South at the moment. Meanwhile, back the old ranch, things seem to be continuing very much as they always have.

Recent form has been middling. They’ve finished 13th, 12th and 14th in the SCFL Premier Division since football resumed after its two-year pandemic interregnum. Not good enough to get anywhere near the top of the table, but some way short of having to worry about relegation either. They’re 13th in the current table, eleven points above the relegation places.

Their opponents on this particular Saturday are Crawley Down Gatwick. Having been formed in 1993, this club is a relative newcomer and they’ve already been through a few name changes, having been known as Crawley Down FC, Crawley Down Village and Crawley Down United before finally settling on Crawley Down Gatwick in 2012.

They joined the Sussex County League in 1995 and have been here ever since. They haven’t won a trophy of any description since 2011, but they did set a new club record this season by making the Fourth Round of the FA Vase before getting knocked out. They’re currently in 7th place in the table, just outside the playoff positions. They’ve got a lot to play for, even if the home team’s season is starting to run out of puff.

There is one other thing. Gorings Mead and I have a history. I’ve been here once before. It was Boxing Day 2016, and it wasn’t to see the YMCA. Horsham had lost their ground and were sharing the place, and had also fallen on hard enough times to have slipped all the way down to the County Leagues themselves. They were on their way back up, as evinced by their 8-1 win against Godalming Town that day, but it would take me a little longer to bounce back; if, indeed, I ever have at all.

It was at this particular game that the realisation hit me that my marriage was irreconcilably over. It was something that I’d known in the back of my head for the previous year and a half or so. A flurry of childcare—the panic of fatherhood—put everything on a back burner, but by that particular Christmas I was at my parents, wondering how I’d managed to make such a colossal fuck-up of my life. It’s a feeling that has never 100% left me since.

I remember that day vividly. It was a sunny but bitterly cold afternoon, which only added to my overall feeling of numbness. Trying to wash down the feelings with alcohol didn’t work. Escaping it all didn’t work. I had no idea what my future might look like. Would I lose contact with my children and end up some embittered old man, living in a bedsit on my own, cursing a world that kept on turning while I made bad decision after bad decision?

Perhaps this was some form of karmic intervention, I thought at the time, a reminder of who I was, unlovable, unattractive and stupid; a feeling that has persisted throughout my adult life and which I’ve never really quite fully managed to shake off. It was the sort of day which meant that it’s taken me eight years to work up the courage to go back.

But I’m in the mood for a mental clearout. I’m in the mood for putting all that shit in a box marked ‘THE PAST’ and leaving it there, for telling a few home truths about what I want and need from life. That marriage is gone, and good riddance to it. It didn’t do me any good. But as winter turns to spring I feel unsettled again, as though I just don’t have the life that I want and may never have it. Word and pictures will follow on Sunday. Let’s hope they’re not too belligerent, eh?