Words & Pictures to Follow: Roffey vs Little Common

I'm eyeing the skies nervously in preparation for a first visit to a football club which may have been named by a dog.

“Make the most of this”, I said to the kids on the school run yesterday morning, “it might be as good as it gets for this year”. The freezing cold rain under a slate grey sky was already making it feel as though we were 300 miles further north than we actually were when it turned briefly to sleet, and for a few seconds to snow.

That’s the reality of it. I don’t want to come across like Peter Kay or anything here but it used to snow every winter, when I was a kid. In 1981, it fell in December and didn’t shift for weeks, if not months. In 1985, it fell heavily again and caused chaos to the football schedules. In 1991, I received my first actual, proper Valentine’s card from a girl who ended up as, reasonably briefly, my first proper girlfriend on a day that we went sledding in the bunkers of a golf course in Harpenden.

But last year, when it fell and settled for no more than 24 hours, was the first time that either of my children had even seen that happen. They are nine and seven years old. Now, it should be mentioned that I lived 80-odd miles north of where I do now when I saw regular snow and that along this stretch of the south coast the Downs smother much of the weather travelling down from further north. But it’s difficult not to think of this fundamental change to the experience of childhood without shuddering at the prospect of the further effects of climate change to come.

I mention the weather—at great length—because it feels as though it’s going to come into play this weekend. It’s not that the weather has been uniformly temperate this season on Saturday afternoons. We (well, she) got soaked at Walthamstow a couple of months ago, on an afternoon when the weather didn’t really feel like it knew what it wanted to do.

But this week the weather has been of a very peculiar mixture indeed, a day of bright sunshine and plummeting temperature, steady rain, and a brief period of sleet. And when you watch a lot of non-league football, you start to build up a spidersense for when matches might be in danger. There’s a point at which you think to yourself, “I know how saturated a pitch would feel, given what the weather has been like recently”.

I even have a back-up plan of Horsham YMCA vs Peacehaven & Telscombe, should this one fall foul of the weather, but this still all leads to a familiar feeling of anxiety in the run-up to the weekend, which became something of a leitmotif for last season, as mentioned in this piece from Hastings in February, which actually turned out to be my most enjoyable match of last season. I only managed one complete washout last season, when every game was off, though there was also the case of the infuriatingly late pitch inspection at St Albans.

Regular readers will already be fully aware that, one weekend a month, I go dadsitting, a weekend with the old man, making sure that he’s okay while my sister takes a pause to recharge, and this requires my Saturday afternoons to be spent in the environs of that area. I’ve been to Horsham a couple of times, Crawley, Dorking, and Horley earlier this season. But one club had somehow slipped below my radar, and they’re about the most convenient of all.

Both my sister and my dad live in north Horsham, adjacent to a hamlet-slash-burb-of-the-town called Roffey. I knew they played in the Southern Combination Football League, and I knew that, wherever their ground was, it was probably quite close to my dad and my sister. But I had never taken the time to take this passing mental enquiry any further, by looking it up on a map.

My sister has lived in this neck of the woods since the early 1990s, and by the time my parents moved down there I was getting on thirty and living in London, so while it’s long been their home, it’s never been mine. Somewhat astonishingly, considering that they’ve all been living here for more than two decades, I still have to check Google Maps every time I walk between their houses.

And upon actually checking the map again, it turns out that Roffey’s ground, Chennell’s Brook, isn’t really actually in Roffey at all, although it is only a few hundred yards from my sister’s house. There is a main road which runs up past the bottom of my sister’s little cul-de-sac thing which… is the road that the ground is on. Well, blow me down. Why was I not previously aware of this? Well, at least I know the way… well, kinda.

The first thing to say about Roffey FC is that Chennells Brook looks from above like something out of a fairy tale. I am supernaturally excited by the idea of what it might look like under floodlights, and I even received a reply to this extent when I mentioned that I’d be visiting this weekend on social media. Look at it! LOOK AT IT! Also, their nickname is The Boars and they have one on their badge, which is also surely notable.

It’s also fair to say that they’ve had a decent start to the season on the pitch. They’re in third place in the SCFL Premier Division, and although they’re already far adrift of Hassocks and Haywards Heath Town at the top of the table, only the champions go up automatically, with play-offs below that. Last weekend they put eight goals past Loxwood, and that was away from home.

And their opponents on this occasion, Little Common, are… not having a good season. They’ve been at this level since winning promotion in 2018 but have never finished above 10th place in the table since, and this season it looks as though the wheels might have fallen off the wagon. They’re bottom of the table with five points—a win and two draws—from sixteen matches.

Are there causes for optimism on their part? Well, results have… improved recently. They picked up their first point at the end of August against Lingfield after losing their first five games consecutively (and even beat Thamesmead Town on penalty kicks in the FA Vase), and two weeks picked up another at home to Saltdean, but it took until the end of October before they registered any more, with a 1-0 win at Newhaven.

Last week they led 2-1 at home against Shoreham before losing 3-2. There have been few Brighton Electricity-esque wallopings going on for them (their biggest defeat of the season, 5-0 at Horsham YMCA, came on the opening day), though this doesn’t feel like much a consolation when you remember that they’re already ten points adrift of safety. It could be a long afternoon for them, if we even make it that far in the first place.

Words and pictures to follow, weather permitting, on Sunday.