Words & Pictures to Follow: Worthing vs Chesham United

It's been a hell of a week, to the point at which there are some things that I can't say anything about, and at the end of it all what I really need is to be at home.

Life comes at you fast, and sometimes it seems to reach warp speed. There are a lot of things about which I can’t go into detail over here, friends, but it has been a week. In two reasonably disparate strands of my life there have been huge upheavals to a point at which it’s felt as though someone has thrown my cards into the air to see what way they’d land. Well, they’ve landed a certain way, and now it’s time to prepare for that.

At such a time, it helps to be at home. This has been a week of extreme uncertainty for several of those around me, and we’re not out of the woods in that respect either yet, but for me over the last couple of days the certainty of home has overridden the shortcomings of the building itself in my affections. I’ve been glad to be here this last couple of days, after having been away for a couple of days myself; an extremely rare occurrence in the middle of the week.

One of the advantages conferred upon me by being in Worthing this weekend is that it affords me the ability to look in on the National League South title race. While the Premier League, two of the three divisions of the EFL and the National League are already starting to look like they have their champions, the picture lower down the ladder is certainly not as clear.

Both of the regional divisions of the National League have tight title races going on. At the top of the National League North, one point separates Chester, Brackley Town and Scunthorpe United, while six points separate the top five. With Kidderminster Harriers and Hereford also in that particular mix, there are some big hitters scrapping it out there.

At the top of the National League South, meanwhile, seven points separate the top seven, with Dorking Wanderers top by a point. But below them the next five down are separated by just a point each. Worthing, Truro City, Eastbourne Borough, Boreham Wood and Torquay United make up that quintet, with Maidstone United two points behind them.

So with the pressure mounting on all sides, it’s off to Woodside Road this afternoon to see how Worthing are coping with the pressure. Unlike most of the others in the National League’s top seven (alongside Truro), they’ve never played National League football before, although they’ve lost in the playoffs for the last two seasons.

And the nerves are real. Bath City aren’t that far above the relegation places, but on Tuesday night they visited Woodside Road and it took a late and somewhat scrambled goal to wrap three points up for the home team. A week earlier had come an uncomfortable 2-1 home defeat against mid-table Farnborough. A couple of weeks prior to this, another relatively struggling team, Slough Town, beat them 4-0. There are wins among these losses, of course, but their form has become a little spotty over the last few weeks.

Their opponents on this particular Saturday afternoon are Chesham United, so here is my Chesham United story. St Albans City and Chesham went head-to-head for the 1992/93 Isthmian League title, with Chesham eventually winning out by five points. So when the two were scheduled to play each other in the first midweek game of the following season, my friend Luke and I decided we’d go.

The vagaries of public transport in that neck of the woods meant that making the 15-mile journey from St Albans to Chesham would take hours, but Luke had a car so on the first Tuesday evening of the new season off we went to Chesham, only to turn up at the ground to find that the match wasn’t on for the—with the 20/20 vision afforded by hindsight perfectly obvious—reason that Chesham played their midweek matches at the time on a Wednesday rather than on a Tuesday. We didn’t return the following evening, which was probably a good thing, since Chesham won 3-1. This remains the only time in my life that I’ve ever turned up for a football match on completely the wrong day.

Of course, Chesham United are The Alex Horne Team these days, and the club have benefitted from his involvement. He’s been a director since 2022, and Taskmaster is the team’s shirt sponsor. The club’s trajectory has been upward of late, and last season they were promoted into this division from the Southern League Premier Division South as champions.

The National League South has proved to be something more of a challenge. They’re 16th in the table at kick-off, 14 points from the relegation places but also 16 from the playoff spots. It seems unlikely that they will be troubling either the top or the bottom of the table this season, but the club appears to be in a relatively healthy position, so that’s something.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been attending matches of little to no consequence. Last week it was at Horsham YMCA. The week before it was Ilford. The week before that it was Shoreham. To put it another way, it’s been four weeks since I went to a match which was attended by more than 200 people, and three weeks since I last went to one attended by more than about fifty.

And while there are a lot of lowly clubs to whom I’d like to pay a visit, there comes a point at which it’s all started to feel a little…context-free, of late. Some matches, there’s just been no-one there. The games themselves might well have been thoroughly entertaining at points, but without that feeling of context they’ve just kind of left me feeling a little empty by the end.

That, I can be reasonably certain, will not be the case this afternoon. There will definitely be context, this afternoon. There will be people frantically checking their mobile phones for updates from elsewhere. It may be that a listless nervousness that descends over the ground, should the home team not grab an early goal.

But there will also be the brittle, skittish energy that comes with a match like this. There will be a four-figure crowd and a feeling of being involved in something of some degree of significance. And there may even be a chance to lose myself in a crowd for a couple of hours, to have a beer and throw the weight of the world off my shoulders for a while. I do feel as though… I’ve earned it, and it’s not often you’ll hear me say that.

Words and pictures to follow, tomorrow.