Worthing fall at the last, but should take pride at how far they've come

Defeat in the NLS playoffs for a second season in a row will have been a disappointment, but this doesn't take into account how far they've already come, and that this journey might not be over yet.

As things turned out, they didn’t quite have enough to get over the line. Worthing were beaten 4-3 at home by Braintree Town in the final of the National League South playoffs, but while there will be considerable disappointment at having missed out this time around, the team can take considerable satisfaction from an excellent season, which saw them record a highest ever league position and reach the FA Cup First Round for the first time in a quarter of a century.

In the town centre at lunchtime, the weather was turning apocalyptic, rain thumping down with a steady and dulling beat. Thirty-odd miles to the north, the League Two play-off semi-final between Crawley Town and Milton Keynes was rained off completely, postponed until Tuesday night on account of extremely heavy rain on the north side of West Sussex. But in Worthing, the rain did at least start to clear a little as the afternoon wore on.

It’s a big day for the home club. This season has already seen them achieve the highest ever league position in their 138-year history in finishing third in the National League South, beating their previous best, which was set a year earlier when they finished fourth. The wobble undertaken following the departure of manager Adam Hinshelwood for the bright lights and big city of York in February already feels like a thing of the past.

Hinshelwood’s replacement Aaran Racine won the National League South’s Manager of the Month award for April after winning six games out of six, including a 3-1 win away to champions Yeovil Town and a play-off win semi-final win against Maidstone United; he should surely now be confident of getting the job on a permanent basis this summer. They finished the season having scored 104 goals in their 46 league games; we’ll gloss over the fact that only six teams out of 24 in the division had conceded more than the 72 that they managed, as well.

This potency in front of goal coupled with occasional bouts of defensive profligacy make them a bracing watch. They are a good team, but they have been capable of the most spectacular collapses. In 46 league matches, and even though they finished in third place in the table, they conceded at least four goals on eight different occasions in the league going into their play-off final against Braintree Town.

Considering all of this, should we really be surprised that this high tension match ended up as gloriously chaotic as it did? Woodside Road is packed out for the occasion. Tickets sold out in an astonishingly short amount of time, and there were complaints from some regulars that they weren’t able to get them, such was the local interest. Lessons to be learned for the future, hopefully.

Fortunately for those who did miss out, at least this match is at least being shown live on the television on TNT Sport. The match seems to have caught the imagination elsewhere too; spotted by the cameras in the crowd is the Chelsea defender Reece James, a reminder that for that we all talk about football as a business, a lot of those who play this game for a living really do love it.

It took 120 minutes to separate the two teams, a thrilling game of seven excellent goals and numerous other chances at both ends. It took a flying header from Reggie Lambe with five minutes of the second period of extra time to play to separate the two teams. As it was the third time that they’d led over the course of the game, it’s difficult to argue that they didn’t deserve it.

Perhaps it’s appropriate that the final denouement for Worthing’s season should have come about thanks to that leaky defence. Conceding four goals in a match for the ninth time this season tells a story of its own, quite possibly that this season would have been a little soon to be getting promoted into the National League. Worthing should be able to be competitive near the top of the National League South again next season. Tighten that defence and it’s well within the realms of possibility that they could challenge for the title.

Furthermore, this is a club with a degree of resilience about it. They were playing in the Isthmian League at the time of the pandemic lockdowns, and for two successive seasons saw their efforts go to waste after the 2019/20 and 2020/21 seasons were curtailed. The club’s reaction to those setbacks—and it could have been very easy to form the opinion that their chances had been diminished by their two curtailed seasons—was to win the title at a canter, scoring 100 league goals in the process.

This time of the season, at a club like this, is a good time to take stock of the club’s position in a broader sense. The first time I went to Woodside Road was about fifteen years ago. A smell of damp rot hung heavy in the air as the team laboured on the pitch in front of barely a couple of hundred supporters. In the intervening years, this club has flourished. The intervention of George Dowell had a lot to do with this, but it’s also reflective of a change in the town itself.

Worthing is demographically changing as people on lower incomes are squeezed out of nearby Brighton by rapidly escalating property prices. Home matches at the football club are notable for the large number of younger supporters. The huge expansion of the club’s youth system thanks to the installation of an artificial playing circumstance has quite a lot to do with that.

That this growth should have been achieved during a period when Brighton & Hove Albion moved into a new stadium and saw their average home attendances rocket from 6,000 to 30,000 as they ascended to the Premier League and then into Europe makes it all the more remarkable. Worthing Football Club has changed, and in ways that are far more valuable than anything that the men’s team achieve on the pitch.

And that, perhaps, is the ultimate takeaway from all of this. Promotion may have been missed out upon for Worthing this time around, but the repositioning of the club has made it an asset to its community in a way that would have seemed unimaginable just a couple of decades ago. And that, no matter what some might feel this morning, might just be the most important thing for a football club that remains one of England’s more upwardly-mobile.