Young man, there's no need to feel Down

If you didn't think I'd put in a Village People reference when visiting Horsham YMCA, you frankly do not know me well enough.

It is grey, when I’m woken up at 5.45 in the morning by a noise from downstairs. I peer out of the bedroom window across the close. Grey and distinctly misty. As ever, my body is telling me something, and although I know I should get back to sleep, I also know that my bodyclock won’t let me. Dad’s already up. I wander downstairs. “You know that it’s quarter to six in the morning, don’t you?”, I ask him. “Well, I woke up. There’s nothing on the television.”

I sit at the desk and work all morning. By 10.00 it’s sunny. I give him his breakfast and a cup of tea. He’s found a television channel which is showing The World at War, so my morning is soundtracked by the background noise of three hours’ worth of history’s worst atrocities. By the time Porridge—by coincidence, what he had for breakfast—comes on at about eleven, I’m grateful for this soundtrack switching from the sound of air-raid sirens and Hitler speeches to studio audience laughter and jokes about the state of Norman Stanley Fletcher’s feet.

Many towns have more than one football club, and even in those in which there might not be a League team, there can be size discrepancies. Where I live, in Worthing, there are Worthing FC in the National League South and Worthing United in the SCFL Premier Division. They both have their own grounds, their own colours and their own identities, yet while Worthing now regularly attract four-figure attendances to their home matches, United often seem to struggle to reach three.

A similar state of affairs is evident twenty miles up the road in Horsham, on the northern side of West Sussex. Horsham FC are the senior club around here, playing to four-figure crowds at their fancy new community stadium a mile or so south of the town centre. But this afternoon’s trip takes us to Horsham’s other club, who also ply their trade in the SCFL Premier Division, alongside Worthing United. It’s time to go to the YMCA.

I wrote on Friday about the mixed emotions that the idea of visiting this place again has brought out in me, and little has changed in my mind by the following morning. The sense of unease that I was feeling 24 hours earlier when I wrote this hasn’t lifted, even if the early morning mist has by lunchtime. This is a football ground at which the only emotion I can remember having felt was deep, relentless, all-consuming sadness. I don’t know how ready for this I am, or aren’t.

The walk to Goring’s Mead isn’t as it is to the other ground in town. Barely half an hour, rather than the hour plus required to get to Southwater. By lunchtime, I’m ready to go. Not out of any desire to watch football, or even really to be out of the house. I’m nervously restless, as I have been for the last few days. I’m going through one of those periods during which the seconds last minutes and days last weeks, when I just want out of everything. I’m not, in all honesty, in the best frame of mind for reminders of some of the worst times of my entire life.

The upshot of all of this is that I’m at the ground by about 2.20. The walk to the ground isn’t unpleasant, but it isn’t especially interesting either. It’s just to the south-east of the town centre; two main roads and a side road. Goring’s Mead itself is a no-through road which twists and turns before turning into the bulb of a thermometer at its end, with the entrance to the ground on the right. There’s a queue to get in, but I’m standing behind two SUVs for the turnstile. This turns out to be a bit of a theme for the afternoon.

There used to be two football grounds here, right next to each other, but Horsham sold their Queen Street ground for housing but were then refused planning permission for a new stadium on the north side of town and ended up homeless for eleven years. Ironically, the ground that never came to be was on the site of where my dad played snooker for many years, barely three hundred yards from where I’m typing this.

But I digress. Horsham ended up homeless for eleven years, a period during which they played at Lancing, Worthing, and right here, at Goring’s Mead. Horsham dropped as low as the county leagues for a year before their revival began. This is how I ended up here on Boxing Day 2016, watching them open a can of whoopass upon Godalming Town while trying to process the futility of existence.

My mood hadn’t been particularly inclined towards paying attention to my surroundings that day. As much as I could remember is that there was a very tall net immediately behind one goal to protect the houses behind it. So being here spectacularly early allows me to grab a drink and go for a wander. At one end of the pitch, two goalkeepers are hoofing a ball at each other right in front of a line of cars in the car park. They must have Autoglass on speed dial.

At the other, an older man with a stick appears from one of the gardens backing on the ground with three balls, fired into his property by non-league footballers with feet the shape of 50p-pieces. “I think that’s all of them”, he says with a smile. Look, I know that the football club has been here longer than he has etc etc etc, but on a human level I was still taken by the forbearance with which he was returning these wayward balls.

The ground itself is tidier than I remembered. There’s a small redbrick stand with a couple of hundred seats—from The Goldstone Ground, of all places— and a small covered terrace opposite. The positioning of this cover is particularly unfortunate on a sunny afternoon such as this. On this sort of day, the position of the sun in the sky at 3.00pm makes being under this cover one of the few places in the ground which will guarantee that you can’t see anything.

The teams eventually take to the pitch at a minute to three. Three o’clock kick-offs at this level can be more like 3.10 or 3.15, at times. Both are mid-table and there’s little to play for in material terms beyond their opponents Crawley Down Gatwick’s chase for a playoff place, but as we found out at Ilford last week, that doesn’t mean that a match can’t get bad tempered. Perhaps it’s the thinness of crowds at this level of the game just means that you can hear what a whiny, moany, complainy bunch footballers are. I watch them with a degree of awe but no little trepidation; was I like that when I was playing?

It’s goalless by half-time, though Crawley Down have had most of the play. That’s not particularly surprising. Horsham YMCA are probably just about safe from relegation but aren’t tearing up trees at the moment, while Crawley Down are chasing a playoff place. They’re also playing down an extremely unusual slope, which seems to run almost corner to corner and becomes quite severe towards the far goal.

Having got to the ground so early, by about fifteen minutes in I’m thinking of getting another pint. The clubhouse is hired out for other purposes. The hall adjacent to the bar has already been dolled up for a party that evening—a poster on the wall screams “BACK TO THE EIGHTIES!”; if I wasn’t dadsitting this evening, I’d be back at eight—but the bar is… shut.

Well, not shut. I don’t have to break in to get in there. But when I do walk in, after about 25 minutes, there are precisely two people sitting in there, evidently listening to Premier League football on the radio through a phone,with a TV blaring away horse racing at absolutely nobody whatsoever, and a completely shuttered bar.

I'm a little taken aback by this. I don’t remember having seen a bar at a non-league ground that closed during the match before. I’ve never really considered it a possibility. They do re-open at half-time, which is a good job because the temperature is starting to fall outside, with no cloud cover to trap the meagre amount of heat generated by the sun. I have no appetite today, so at least I don’t have to worry about trying to source food.

Slopes on football pitches aren’t the big advantage to those kicking down them that some seem to think they are, all of which is a long-winded way of saying that Crawley Down dominate possession for the first 25 minutes of the second half and then score three goals in about four minutes to blast YMCA away. They’ve been the stronger team all game, but it’s still a bit of a surprise to see them blast them in like this. A fourth, scored shortly before the end, finishes it off.

But during the second half, I do get briefly preoccupied by something else. I did recall that there was a bit of a car park behind the near end goal at Goring’s Mead. At this level of the game, crowd figures aren’t very high and take a while to filter onto the League’s website, if they do at all. I manually counted the crowd at 84 for this match during the first half, but it isn’t until the teams have been playing for an hour that I realise how big this car park is.

I am, of course, immediately fascinated, and wander off to count the cars in this car park. There are 65 of them. There’s also a sign on the bar which says “OVERFLOW PARKING”. It turns out that they were given permission for private parking here at the end of last year, though that was for businesses and during the week. So, who knows? I doubt I’ve ever been to a match with a higher human-to-car ratio, though.

It finishes 4-0 and I’m back at dad’s by 5.45, even though the late kick-off time meant that it was well past five by the time the referee finally blew the full-time whistle. It’s a quiet walk home. I have a lot on my mind. Not quite as much as I did on Boxing Day 2016, but enough to be getting on with. He’s in front of the television, watching a documentary about motorbikes. He doesn’t so much have an interest in motorbikes so much as no idea whatsoever how to change the TV channel on the remote control. I’m not sure that I’ve exorcised any demons today, but I’m in a more peaceful place as it comes to its end than I was at the start, and that’s something.