MATCH 2: Back to Blogging: Balham vs. Hassocks

Balham 2 Hassocks 2 (Hassocks win 5-3 on penalties) (FA Cup extra preliminary qualifying round)
The Mayfield Stadium, 2 September 2020

I hadn’t planned to do two matches in two days – it was a surprising, but not unpleasant result of not being able to go to Clapton for my first game of the season. This time, I had company: my friend Andi, who I met on Twitter when I joined ten years ago, and got sucked into a vibrant football blogging scene, of which his site, Twisted Blood, was a genuine highlight. When I said on Twitter that I’d be going to ‘loads of non-League matches’ in 2020-21 and planned to ‘blog about it like it’s 2010 all over again’, Andi got in touch saying he’d be up for joining me for some of them. We’ve watched quite a lot of football together over the last decade – mostly at non-League Dulwich Hamlet, just once or twice a year for me when Norwich weren’t playing, but also Premier League and international matches in pubs around London. Our take on football is quite similar: we both enjoy its top levels but hate the hype around them, and the way television and oligarch money has made them less unpredictable and less community-oriented; we both like football writing that focuses on the game’s emotive qualities more than dry tactical analysis; we both think, above all, that football is really funny, and are just as happy to see grown men embarrassing themselves as we are, say, to witness a sublime goal by one of the global greats. (Crucially, we share a love of the house band of anyone who watches football this way: Half Man Half Biscuit.)

We met at West Croydon station for a twenty-minute walk to Thornton Heath, culminating in a slightly unnerving walk down a dark alley past a graveyard with a high metal fence, leading to the Mayfield Stadium, which Balham share with AFC Croydon Athletic. Andi was one of the few of the many early 2010s bloggers who made it into professional football writing, getting a regular column at SB Nation and going to Brazil for the World Cup in 2014, which I watched in pubs in London with others from the circuit who didn’t have that honour. When everything shut in March, he lost his column, along with most of his other freelance work; he had picked up a few gigs since football returned, watching the matches he was covering for Eurosport on TV like everyone else. Otherwise, he had been working on an anthropological book, which had taken the question of “what is a football club”, famously defined by Bobby Robson as ‘the noise, the passion, the feeling of belonging ... a small boy clambering up stadium steps for the very first time, gripping his father’s hand’, as its starting point, and looking after his one-year-old daughter.

Unlike Walthamstow – founded in 1868 as Leyton FC and one of London’s oldest surviving clubs – Balham are new, founded in 2011 as an adult team for the popular Balham Blazers youth club, itself only set up in 2001. They rapidly shot up through the Surrey leagues to the Combined Counties League, meaning they soon had to move out to Balham to meet the ground criteria for promotions. They shared with Cobham and Colliers Wood United before this arrangement with Croydon, The Mayfield Stadium was similar to Walthamstow’s, with one main stand (also reserved for players’ friends and family and club officials, post-Covid) and covered terraces behind the goals, with the side opposite the main stand left open, with dugouts. It was more ramshackle than Wadham Lodge, with paint peeling off the surfaces and the pitch markings virtually invisible, but the food counter and bar were open, which made this feel much more like a normal non-League fixture. In fact, both at the match and walking through the surrounding area, I saw far fewer immediate signs of the pandemic than the night before.

The main reminder made us miss the kick-off, and the opening goal. We’d booked tickets, which we’d never normally do a game like this, but the added track and trace measures on the turnstiles, as well as the temperature checks for Covid-19 symptoms, kept us stuck in a queue for several minutes. As we waited, I told Andi that I knew nothing of Hassocks FC, and little of the town, which was one of those names I often saw on the London-Brighton line, cursing any train I was on that stopped there for slowing me down. (However, it’s usually Wivelsfield that I take as a personal affront, something about the name.) Most of my Hassocks knowledge comes from my friend Carl, who I met on my Literature & Visual Culture MA at the University of Sussex in 2004, who held Hassocks in greater contempt than any of the other towns on Brighton’s fringes. I kept telling Carl that he should try stand-up as his stories about the area were so funny, although the basis of his hatred of Hassocks seemed to be a drunken night out where he had missed the last train home, had to walk through a local field to get back to his home in Burgess Hill, get caught short and then accidentally shat in his pants whilst relieving himself. This was mostly been Carl’s fault, but still formed the basis of the nickname I gave to Hassocks on the night (which I won't repeat here).

As you may have noticed, this blog isn’t really going to focus on the actual football (hence linking to a match report at the top of each entry). As we walked in to find Hassocks already 1-0 up, Andi and I checked out the ground, new to us both. Again, I recognised no names on the team sheet, but two stood out, both substitutes: Hassocks’ George Galbraith-Gibbons, probably signed from the Royal Engineers’ FA Cup-winning side of 1875, and Balham’s Jude Le Net, who sounded like a superstar French centre-forward from Roy of the Rovers. That summed up our approach to it all: looking for something, anything, to make us laugh. I thought back to when I joined the football blogging circuit, ten years ago, an anomaly within it as unlike most involved, I was already writing for a mainstream newspaper, albeit not on football. Trying to escape typecasting as “the transgender journalist”, I started writing match reports and putting them on my blog, At Home She’s a Tourist, along with my old, print-only film and literature journalism. Someone on a Norwich City forum, who I’d never even met, immediately called me out: they weren’t in my voice but written as I thought a mainstream reporter should write, lacking my usual humour or heart. So, I started writing instead about where football intersected with art or literature, politics or popular culture, or what it meant to be a fan, and enjoyed contributing to this eclectic, eccentric blogosphere far more than pitching to the Guardian sports desk (which never worked in any case).

Balham pressed for an equaliser and Ash Snadden prodded home from a low cross after 18 minutes, and while the action settled into a lull, Andi and I reminisced about that blogging culture. After 2010, as the major newspapers published more online-only content and new publications such as The Blizzard emerged, it had broken into careerists and amateurs, with the anarchic Surreal Football lot setting themselves firmly against the wannabe-professionals with notable aggression (as well as making a point of unfollowing everyone on Twitter and provoking Liverpool fans as much as possible). Names came back to us that we hadn’t thought about in years – by 2014 or so, barely anyone was still writing for free, or for fun – and I was reminded of the sheer number of people that football has brought into my life, even fleetingly, over the last three decades. What had happened to all those aspiring writers, and the sites they'd set up? We struggled to remember most of them, as we reflected on how Andi had managed to make a living, until recently anyway, from combining analysis and humour so effectively in his football writing, and I had managed to incorporate my interest in the sport into my wider practice.

We weren't taking the match too seriously, and we got a few laughs from the fact that the players were. Of course they were: I hate losing, in whatever form I'm playing, and I've both shouted at people, and been shouted at by people, for not putting enough effort in even during the most casual kick-abouts. At one point, Hassocks put in a free-kick that sails over everyone's heads, and their number 11 turns around and yells "For fuck's sake, Brad!" at his own captain. Later, Hassocks' winger beats a couple of Balham defenders, tries to take on the full-back, slips and shanks his shot (or cross, it was hard to tell) into touch. "And you came all that way," said Balham's right-back, not managing to get a rise but amusing Andi and me. We talked about our favourite examples of players winding each other up to get an advantage – I passed on Carl's story about a mid-Sussex Sunday League match where he provoked an opposing forward to swinging at him, missing his punch but getting a red card for his trouble. "I kept calling him 'Stinky'," said Carl. adding "go and have a bath, Stinky" as the striker stormed off.

The teams exchanged two more goals: Jack Troak put Hassocks back in front just before half-time, and Balham pushed for another equaliser in the second-half. They got it with a few minutes left, winning a penalty that was hotly contested by Hassocks' defender, who harangued the linesman for what felt like an eternity. Tom Read scored it, and with no more score, and to our delight, the match went straight to a shoot-out. The penalties were good: only one Balham player had his saved, and Hassocks won 5-3. Andi and I made our way back past the graveyard to the station, talking about whether we'd write about the game and if so, where – it felt like the opportunities to document more marginal experiences, at least in more mainstream outlets, had narrowed over the last few years and especially since the pandemic, hence this return to blogging. It's a time-consuming business, though, far more than I'd remembered, so it may be more sporadic than I'd like, but I think I'll keep going.