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Matt Barlow at Cheriton Road – Folkestone 1 Worthing 2
According to George Dowell’s five-year plan, this was to be Worthing’s first year in the National League South and they were firmly on track when the season was ended early.
The team known as the Mackerel Men were seven points clear at the top of the Isthmian Premier with seven to play when the axe came from the FA and ruled their fine campaign to be void.
It is still a sore point but time to move on. ‘I’m looking forward to watching some football again,’ said Dowell, who provides a unique perspective on such matters.
Worthing were back in action this weekend as they secured a 2-1 victory against Folkestone
Worthing owner George Dowell is adamant his team should be in the National League South
He was a teenage Worthing player when he broke his spine in a car accident a decade ago and was left paralysed from the chest down but he refused to let it end his footballing ambitions.
In 2015, Dowell bought the club using his compensation and they have been thriving since, with investment in Adam Hinshelwood’s team and the ground.
When the pandemic hit, fans raised £43,000 to complete an upgrade, taking the stadium to National League standards with new toilets, turnstiles, a new burger bar and better floodlights. Promotion is the target again.
Among the items sold to raise funds were souvenir shirts listing last season’s results on the front and the slogan ‘Expunged but not forgotten’ across the back.
They started the new campaign with a solid 2-1 away win thanks to goals from Ricky Aguila and Ollie Pearce at Folkestone Invicta, another team with eyes on promotion when football came to a halt in March.
Worthing have thrived since Dowell purchased the club in 2015, with investment being made
When the pandemic hit, fans raised £43,000 to complete an upgrade, taking the stadium to National League standards
‘Sh** town, no pier’ sang the travelling contingent of Worthing fans. They, too, were delighted to end the six-month hiatus and yet remain distinctly unimpressed by the FA’s decision to deny them the chance to go up to the sixth tier.
They also wanted to know why midfielder Jesse Starkey should be serving out a suspension for a red card from the season that never was.
Worthing drew an average crowd close to 900 for home games last season. There were nearly 1,700 for the derby against Bognor.
Attendances in the Isthmian Premier will be restricted to 600 to comply with social distancing
Attendances in the Isthmian Premier will be restricted to 600 to comply with social distancing and, at Folkestone on Saturday, all the tickets went long before kick-off.
David Smith pulled one back for the hosts but they started with a defeat.
‘Not only did we lose but the Invicta TV camera appears to have died 10 minutes from the end of the game,’ groaned their Twitter account. ‘Terrible day all round.’
Only it did not feel like a terrible day. It was good to see football back at this level.
Matt Barlow – Truro City 1 Harrow Borough 0
The expunged are back and Jack Richards cannot resist a laugh. When he first heard the word, he looked it up and found it defined as ‘to obliterate’ or ‘to remove completely, usually something very unpleasant’.
He wasn’t laughing then. It was March and nine months of graft were down the drain as the FA ruled the Southern League 2019-20 season never happened and Truro City would not be going up despite being clear at the top of the Southern League Premier South.
‘It’s a long time since I heard that word,’ said Richards, the former Surrey and England cricketer who returned to his Cornish roots and became the chairman at Truro.
Six months on and the new season started with a 1-0 win for the White Tigers against Harrow Borough, on Saturday, and a crowd of 420 fans, all carefully adhering to the new post-pandemic guidelines at Treyew Road.
‘It’s important that fans trust us,’ said Richards. ‘We want to make it safer to come to Truro City than it is to go to Sainsbury’s – and cheaper! We survived with the help of the furlough scheme and a good group of volunteers.’
They missed out on the usual money-spinning pre-season friendlies against Plymouth and Exeter but still have aspirations to become established in the National League and, over time, take a shot at the EFL.
Key to this is Truro City’s partnership with Cornish Pirates and Penwith College to create a stadium in Truro fit for Premiership rugby and EFL football while delivering a much-needed boost for the region.
‘God knows it’s not easy for young people down here,’ added Richards. ‘It’s a hard slog and we have to keep them motivated and give them something to aspire to. The stadium will help us to do this, promoting activity in deprived areas and bringing the county together. ‘There’s more sporting talent in Cornwall than we ever see.’
Truro returned with a win thanks to a splendid goal curled in by Rocky Neal, and match-day programmes hailing boss Paul Wotton as the ‘White Tiger King’.
Craig Hope at Mariners Park – South Shields 3 Mickleover 0
‘Ref, are you part of their bubble?’ Welcome to 2020 and a new playbook of terrace wit.
It was heartening to hear the good folk of South Shields make light of this peculiar world – and they were in high spirits, 600 of them back inside Mariners Park for the first game of their Northern Premier League season.
There were no jokes back in June, however, when the club were told that the FA’s decision to null and void the last campaign would stand.
South Shields were 12 points clear and heading for the National League North for the first time in their history.
The only team to blow that sort of advantage in these parts were, infamously, Newcastle in 1996. A 2-1 defeat at Blackburn during that collapse was fatal. The scorer of Blackburn’s two goals? Geordie boy Graham Fenton, now joint-manager of Shields.
The 46-year-old said: ‘We’d have gone up last season, so it hurt, a lot. There were a few days of feeling aggrieved and then you get on with it, and here we are.’
It took just 90 seconds for Nathan Lowe to curl into the top corner, bestirring a roar of celebration six months in the making. Captain Jon Shaw headed a second and striker Jason Gilchrist hooked a third in stoppage time.
News of last week’s partial lockdown in the North East had left this fixture – as well as the prospect of the limited crowd – in doubt. But the sun shone on Shields, literally and metaphorically. ‘We’re drinking beer and watching football, we’re lucky,’ said one fan.
Elsewhere, a pre-match chorus of ‘happy birthday’ broke out among a group of regulars.
‘No singing without our masks!’ checked one of the gang.
Fenton spent the game sitting on what looked like a Marcelo Bielsa bucket. ‘Nah, the social-distancing thing meant I had to sit outside the dugout – I think it was a nursery school seat!’ he laughed. There was humour, but also caution. Shields want to make the Football League and, with the backing of chairman Geoff Thompson, there is a five-year plan to make that happen.
But skipper Shaw warned: ‘Football doesn’t survive without fans at our level. We’re fortunate to have the owner we have. But some clubs have gone. That saying, ‘One game at a time’, has never felt more appropriate.’
So this was a start and it felt good. But in a Covid world, who knows when that bubble will burst?
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