I have been to Champion Hill three times this season, seen games in three different FA competitions with three different teams playing at home.
After Dulwich Hamlet v Worthing in The FA Cup and Fisher v Crawley Down Gatwick in the FA Vase in recent weeks, Sunday’s game featured Lambeth All Stars and Emmer Green in the Second Round of The FA Sunday Cup.
On a miserable grey afternoon, with drizzly rain throughout, a crowd of around 70 saw the All Stars – second on goal difference in the Morden & District League – do nearly all of the early attacking and take the lead on 16 minutes.
Whyteleafe take on Leatherhead in the FA Trophy Second Round Qualifying
Their big centre-forward later made it 2-0 with a header that deflected in off the head of a defender.
Before half-time the referee missed his assistant flagging for a corner kick despite most people in the ground shouting at him.
That centre-forward, ‘Gazza’, hit a beauty of a left-footer across the goalkeeper and into the far corner for 3-0. The contest looked to be over.
But Emmer Green, from Reading, pulled one back and with the rain getting harder, I moved from behind the goal to the back of the stand.
Lambeth All Stars line up against Emmer Green
I noticed that a few of the seats were either broken or missing.
In the last minute or two All Stars’ No.14 went on a determined run that took him past or through several defenders before he sent a low right-footer rolling inches inside the far post. It was an excellent finish to an entertaining game.
There’s a lot of skill in this All Stars team and they could go far in the competition. I was back at Victoria within half-an-hour, a little damp.
The weekend’s FA Trophy Second Round Qualifying action was at Whyteleafe’s Church Road, one of my familiar haunts.
Whyteleafe had a Surrey derby against Leatherhead on their fabulous new 3G pitch, a sizeable contingent of Tanners fans boosting the attendance to 148.
The game at Lambeth took The Barber to 6,735 in total
The visitors won 4-1 and I’ll remember this tie for some outstanding goals – three of Leatherhead’s flew into the top corner and Whyteleafe’s was a textbook header from an inch-perfect cross.
Saturday was 15 November and would have been my father's 91st birthday if he’d still been with us.
He was even more obsessed with football than I am. At the end of the war, when he arrived back at Southampton on the boat from India, the first thing he did was buy a paper to see if there was a game he could get to that night.
We went to more than a thousand games together. At the moment he passed away eight years ago, he had Manchester United v Burton Albion – an FA Cup Third Round replay – on his little television, so the last thing he would have heard was the roar of a football crowd.
I’m really happy about that.
David Barber, aka ‘The Barber’, joined The FA as Sir Alf Ramsey’s assistant after the Mexico World Cup in 1970 and has been its historian for the last 35 years.
He has attended nearly 7,000 matches at all levels but has lost none of his enthusiasm!
