Where Was Jared Wills? : Havant 0-1 Dover

Saturday's little jaunt took us to a club in Hampshire called Havant & Waterlooville and Dover continued their superb away form by leaving the county with 3 points thanks to a header from Robert Edmans, his first goal for the club since arriving on loan from Dagenham. In what we thought would be a low-key end of season nothingness game, we ended the up the day firmly back into the play-off position when we thought we were entirely out of it.

Another away game, another ridiculously early awaking time. Thanks to be stuck into Herne Bay I had to get a stupidly early train to meet the others at Dover before the 7.44AM departure time. So I had to set my alarm for 5:30, in order to catch the criminally early 6:30 train. I didn't even allow myself enough time to toast a couple of crumpets which would eventually prove costly and prevent me from seeing Robbie Edmans winner. But I did have enough time to shove 6 cans of becks, a big bottle of poofy alchopop and a couple of retro FourFourTwo magazines into my rucksake.

Luckily my train was on time because thanks to national rail's ridiculous time-tabling, I had less than two minutes to get my connection at Faversham. Had I failed, I would've had either an hour wait or make my own seperate way via London.
But I didn't have to. And you know they say things come in twos? Well I had a fat steaming dump as soon as I got on the train. I don't think the woman sitting outside with her bike would have been too impressed by the smell lingering from the pebble dash.
The little furry (i.e Russell) jumped on from the slum village of Aylesham which gave us a good twenty minutes to chat about Faustina Asprilla and the joys of indian takeaways, seeing as I was still bouyant from the one I had eaten on Friday night.

Then we met the others at Dover Priory to huddle in for one of our smallest train followings of the season. Only I, Russell, Martyn Mcgazzagle, Phillip Smith and Kieran Dodd (who arrived unfashionably late - again) had the guts, courage and determination to make the journey for this one. Sappo was also due to come but the silly twat overslept despite missing my phonecall, so had to get his own seperate train down there.
The highlight here was a group of small Scouse thugs, who were obviously off to their first game of the season at Wembley, giving us funny looks in our town as if to say "Who the fuck are these guys and who do they support?"

As for everybody else, they were either mooching around at home wanking off to pop idols, conserving for our weekender in Bristol for WSM away in a fortnight, too lazy to go to the game, playing bowling or had taken up Jim Parmenter's kind offer of free coach travel for any Dover supporter. Quite humiliatingly, we didn't even manage to fill up the full 52-seater, thus reinforcing the strong fickle perception we justifiyably receive from other club's supporters.

And thus it was a relatively low-key journey as we headed towards Portsmouth, yes Portsmouth, for our pre-match drinking shenanaghians. Usually for this fixture we have a few lunchtime drinks in Brighton but none of us had ever been to Pompey before and we thought this would make for a pleasant change. Would it though? We'll find out after the break.

But yes, compared to our recent rather unpleasant and boisterous antics on away journeys we were relatively pleasant for a change. We had lots of changes to make here; Ashford, Tonbridge, Redhill and Barnham before reaching Pompey, so it was fairly stop start. Martyn's unable to drink at the moment for valid reasons, Russell is an incompetent git who can't drink and thus took nothing with him, Doddy took a few cans with him but seemed more concerned with fuelling himself with food while Phil had the most enviable drinkage out of us, taking 3x 660ml bottles of Chang and 3x 660ml bottles of Singha.
Due to Ben Mitchell being the only other legend (i.e somebody who smokes) we actually spent a lot of time together and I can confirm, deep down he is actually an alright person when he's not trying to make a cunt out of himself. Just thought I'd let everybody know that.

Most of the conversation throughout the journey was of coursed focused on soccer, particularly Dover Athleltic, and there was actually some really well thought out and articulate discussion at times. And then our good chin-wag focused on holidays (seeing as we went past Gatwick Airport station and it brought back some nostalgic memories) as well as the working world, seeing as i'm unemployed and looking for a job at the moment.
Then when the beers really started kicking in the conversation de-generated into something that you would not expect non-leaguers anything to know about; Sex. But for all the piss-taking, we do actually have quite a bit of experience between us, particularly thanks to Phil, a legendary swordsman, so there was a lot of funny and entertaining stories to keep up the BANTZ. Sadly though that was the only thing I could contribute to the discussion: memories. Although I did tell a great moment of when I received a chewy from a girl wearing braces and it felt like the poor little lad was going to get its foreskin ripped off.
RIP Callum Snell's sex life 2005-2010 - gone but not forgotten <3

So  other than the usual mundane conversations, I can't remember anything significant happening on the journey up. Before we knew it it was quatar to twelve and we had arrived at our planned destination of Portsmouth & Southsea.

So what were my first impressions of Portsmouth? Well, it seemed like a ghost town. Couldn't believe how quiet it was for a Saturday afternoon and this was right next to their main station. I had gathered that it was a vibrant coastal town, which didn't seem to be the case at all.

We started off for our customary 'weatherspoons beginner' pint even though Phil was eager to avoid any chain pubs. As I was finishing off my cigarette before I went in, two lads in the beer garden began speaking to me as they became curious about what football shirt I was wearing. As I explained the usual inane bollocks about me being a Dover fan and I was off to Havant blah blah blah, one of them says to me "You boys should watch a proper football match this afternoon" then unveils a Liverpool shirt underneath. FOR FUCK SAKE. Even when you're in the town of a pretty large football club you cannot get away from plastic premiershite fans. At that point I just rolled my eyes and walked into the pub.
It was quite a big weatherspoons with some decent decor inside but I was surprised by how empty the place was.
I'd love to tell you the fascinating details of the ale I had in here but i've honestly forgotten what I had now. I can remember it being rather decent though.
Quite amusingly Doddy didn't get served in here. Despite being 20 years old and only four days younger than me, they refused to serve him because his passport is a few years out of date. While thats jobsworth twattery of the highest order it should teach Kieran to get his arse into gear and sort out some new I.D!
Not much else to report here though. Sappo arrived and met us while Russell was up to his usual snail-drinking pace and had to force down the last lashings of his pint as we were  keen to move on and not waste VDT.

Now this is where our lack of planning and organisational skills cost us some valuable drinking time. We had absolutely no idea where we were going and walked around for about 20 minutes before trying to find a proper pub. We eventually ended up at the Portsmouth Harbour shopping centre area in our drinking quest but actually ended up walking a longer route than we should have done. In the end we actually did rock up at a chain pub, albeit a Fullers pub which seemed more justifiyable than a spoons/yates's.

As you can imagine a Fullers pub in a shopping centre is never going to be cheap but I was one of the few that got off 'lightly' when I parted with £3.60 for a pint of Seafarers. The only reason why I remember this was because I nicked accidently took the glass home with me. Some would say that its karma that it smashed in my bag on the way home.
It wasn't a too great ale to be honest as I can recall much prefer Russell's number when we had tasters of each other's. Sappo got fleeced £4.10 for a pint of San Miguel, while Phil wasn't keen on his initial pint so the cheeky bastard had it swapped for free having drunken a quartar of it. McGarrigle broke his no-drinking committment to have a pint of Veltins, a strong German lager I believe. The beautiful glass that accustomed it is now nestling beautifully in my cupboard, completely unscathed.

It was quite sophisticated here as you can imagine. The beer garden was lovely and comfortable cushioned outdoor leather sofa's, a far cry from the bird-shit clad deck chairs you'd find in the Old Endeavour. The toilets were as clean and fresh-smelling as you'd hope to find in a public toilet.
I wasn't so sophicated here though, doing my old usual trick of going to take a gulp of beer and ending up with half of it down my shirt. D'oh!

After leaving here we headed in search of our next pub. There was some bloke who was absailing down this humoungously tall building on the harbour - fucking adrenaline junkie.
Yeah, we had to walk through a shopping centre and ended up outside the Portsmouth Harbour train station which in hindsight is where we should have gotten off to begin with! Opposite the station there was a pub thankfully, thus ending a period of aimlessly walking about.

There were an obscene amount of Liverpool shirts in here watching the FA Cup semi-final, none of whom appeared to have Scouse accents. Modern football and broken Britain truely in motion.
Not a bad pub though although the choice of lager and ale was pretty limited and left a lot to be desired. I had to settle for a pint of Old Speckled Hen which I have to admit isn't particularly my favourite of mainstream ales.
My main memory of here is Doddy winning a few quid on the colour of money quiz game thanks to our combined super knowledge and i'm pretty sure I impressed on a few history questions? But then I always do.
Oh, and buying some cigarettes from an ice cream shop next door was pretty strange too but my lasting memory was the beautifully loud roar as Suarez sent the entire pub into raptures, myself included.

By the time we had finished up in here though it was already time to catch a quartar past two train back into Havant, having only managed 3 pubs in our 2+ hours there. So we have to ask ourselves; was it worth it? Probably not, no, on reflection. Had we done our research a little bit better it might have been but we spent too much time wandering about and didn't end up in anywhere particularly special. It was quite dissapointing so in hindsight we should have just stuck to our Brighton plan as we know the area a lot better than Portsmouth.

We failed to book ourselves a taxi to Westleigh Park while on the train despite Russell's best efforts but I did manage to finish off any remaining alcohol in my bag. Luckily though when we got off for the train there was a taxi rank outside and we managed to hop straight into a seven seater taxi before engaging in lots of great BANTZ with the driver en route to the ground.

We arrived with enough time to slip in another quick crafty pint before kick-off. Their bar is situated just outside of the turnstile and seemed a lot different from last time I went there back in December 2009 (I missed our re-arranged at the fifth attempt game there last season). Its a great bar though. Really spacious, really tidy, a pool table and a tidy bit of crumpet pulling the pints behind the bar. Something there for everyone.
The only ale they had on tap here was Chuffin' Ale, a quite strange choice. To be honest I wasn't really overly keen on it but still slipped another one in at half-time despite this.

I waded my 40st frame of steel through their turnstiles and once again cunningly mugged a turnstile operator out of money as I claimed I was am a student. Then casually walked around to behind the goal we were attacking towards to be delightfully greeted by our raptuous tinpot away following, who were obviously keen to  see their true leader of the terraces there.

I have to be brutally honest and admit that my memory of any on pitch action is hazy at best. When I watched the highlights this morning pretty much everything I have little recollection over!

I did recall that Havant dominated most of the early proceedings and looked more likely to score a goal. Looking back on it it appears that the player I voted for player of the season kept us at bay with a string of great saves, including some blinding reflexes from a close range header. I think Ruiz has come in for some unwarranted stick on our forum recently because on his day, you won't find a better keeper at this level. While he's prone to the odd error, we could be a lot worse off without him between the sticks.

My lack of interest in the actual game meant that I missed our opening goal. Having not eaten all day and being tempted by other people purchasing food I wandered off to their tea bar. The moment I opened my wallet to pay for my chips I turned around to discover Rob Edmans celebrating the opening goal. It was a really soft header which their keeper really.  should have got to. Never mind - they all count.

(Also would just like to make a quick irrelevant shout out to Bradley "the bowmanator" Bowman here seeing as he kindly pleeded for me to recognise him in my blogs. Hello Bradley)

Me and about five others also risked missing any further action as we headed off outside to grab a pint. Had I believed there was more importance on the game I wouldn't have bothered but most of us there just adopted a carefree attitude to the game. Mind you, I did keep tabs on the game from the beer garden. But I did miss Edmans put the ball into their net for a second time. Curiously it was ruled out for an alledged push which the video evidence really doesn't support the referee's view. Never mind - just the one goal turned out to be enough.

The second half was quite a laugh on the terraces as we spent the majority of it pissing about and singing ironic chants. The main one was "Don't care if we win, don't care if we lose, you're going down and we're on the booze". Hooky took a lot of stick on the bench aswell but was clearly loving it. Then the birds at the tea hut tried charging Phil £6.20, yes six pound twenty for a double cheeseburger. He refused to be mugged off and then we just began singing songs over how much of fleecers they are. (Can't remember all the songs though - was pretty wankered at this point).

As for the soccer, we saw out the second half fairly comfortably without having to deal with too many chances from Havant. We had to play the last twenty or minutes or so without Corcoron as he received a red-card for a cynical foul outside the box. It seemed very harsh to be worthy of a straight red-card, I thought it was a second yellow in my pissed up state at the time.

But yeah we held on and it was marvellous. Even Nicky Forster and Steve Brown gave us a wave late on when we asked them to. So a great day all round. Not a classic match by any means but an efficient enough performance to extend our awesome away form that has seen us not lose a league match since December 3rd. Why can we not produce this stuff at Crabble? Its just a strange hoodoo and one none of us can fathom out for the life of us.

It was made even better for us when we were waiting outside for our taxi that Phil had booked. Steven King rushed over to us to excitedly tell us that Chelmsford had managed to chuck away a 2-0 goal lead at home to Salisbury with 5 minutes to go and ended up losing 3-2. We thought he was taking the piss with it being a prank being played by the people on the coach but no. They  really did manage to throw it away including 2 injury time strikes.
Cue a "fucking hell we're back in the mix" mixed feelings of that we're probably prolonging our pain but we now have something to turn up for.
That said, Basingstoke also beat Havant this evening and are now level on points with us with another game in hand. I really can see them snatching the play-off place in comical fashion, thanks to the bottlers of Essex and France. Could you imagine Basingstoke getting promoted? TinpotTASTIC! But I really do believe they'll snatch that final spot now.

Well this put us in a more glorious mood and the taxi driver kindly dropped us off at co-op to top up on beer and snackage. 5 tinnies of fosters, a ginsters meat slice and a chicken and sweetcorn sandwich set me off for a great journey home.

But we were actually relatively well-behaved for once despite being pissed as a fart. I was too busy lecturing the others other what a sickening sport horse racing is and that I don't have blood on my hands for the sake of making a few cheap quid while they were all obsessing over the grand national. Sadly they had no reasonable retort to my comments and knew I was in the right but hopefully they'll learn to grow a few morals and a bit of a backbone next time.
The only thing else I can remember was Phil receiving a pissed-up phone call from and emotional Kingfield Ender, clearly upset to be leaving us having just won the league at Maidenhead. Bless him.
I guess I might aswell congratulate Woking here while i'm at it. They've been the best team in this league by a mile this season and have fully deserved their title win after staving off a strong challenge from Dartford. Fair play to 'em, and the best of luck for next season chaps. On a personal note though, its great to get the arrogant wankers out of the way for next season!

Yeah it was a pretty low key journey back from what I remember which is admittedly little. I had to change at Tonbridge in order to get back to Herne Bay quicker so had to bid my emotional farewells there while enviously hearing of their plans to have a curry when they got back into Dover.

Guess what I did instead? Fell asleep on the train. Luckily I woke up at Strood and managed to get off in time before the train terminated and I missed my connection but incredibly history repeated itself on the next train! I ended up waking at Faversham station where nobody had bothered to wake me up, thank you general public. So I missed my train back to Herne Bay and hate to wait an hour for the next one. But that wasn't the worst of it - the next train had to be stopped because of an incident at Chestfield station so I had to get a replacement bus service home. Fucking marvellous. Ended up getting home about 1h 15m later than I should've done.
Mind you, it could've been worse, I could've woken up somewhere in London. I have woken up at Bromley South station before and ended up getting home at 2AM, when I should've got back 4.5 hours earlier than that.  And that was just a home game from last season!

But I managed to dust myself down to cooly by a lovely chinese, thus completing another healthy day following DAFC on the road.

So we're at home to Maidenhead on Saturday. Sadly they are 2nd bottom and we could relegate them should we turn around our dreadful home form and beat them. I'd be sad to lose one of the better away days but I'll be hoping for nothing less than 3 points on Saturday.

Lets stop being miserable fuckers and try and end the season on a high. I don't think we'll make the play offs with the form of Basingrad bared in mind but it would be great to end the season trying anyway.

Come on you whites, Dover til I die. Callum is rejuvanated and BACK!!!

Monday 16 Apr 2012
Havant and W	0	-	1	Basingstoke
			Sam-Yorke (22) Adams (43)		724
Saturday 14 Apr 2012
Chelmsford	2	-	3	Salisbury
Akurang (46) Slabber (06) Nunn (85)			Griffin (86) Bell-Baggie (91) Williams (91)		777
Dorchester	0	-	3	Staines Town
Walker (44 og ) Martin (65 og )			Risbridger (87)		413
Eastbourne Borough	2	-	0	Hampton & Richmond
Lacey (28) Ademeno (80)			Inman (65)		633
Havant and W	0	-	1	Dover
			Edmans (23) Corcoran (61)		792
Maidenhead Utd	0	-	1	Woking
			Sole (24)		1,192
Sutton Utd	0	-	1	Dartford
			Garrod (59)		756
Thurrock	1	-	2	Basingstoke
Boylan (91)			Pratt (22) Sills (48)		211
Truro City	1	-	2	Bromley
Watkins (48)			Malcolm (57) Waldren (76)		537
Welling	0	-	1	Eastleigh
			Smith (40)		454
Weston-S-Mare	2	-	2	Tonbridge Angels
Duharty (34) Ingram (76)			Piper (01) Collin (56)		327
Boreham Wood	4	-	0	Farnborough
Akinola (64) Effiong (66) Riza (06) O'Loughlin (86)					175

Pos		Team	P	W	D	L	F	A	GD	Pts
1		Woking	40	29	6	5	86	36	50	93
2		Dartford	40	26	8	6	86	37	49	86
3		Welling United	40	23	8	9	76	46	30	77
4		Sutton United	40	19	14	7	65	50	15	71
5		Chelmsford	40	18	12	10	64	40	24	66
6		Dover	40	17	13	10	59	46	13	64
7		Basingstoke Town	39	18	10	11	59	49	10	64
8		Boreham Wood	40	16	9	15	60	54	6	57
9		Dorchester	40	16	7	17	56	62	-6	55
10		Tonbridge Angels	40	14	12	14	66	62	4	54
11		Eastleigh	40	15	8	17	53	58	-5	53
12		Weston-S-Mare	40	14	8	18	56	68	-12	50
13		Salisbury City	39	12	12	15	47	51	-4	48
14		Truro City	40	13	7	20	61	76	-15	46
15		Eastbourne Borough	40	12	9	19	53	63	-10	45
16		Staines Town	40	11	10	19	49	59	-10	43
17		Bromley	40	10	13	17	51	65	-14	43
18		Farnborough *	40	14	6	20	51	77	-26	43
19		Havant and Waterlooville	40	10	11	19	61	72	-11	41
20		Hampton & Richmond	38	9	12	17	50	63	-13	39
21		Maidenhead United	40	10	9	21	43	69	-26	39
22		Thurrock	40	5	10	25	33	82	-49	25