-
“Me singing Dorch songs around the living room hasn’t gone down well with the wife. Apparently, the youngest has only just gone to bed. I really don’t think she understands the level of Dorch I’m at.”
The only other time I’ve written the blog was 10 years and 1 million miles away from where we are now as a club. A 3-0 loss away at Redditch on a Monday night in front of a bumper crowd of 204 might have been the bleakest moment of my life, just pipping my mum dying two months before. Supporting Dorch never really got any better than that and I fully believed that wizard’s curse on the club was a real problem. Until a man called Tommy Killick came and lifted it. Merthyr at home had the potential to be…
-
“Good lad is Rob. He even offered me his kidney.”
The mark of a good side is picking up points when you’re not at your best, and that’s exactly what we did on Wednesday with a 2-2 draw at Gosport. After a nightmare start and being 2-0 down inside 15 minutes, a point was the least we deserved, and we’re now fourth going into a big game against table toppers Merthyr on Saturday. We didn’t do things at Gosport the easy way, and there were a lot of twists and turns, but if Luke will insist on being the navigator for the battle bus, this shouldn’t come as a shock.…
-
“Straight outta Frampton.”
Debut blog for me so go easy fellas, writing ain’t my cup of tea. Bracknell away on the club coach and 10 o’clock leave was fucking early, so that meant a quick trip to Tesco for a couple of meal deals and a few tins of something fizzy. Onto the coach and the Excelsior one is certainly an upgrade on the normal one. There was a good few of the usual faces on the bus and early part of the talk was about how old Aiden was going to be after he turned 11 last weekend at Swindon. He’d been…
-
“Children under 12 get in for free? Aiden, you’re 11 today.”
Well, this is an honour. Until a Tuesday night in Hungerford last season, it had been many years since I showed my face at a Dorch game. The buzz was back after many years in exile in the leafy green belt of Berkshire. Killick was in, a new generation of reprobates behind the goal are emptying the keepers’ water bottles and an acceptance into the TSOF WhatsApp group. Sadly, since then my record is 6 games, 1 win, 3 draws and 5 red cards. To be honest, I’m pretty sure I was still hungover from the previous week’s trip to…
-
“Fuck me, the bus has left early and two people just had to leg it to get on. Dabbs only had one job.”
When it was put on the group chat who wanted to write this blog, Mr Henry Weston was probably still talking for me when I agreed to do it. You can thank your lucky stripes we didn’t elect Mr Buik to write it, as he summarised it perfectly on the group chat. “Got pissed, ref was shit, lost, got more pissed, the end”. So here goes with writing the ramblings of AFC Totton away. The day started in quite typical fashion, I was awoken by my children at some ridiculous hour of the morning, nursing a rather awful hangover. The…
-
“Well tell him to wait in a layby for a while then, we can’t kick off without a kit.”
Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United were undoubtedly the best side in English club football during the 1990’s. Then came Wenger’s Arsenal and Mourinho’s Chelsea in the early 2000’s. Following them, new incarnations of United, Arsenal, Chelsea and Man City laid claim to being the best, before Klopp’s Liverpool and, most recently, Pep’s Man City have been the best club side in the land. Well, between nine o’clock and about a quarter past on Tuesday night, Tommy Killick’s Dorch morphed into the best side in the land as Sholing were blown away in the type of spell after halftime which I’ve…
-
“I always try to stop people from pissing if we’re near a roundabout.”
The Southern Premier League is the strongest it has been in years, and there is no better barometer of this than the quality of the away games. Good riddance Dunstable, Hendon and Hayes, greetings to Marlow, Chertsey and Frome. Having to watch a game at Havant? Well, you can’t have everything. And it was Marlow that was the delightful setting for our latest round of the mildly infuriating game of ‘two dropped or one gained’ as we were left to ponder what might have been on Saturday. Having twice let a lead slip to eventually come away with a point,…
-
“Dad, can I have my picture taken with Jurgen Klopp?” “Jurgen Klopp? That’s Brian Churchill.”
It wasn’t that long ago that the idea of going down the ground and watching Dorch would be something you’d feel more obligated to do rather than something you’d enjoy. Sure, it would be nice to see a few old faces and have some beers of varying quality, but the actual game itself would usually be somewhere between very average and fucking awful, with the occasional false dawn of three points every now and then just to keep us interested. Well, those days seem a distant memory now as home games are fast becoming the week’s highlight, wins expected, crowds…
