Always Meet (and play Sunday League football with) Your Heroes

The year is Championship Manager 01/02. My hair is shaggy and bleached blond, my sixth-form suits are simultaneously too big and too tight on my weird teenage body (it’s still weird), and I’m sharing a room with my pre-teen brother. It’s going great.

Somewhere in all of that mess, I started supporting Bromley Football Club. As if I weren’t awkward enough, I began to idolise a bunch of Ryman League footballers. Big Danny Harwood, tough-tackling Dean Forbes and Grant Watts, wing-wizards Gary Drewett and Kirk Watts, dynamite strikers Wade Falana and Adolph Amoako. If you know, you know.

I’m always jealous of people who can remember their first Bromley game because I haven’t the foggiest. I just have a mental collage of sparse crowds, frozen pitches, and brutalist football. But from the moment I clanked through Hayes Lane’s old iron turnstiles, I knew this rusting, rotting, crumbling concrete cauldron was for me.