“Walthamstow FC exist and they’re playing on Saturday, and that’s a start …”

Do you remember when bloggers just sometimes did short posts about things they had enjoyed and just wanted to share them? I know, I am such a boomer^*. Anyway, here is one of those, with a couple more to follow over the next few days …

I really enjoyed this piece, billed as “a short history of non-league football in East London” by Ian King, who points out that over years of groundshares and mergers and bankruptcies and demergers “it’s complicated. Oh lord, it’s complicated.”

He rightly observes that “the late 1970s through to the early 1990s were a desperate time for football in this country in a general sense, and the non-league game suffered as much as the top level of the game,” while pointing out that the current Dagenham and Redbridge FC playing at Victoria Road exist due to the sad “bodycount of three football clubs and three grounds having effectively been obliterated to get there.”

There’s even an extra layer of that too, as when I went with my dad to watch Leyton Orient play there a few seasons back on a Boxing Day fixture, he regaled me with tales of his dad taking him to see Briggs Sport play at the same ground in the 1950s.

Anyway it is a great read, and Ian’s piece finishes with the sentence “Walthamstow FC exist and they’re playing on Saturday, and that’s a start …” and there is always a very good chance that if Leyton Orient are not at home that day, I will be there at Wadham Lodge to watch them play.

[Walthamstow FC at Wadham Lodge]

READ IT HERE: Words & Pictures to Follow: Walthamstow vs Mildenhall Town – a short history of non-league football in East London.

^*I genuinely believe that “boomer” is just gonna become a generic insult for “older person doing things that aren’t fashionable anymore” and we just have to suck it up, even if, like me, you are proudly Gen X. The best gen.