The characters in the crowd who bring life to non-league football
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You might not know their names but you’ll miss those familiar faces on the terraces once they’re gone. By Harry Pearson for When Saturday Comes. Scoreline Man sat a couple of rows down from me at a non-league ground I visit half a dozen times a year. He had a face as crumpled and weather-beaten as an aged conker and always wore the same dove grey, Velcro-fasten, wide-fit loafers. In my mind I called him Cosy Shoe Man. On arrival and departure we nodded to one another, or raised our eyebrows and tilted back our heads in rueful acknowledgement of a scrappy 0-0, or an unfortunate defeat.
The only time we spoke came after one of those, an egregious 0-3 in which the home side struck the woodwork so often in the second period it was practically a drum roll. “Unlucky,” I said. Cosy Shoe Man pulled a face. “One of those results that in no way reflects the scoreline,” he replied in a low nasal tone. After that I thought of him as Scoreline Man. For a dozen years Scoreline Man was a small fixture in my life. Then one matchday he wasn’t there. He wasn’t there the next time I went either, nor the next and soon his absence had ceased to be noteworthy, a broad loafer print slowly faded.
He is just one of a legion of fans I’ve known well enough to acknowledge, but never befriended. At the same ground a tall, perpetually damp-looking chap, lonely as a heron, clung to the perimeter fence like a sailor in a storm. Every match, as time elapsed in the second half, he would call out, just once, “Come on, boys, dig deep” in a timbre so melancholy it was more like the baleful howl of a distempered hound than any form of encouragement. Dig Deep Bloke disappeared sometime after a 1-0 home win in the FA Vase over a burly team of sweary blokes from the South Yorkshire coalfields.
