Saturday 4th October 2025 ko 11:00

Southern Counties East League-Division One

CROYDON 6 (Asafu 2 25 87 Cormack 4 Barton 8 Ward 15)

HALLS ATHLETIC 0

Att 266

Entry £7

Programme £2

In so many ways it was obvious that this was the final SCEFL Hop. The main thing was the teams we were visiting seemed to consist of clubs relegated into the league being paired with others whose levels of enthusiasm at hosting were, at best lukewarm. As organisers you manage to the red lines, and hope for best.

We’d visited Phoenix Sports the previous evening, and following this game we visited Holmesdale, finishing the evening at Glebe, in Chislehurst. They managed to be the first club we’ve ever dealt with who we couldn’t get any communication with at all. So much so that we ended up doing a programme for them just in case, we couldn’t run a GroundhopUK event without all clubs doing them. We turned up, no Glebe hadn’t printed and the club ended up buying up all our spare copies! On the Sunday we visited Hythe Town before finishing at Hollands & Blair.

On a personal level I’d visited many of these clubs fairly recently, but it had been 20 years since I’d visited Croydon Sports Arena. The sadness was back then I’d watched them play an Isthmian League Premier game…

So you’d be forgiven for thinking that maybe we’d have collectively walked into a miserable down-at-heel club, when in fact the exact opposite was the case. Back when, the Arena was down-at-heel but has now been extensively renovated and the club have even managed to get the club name added to the nearby tram stop- it now says “Arena- for Croydon FC” Good on them. You can just about see the tram cables beyond the far side of the arena.

We arrived to a hive of activity, no one went hungry but the better informed made a beeline for the tea bar adjacent to the stand- its cheap and really good. Elsewhere there were no end of badges, books and other merchadise on sale; I got a disapproving look from Robyn when she spotted a club history I’d bought. But here’s the thing- hop games are an opportunity so I look to see host clubs do something different from normal, Croydon did, when others didn’t.

On the pitch the game was every inch as one-side at the score would suggest- in fact you could say that if they hadn’t “Declared” at half time, the score could have reached double figures. I was sorry to leave, but left with a moniker ringing in my ears oft used by the club.

“Ting Ting- here come the trams!” I hope they’re back on track.