How do you find out your football club's results?

When I was much younger, in the days when I couldn't attend the Cray Wanderers away games, we never had the internet. Nor did we have local radio stations like Radio Medway (which later morphed into Radio Kent). And that meant we couldn't follow each game on a Saturday afternoon via news bulletins or website updates. There were also no mobile phones or even their immediate predecessors the belt pagers.

Unless I knew somebody who had attended an away game, and that was never too likely as a 12-year-old, just how did I learn of Cray's exploits 'on the road'? Well, it was my dad who first 'discovered' the way. He was looking at his Sunday newspaper the day after the Wands had played away to Met Police in the Metropolitan League. In fact, he was looking at the sports pages and, if anyone reading this knew my dad, you would know that the only reason he did that was to check the Pools numbers against his coupon. Other than that, he was not particularly a sporting man, especially not where football was concerned.

But, on this particular Sunday morning, he spotted it. There, in the small print underneath the four divisions of Football League results, he found the results for the previous day's Metropolitan League. To be honest, my dad didn't care too much for Cray Wanderers, always referring to them in my earshot as 'that team'. Mind you, he didn't care too much for any football club, especially the clubs he felt prevented him from getting 24 points on his coupon (you might have to ask your grandad about that one). 

Yet, my dad knew enough to know that Cray Wanderers plied their trade in the Metropolitan League, although he got great enjoyment that morning by asking me who Cray had played. After I told him, he replied "... is that as in Metropolitan Police 3 Cray Wanderers 0"? My heart sank. Of course, he was gutted that I was gutted Cray had been tonked on the Saturday but, he had opened the door for me to learn of the Wands' away results without having to wait until the end of the week for when the local Orpington & Kentish Times (later changed to The Orpington Times) was delivered to our house.

Then the following season, I found out by twiddling the station dial on my transistor radio one Saturday night that, BBC Radio Four had a sports programme that not only gave out the day's Football League results but also non-League cup results. They didn't announce the many non-Leagues but they did reserve a spot for the FA Cup Preliminary Rounds, the FA Amateur Cup (later to become the FA Vase) and even the county cups, in Cray's case that was the Kent Senior Cup, the Kent Amateur Cup (latterly renamed the Kent Senior Trophy) and the London Senior Cup.

Nowadays, there are several ways to not only find the results of your local non-League team but also to follow the games through the afternoons (or evenings, in the case of midweek games). There's the official club websites, the relevant leagues' websites, local radio, mobile phone contact. Some clubs have even got their own radio coverage at their home games. And, dare I say it, there's social media to boot. On Sundays, there's a dedicated publication called The Non-League Paper, which has the results and many match reports of umpteen leagues from the National League down.

Non-League football has greater coverage now than it did when I was growing up. Unfortunately, it is still a bitter pill to take when you find out your team has lost, just as it was for me the first time my dad read out Cray's result in his Sunday paper all those years ago.

Trevor Mulligan