I was there...
Prior to the season that Cray moved to the Isthmian League, there was a better than 50% chance that the Wands could have landed up in the Southern League. At the time, the footballing pyramid was still trying to sort itself out and many clubs found themselves either in the Isthmian or the Southern when they should really have been in the other to which they were assigned, depending on their location. The Isthmian League was, and still is, more about competing clubs from around London and the Home Counties whereas the Southern League was, and still is, about the more broader aspects of the outlying areas beyond the Isthmian League's scope.
By the by, the Wands were eventually accepted into Division One of the Isthmian League. Back in those days, it was a much coveted step up from Kent League level and, the Isthmian League wasn't at the time segregated into areas such as North or South. It was purely and simply Premier Division and Division One; zonal fixtures for the Division One clubs came a couple of seasons later. The Wanderers did well and even reached the Division One play-offs in their first Isthmian season to see who would join AFC Wimbledon in the Premier Division for the following campaign. Unfortunately, despite going 1-0 up at Horsham in the play-off semi-final, the Hornets stung the Wands with an impressive second half and extra-time display and we ended up going home on the back of a 3-1 defeat. Yes, I was there for that game, as I was too for the most startling game of Cray's season a few months beforehand.
AFC Wimbledon, the club that is now in the Football League, were up and coming at the time and were promoted to the Isthmian League Division One at the same time as Cray. They took the league by storm and soon found themselves heading the pile. By the time they visited Hayes Lane to play the Wands, Wimbledon had gone 78 successive league games without defeat, a run that had started in their pre-Isthmian League days, which could be a non-League record or something close to it. Luckily for me, the game fell on a Saturday afternoon when I was not working one of my shifts, so I was able to travel up to Bromley to bear witness to a game I strangely fancied Cray could win.
It was attended by the biggest crowd of Cray's season, mostly because of the fact that the well-supported phoenix club had brought many of its supporters and, they easily outnumbered the Wands' regulars around the ground. It was a crisp early December afternoon and the game was played mostly under Bromley's floodlights. I had received a request by our club to provide a match report and a photo or two from the game for inclusion in the News Shopper newspaper the following week. Luckily, I managed to snap the early Cray goal scored by James Millar in the second minute but, what with the afternoon atmosphere and from not wearing gloves in the chilled air I completely ballsed up my photo of Sam Wood's brilliant solo goal midway through the second half to make the score 2-0 to Cray!
The final score was 2-0 to the Wands. Our club had blown away the visitors' more than impressive run of undefeated games in one afternoon on 4 December 2004. Sure, the visitors had more than their fair share of chances to equalise when the score was 1-0 and even at 2-0 they could have turned the game around but, it seemed that their players left their scoring boots at home that day.
The 64 miles drive back home for me to the Kent coast that evening was very satisfying. Yes, I was feeling very smug following that win, yet even more so because I was there.
Trevor Mulligan