TT GROUNDHOPPING

Matty Hayward – @MattyHayward96

Matty discusses his trip to Hemel

HEMEL (A)

Welsh football fans, beneficiaries of increasingly widening entry requirements for international tournaments, have started singing ‘Yma o Hyd’ before games.

The song’s title, first recorded in 1983, translates literally as “we’re still here”. Its refrain – “despite everyone and everything, we’re still here” – refers to the troubled history of Welshness. Its singer, Dafydd Iwan, mentions by name Roman Emperor Magnus Maximus, and Margaret Thatcher. It’s anthemic. It’s angry. And, while it is specific about who and what the “everything and everyone” are, its chorus can be transposed onto all number of narratives. Today it’s a song of defiance, of nationalism, an antidote to the forces that have tried and continue to try to dismantle Welsh identity: they’re still here.

I’ve thought about this song a lot this season. In fact, the absolute truth is I wrote that introduction on the train down to Tonbridge, but never got round to finishing the article. That day was particularly poignant: 51 weeks after we had been wooped 4-1 by a side containing Ryan Hanson, the Yellows came away 1-0 winners. A clean sheet on a plastic pitch and Matt Jay clicking into gear: it felt like centuries from the unedifying, hopeless, justified spectacle of barking disgruntled ramblings at a non-plussed George Edwards. It really was a different club.

I felt the same at Hemel Hempstead on Saturday. Unity. Hope. And, by the end, a bit drunk.

The journey – the physical one, not the emotional or inebriation one – began on the 7:32 from Newton Abbot. The train was fairly busy without being rammed: think Boreham Wood’s ground in a playoff, not Boreham Wood’s ground when Arsenal women are playing there. The highlight of an otherwise uneventful trip was being offered a cake from a group of London-bound revellers celebrating a man’s fortieth birthday. A bannoffee-type affair went down a treat between swigs of responsible sparkling water.

I like to think of myself as relatively railway-savvy. In fact, I’m the go-to guy in most of my friendship groups because I know my way around the Trainline app AND the RealTimeTrains website. But, on Saturday, I was able to designate all track-based decisions to Keith and Kirsty: the Charles and Diana of GWR, or Network Rail’s answer to Posh n Becks. It was they who suggested we get to Euston via Tottenham Court Road, so it was they who got their way.

Arriving at an away town at half past eleven is, frankly, mad. It was the right call – alternative services would’ve been cutting it too fine for a big game – but it still felt a bit ridiculous. Naturally, we did the only thing we knew how to do: we went to the pub.

Our first stop was The Fishery Inn, a quaint, primarily food-serving, primarily-non-football-fan-serving boozer with an accommodating beer garden. Having formed a trust circle involving some of TUFC’s most illustrious (and most online-active) fans, along with a couple of members of the youth squad, we aired frustrations about – among other things – Dorking supporters, Cody Cooke’s miss at Truro, and Tyler Harvey’s gambling.

It was time to step things up a gear: our group splintered, with a handful chartering Ubers to the Crabtree. This was an establishment that I remembered from my previous trip to Hemel as being overcrowded and having slow service. I don’t blame them for that. However, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that they could’ve put more bar staff on when surely the biggest event that’s happened in Hemel Hempstead since the turn of the decade was going on down the road from them. I’d argue those circumstances were – to coin a phrase – foreseeable.

I’m slightly ashamed to say that, because I wanted to be served before the game finished, I was left with little choice but to join in with the floods of people rushing to the off licence down the road. Sorry, officer. Cans of Stella were consumed in the beer garden without the batting of a single Hertfordshire eye.

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HEMEL (A)

We were in the ground by 2:15pm. While others snaked around a five-a-side pitch, my dad and I found ourselves ushered into an emerging side-queue. This, like everything else at the club on the day, was organised very efficiently. It would’ve been easy for Hemel to take the payday and half-arse the rest, but they got it all basically spot on from what I could see.

The game was the game. Exhilarating. Heartwarming. Initially absolutely crushing. Loud. Cody Cooke, man. Fucking hell. It was enhanced by the joy of standing with surely some of Europe’s funniest men: Cadigan, Baker, Diamond, Diamond’s mate who for reasons unbeknownst to me is called ‘Dodger’, Hayward Sr (don’t worry about his ego being boosted; he won’t read this), others whose faces I knew but names I didn’t, whose jokes and songs I gladly joined in with.

The post-match was perhaps the emotional peak. Singing “we’ve got our club back” – towards board members who love and care about Torquay, surrounded by 2000 other people who love and care about Torquay just as much – was truly special. We were still here. Despite everyone – you know who you are. Despite everything. Still here. If anything, we’re enhanced, more engaged, bigger, better, strong, more powerful.

I imagine, at this point, you’re expecting this article to wind to a close, but it was this return leg of the journey – after establishing that we were absolutely not going to discuss games that we could’ve won or scored more goals in throughout the season – where the away day really wrote itself into the personal annals of history. Sitting at a table with my old man, notorious funnyman and broadcaster Will Taylor, and the best-connected man in the bay, Joe Uglow, it was revealed that the afternoon’s hat-trick hero kept rabbits. House rabbits. This fact, written in plain English in the cold, sober light of day seems… irrelevant? Uninteresting? It may shock you, then, that it formed the basis of pretty much everything we spoke about between 6pm and whenever we were bundled off in Newton.

Songs were written and sung and re-written, adoring DMs were sent, confused DM replies were received. Sculptures at Paddington – which I now learn is called ‘The Wild Table Of Love’ – were found, and its rabbit/hare-like creatures were daubed with Torquay scarves. Hat-trick balls were photographed with said rabbits. Conversations about wearing rabbit ears to the playoffs were had. Those conversations continue: Joe Lovell, if you don’t do it, Sky will.

The rest was fun, too.. There was Uno (renamed Hamon) where every laying of a 7 was met with “I wanna dance with Hasani”, there was a jovial, sprited sing-off on the Lizzy Line between our number and a group celebrating an Asian wedding, and an absolutely splendid execution of the “sorry what was the score mate?” game to a number of subdued Aston Villa fans.

And we’re still here. It’s definitely possible to be silly on an away day when the football is shit – sometimes it’s a welcome distraction – but Saturday goes down as an absolute all-time great because it was allowed to be. It was great because the company and laughter was great, yes, but also because we were allowed to have fun, because we weren’t dreading the next game, dreading the next press release, dreading the end. Because we’re still here.

See you Saturday.