As part of my “2026 Bingo” card, I set myself the challenge of reading twenty-five books. Something that shouldn’t be that difficult. I like books. I have lots of them. I just tend not to actually read them, leaving them as offerings to the Bookshelf God. They look good on the shelf, and make any visitors think that I read a lot. This year, I am trying to prove them right.

Thus far, I have completed two books. “This Way Up”, by Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones. Those who frequent the geographical corners of Youtube will know them better as the Map Men, a couple of Brits playfully providing educational information about maps, in a dead-pan manner and lots of silly gags and word-play. The book follows that format, with lots of puns and one-liners interspersed with knowledge. I started reading it in the departure lounge at Heathrow, and had to stop as my cheeks hurt, I had tear of laughter running down my face, and people were staring. Highly recommended.

The second one was a novel by Matt Coyne, “Frank And Red”. It follows the story of Frank, a tremendously anti-social widower, and his new six-year old neighbour, Red. The book is written from both their perspectives in alternate chapters, and is heart-warming and heart-wrenching in equal measure. Coyne is another author whose work I enjoy. His first book, “Man vs Baby” chronicles his entry into parenthood, and is side-splittingly hilarious. I met him at a festival in 2021, and due to a combination of Matt’s personable nature and the confusion of the agent for the festival, he got me backstage at the literary stage where he was subject of a Q&A. I had only been behind the scenes at a festival once before – Download Festival, 2002, long story – and so we got to watch the stars of Drag Queen Bingo get themselves ready, and I had some free cider. Which may also provide some favourable bias towards his work.

And now, I am on book three. For Christmas, I was given a twenty-pound gift card for Waterstones. A shopping expedition to Reading allowed me to nip in a spend the money. Two books were obtained. One is “Why We Love Baseball” by Joe Posnanski, which I have lined up to read next – am hoping the book is set-up nicely by the title. The other book, and the one that I wanted to get stuck into first, was “Worst Game Ever – Journeys Into The Agony Of Defeat” by Phil Harrison. Accounts of defeats from supporters perspectives, all of which had seismic affects on a club’s future, it scratches a particular itch that all football, or even sports fans, suffer from. Not every fan supports Barcelona, or watches their team collect trophies like Pokemon cards. For the majority of supporters, sporting life is utterly average at best. There isn’t an endless wave of ecstasy or despair, it’s just…mundane. Win a few, lose a few, draw a few. Sigh, grumble about the game, then see you again next week.

For myself, sometimes my brain yearns to suffer as a sports fan. I’ve been to games where I have almost enjoyed the misery. There’s nothing quite like a cold, rainy January evening watching two teams boring everyone in the pitiful attendance, going through the motions. It’s not even always about the result, I just want my suffering to be justified by those on the pitch in front of me. Defeats will linger longer, personally, than the victories. I am not the kind of person who lets a defeat at the weekend affect my entire week – I’m not the kind of person that Sky Sports markets their product at, who thinks of nothing other than football – but I will profess to having defeats sit in my head a lot longer than a victory.

Supporting the clubs I do does tend to make me philosophical about losses, especially as there have been so many of them. My fledgling footballing “career” was littered with awful teams. A Polish Sunday team, formed by an old school friend and where I played over 100 times (the most in the clubs history – I was also club historian), saw a number of the biggest score-lines I have seen in a match. It was two years before we won a game. As the teams keeper, I was at the centre of the action most weeks, with the split between me saving efforts on goal, and then picking them out of the back-of-the-net roughly 50:50. My last attempt at organised football – a five-a-side team formed out of a brief dalliance with walking football – resulted in similar score lines, and a similar role in those results. And I was comfortable with all that. I saved a few, let in a few more, but I was content. That was my role.

As a supporter, I am also content with this. I am not a person who naturally likes the spotlight, which is how I like my teams as well. I do think that I revel it. Hendon Football Club, the team my dad took me to when I was young and impressionable, are incredibly average. Famous in non-league circles in the amateur days, once players at that level started getting paid, their fortunes declined. Yet from their foundation in 1908 until 2025 the club have never moved up or down. Never promoted, never relegated. Sure, a couple of times they finished in relegation zones after the season’s end, yet were saved by other teams financial problems in other parts of the country. A few play-off runs ended in final defeat – one at home to Margate following an early red-card that was overturned following video evidence after the game (a novel concept at this level); the other a penalty shoot-out defeat to Dulwich Hamlet, a game I was so mentally exhausted watching that the penalties didn’t really even register. Everything else in the 117-years, average. A few cup runs, a few relegation scraps, but nice and safe every year.

Until last season, when the problems faced by a fully supporter-owned club with an aging fanbase in an area of North London already fully-loaded with other football clubs from all levels came home. A managerial departure at the end of November, players being picked off by other clubs, and a spectacular loss of form and confidence sent us spiralling to our first relegation in the club’s history. It seemed inevitable in the end, and it was sad that a club that so many people had given their time for had gone down with barely a whimper.

It isn’t like I haven’t seen Hendon lose before, and in desperate fashion. A trawl of the memory-banks reminds me of a defeat in my second time watching them, a 3-0 home defeat to Wokingham Town that ended a season-opening unbeaten run at game number twenty-two. FA Cup upsets followed in the early 1990s, a 2-1 defeat at home to Baldock Town (featuring a soon-to-be-famousish Kevin Phillips), was followed the next year by a staggeringly awful 1-0 defeat at local rivals Wembley. In between, I witnessed a 5-0 home defeat to Woking that felt like a celebration – the Claremont Road ground had been locked by the local council the previous week for various financial problems, so even the battering handed out by a rampant Woking team didn’t really matter in the long-run. The final game at Claremont Road in 2008, a 4-1 loss to local rivals Wealdstone, a club well-accustomed to ground troubles, was an awful way to see the old ground out.

And yet, our defeat to Kingstonian at our newish home, Silver Jubilee Park, yesterday was arguably our worst ever defeat. When we have had big defeats in the past, it has at least been at a higher standard of football. This is the lowest level the club has operated at, and the performance sank to match that level. Kingstonian – another club used to playing in a higher level, who have also had their own ground and ownership problems this century – are like a Hendon, a club who have seen better days in black and white. They dismantled Hendon in the second half. Simple skills were lacking, along with discipline, morale, coherence, purpose, ability and all the other things required to win a football match. Four-nil, could have been a lot more but for the hosts goalkeeper, who was often fighting a King Canute like rear-guard action all by himself. At full-time, I booed. I don’t ever remember doing that before.

As a small club, the money isn’t there to go and get a thirty-goal-a-season striker in, or a gnarled, battered centre-half, ready to kick anything that enters his personal space. They rely on players graciously being loaned to them by clubs further up the food-chain, and freebie signings, a combination of wet-behind-the-ears youngsters, and veterans with “have boots, will travel” plastered across their CVs. So the quality isn’t always there, which I can cope with and understand. And once defeat follows defeat follows defeat, confidence in ones own ability evaporates. Every touch has to be extra sure, every decision has to be over-thought and before you know it, nerves start to creep in, mistakes are made and pounced upon. Defeat follows defeat….

All of that, I can accept. Can’t win them all. But it would be nice if mistakes made are learned upon, and not repeated on a regular basis. The players over-compensate on the “trying hard” stakes, resulting in yellow and red cards being handed out to players like party invites. One player, already serving a suspension, managed to get himself red-carded whilst sitting on the bench on Saturday for offering the assistant referee his opinion on some of his decisions. Remarkable really.

The feeling was that the only thing saving us from relegation down into the Abyss of County League football is four teams being even worse than us for the rest of the season. Considering Kingstonian were, according to the league table, one of those teams, I will keep any level of confidence fairly low. When my eight year old daughter, not known for generally having an opinion on the standard of football offered in front of her – she is usually attempting to make friends, or find an area to cartwheel around – said “that was really, horrifically, terrible”, then things must be bad. As well as suggesting I should probably not put her through this level of trauma at her age.