The characters in the crowd who bring life to non-league football

You might not know their names but you’ll miss those familiar faces on the terraces once they’re gone

By Harry Pearson for When Saturday Comes

Scoreline Man sat a couple of rows down from me at a non-league ground I visit half a dozen times a year. He had a face as crumpled and weather-beaten as an aged conker and always wore the same dove grey, Velcro-fasten, wide-fit loafers. In my mind I called him Cosy Shoe Man. On arrival and departure we nodded to one another, or raised our eyebrows and tilted back our heads in rueful acknowledgement of a scrappy 0-0, or an unfortunate defeat.

The only time we spoke came after one of those, an egregious 0-3 in which the home side struck the woodwork so often in the second period it was practically a drum roll. “Unlucky,” I said. Cosy Shoe Man pulled a face. “One of those results that in no way reflects the scoreline,” he replied in a low nasal tone. After that I thought of him as Scoreline Man. For a dozen years Scoreline Man was a small fixture in my life. Then one matchday he wasn’t there. He wasn’t there the next time I went either, nor the next and soon his absence had ceased to be noteworthy, a broad loafer print slowly faded.

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