Record Crowd Sees Peckham Draw Stonewall Friendly

Peckham Town played the second of their 2023/24 pre-season friendlies with a Friday night match under the sunlight, as a beautiful July evening provided the perfect stage for the first football of the Frendschaft weekend celebrating the historic links between Peckham’s south London neighbours Dulwich Hamlet and Altona 93 of Hamburg.

As many as a hundred or so visitors from Hamburg were joined by Menace regulars and hardcore Hamlet (there being much overlap between the latter two of course) as well as a sizeable contingent representing Stonewall. Queues for food and drink were long - the attending Altona players doing their bit by paying in slow individual succession for single bottles of water - but the mood was universally buoyant.

Having missed the defeat to Hassocks a week earlier, this was my first game of the season. As any fan will tell you, first games back are always special, and this evening was a wonderful example of its kind. If pre-season friendlies for the players are for getting back into the groove and reconnecting with muscle memories made distant by summers on the beach, for fans there is also the picking up of old routines that define lives for so much of the year before melting away as early summer takes hold. As well as the usual joy of being back in familiar surroundings after the long break, fans delighted in the novelty of convening with three other sets of supporters, including many old friends some not seen for much longer than the end of last season.

The ground resounded to warm greetings and new introductions, to the happy re-telling of old tales, to old hands giving tours to those adding a new ground to their list; in a word, to Freundschaft.

As to the action on the pitch, I’ll be honest I paid less attention. Stonewall looked the trimmest I’ve ever seen a side at this stage of the season, and dealt well with Peckham’s energy. Their goal on the break in the first half (was it on the break? is that why I barely caught it? was it even in the first half…?) was well deserved for the control they exerted over proceedings, and the home side - for all their possession and territory - probably couldn’t have complained had things stayed at 1-0. But Kieran Dowding had other ideas, so determined was he not to be one the losing side; a couple of sighters towards the end of the second half got his eye in for the stunning 25 yard free kick he sent over the wall and into the corner of the net with just a couple of minutes of the game remaining.

That this game was about much more than the action on the pitch was summed up by so many of the record attendance of 283 staying long after the final whistle to celebrate old friendships and cement new ones. Most were also part of the 900+ gathered at Champion Hill a day later to see Altona’s players - no doubt still nicely hydrated on the Peckham Spring so painstakingly bought at the Menace Arena - reclaim the Pa Wilson Trophy with a 2-1 win. But this was about so much more than the match, than the score. This was about reconnecting, with football, with routine, with friends. As a beginning to the weekend, and to the season ahead, no one at the Menace Arena could have asked for anything more.