I can’t believe it took me so long to get into non-league football and groundhopping. Having always had a fascination for stadia and a love of football it was a hobby just waiting for me. I used to just get around the ‘92′ following my team - and considered myself a groundhopper then, but I realise now that in limiting myself to the league grounds I was missing out on some of the finer aspects of football - aspects that have been diminishing fast from the league.

Watching non-league football is like going back in time to the football of yore (well - the eighties in my case). There are still old historic stands, grounds pieced together with mismatched but interesting stands, programmes that are still individual to each club, and nearly always a great camaraderie and atmosphere. Non-league football, for me, is much more akin to the original philosophy and tenets of football than the league nowadays, and is a lot more enjoyable for it.

Shrewsbury's New Meadow Stadium. A sparkling new yet completely anonymous League ground.

I used to be a regular fan, watching my team play week in week out. I watched Brighton from the early eighties, when they were in the top flight, and between about 1984 and 1990 barely missed a home game at the wonderful Goldstone Ground. Going down the Goldstone was as routine as getting up for school.

It was in 1990 I got the away bug and a real love for stadia. I’d packed my rucksack and went off to Preston’s Lancashire Polytechnic, 300 miles away from home, but in a football hotspot. At eighteen I’d had a bit of a taster of away games, but only half a dozen or so in the last few years. With this new found independence, a grant, student loan and railcard and a shameful disregard for money, I went to 20 Brighton away games in my first year!

Although I regarded myself as a groundhopper at this stage with a notion of completing the 92, I was vaguely aware of a different sort of groundhopper, in the same mould as trainspotters, the sorts that got together for easter weekends where they’d speed furtively en masse from 11.30 Good Friday to 14 different inconceivably rare non-league fixtures. I was pretty much a one man team though at this stage. If it wasn’t Brighton I wasn’t that interested, finding neutral games generally dull, missing the essential element of fierce passion.

Like a lot of ardent club supporters there were times during that season where I’d have a sudden realisation of what I was doing, like a drug addict coming to terms with his addiction. I distinctly remember having an epiphanic moment at Liverpool Street station;  the only divine thing about it was realising how divinely stupid I was having spent 2 weeks’ living allowance travelling from Preston to Southend for Brighton’s fairly innocuous fixture at Roots Hall.  We’d lost 2-1 in an interminably dull game, and despite scoring a consolation on 84 minutes, had had no further attacks.

This 20 away game season was 1990-91, which is to this day my favourite season. Despite Southend I couldn’t have picked a better time to take leave of my senses and travel everywhere on borrowed money to watch my team. It was one of our best away records ever (9-3-11) and we’d got to the play-offs thanks to the last kick of our season (a free kick by current manager Dean Wilkins). We then did the double over rivals Millwall in the semi-s (6-2 on aggregate). Getting the train to London twice in 10 days, first for the Den and then for Wembley were, for me, essential living costs.

The Goldstone Ground

Despite this depression in Albion’s history there was still something noble about being a loyal fan of theirs. After Preston, I settled in Staffordshire but was still watching them all over the country. Despite almost every away game ending in defeat in these years, there was something edifying and character building about it. I felt like a true supporter, a martyr almost, travelling to places that I only knew from the vidiprinter, that inhabited that strange eldritch world at the bottom of division four - Rochdale, Chester, Halifax, Mansfield, Doncaster, York - I’d seen us lose to all of them.

I’d say from around the turn of the century onwards my patience with league football was starting to wear thin. Since 1993 the Premiership had been slowly poisoning football from the top down, like acid rain, soaking into the roots of football. The greedy demands of a few clubs, who bullied the FA into reneging on one of the defining original principles of football, namely the sharing of revenue between all clubs, had killed top flight football as an interesting and competitive league.

This intangible dictator of football called money was making its presence felt through all the leagues. At some point the gate money to watch Brighton crossed an invisible line between an amount you could laugh at yourself for paying after a bad game, to an amount that wasn’t funny anymore. Watching them would make me angry unless nothing short of a perfect performance was put in. The stadia, even in the bottom two leagues, were starting to look alarmingly smart and uniform, the programmes were no longer individual to each club, the formats all the same and the stats lifted straight from some generic website. Even the drinks all looked and tasted the same in the league, now.

Congleton Town's Booth Street ground.

With there being 40 divisions down to step six, all with around 20 teams in, there is never a shortage of venues. Though you’d be surprised at how many full-time hoppers there are that have completed nearly all of them - it kinds of puts the ‘92′ in perspective! I’m not in a position to reel off grounds at the rate of three a week, but I can never wait for the next game - a new place, new ground and always something different to take away from the afternoon or evening. It no longer matters to me that I don’t have a vested interest in one team - the matches are much more consistently good and entertaining than league football, and it’s quite a relief to be without all that emotional intensity.

Clitheroe FC - Shawbridge

At Brocton recently I was given a complimentary cup of coffee just for being a groundhopper. The hospitality is something that seems to be evident at all grounds in the lower leagues. The clubhouses and bars welcome everybody, glad of the gate money and interest shown in their club. As you wander pitch side you feel part of something great and worthwhile which football, of course, is.

I still watch Brighton occasionally but tend to limit it to previously unseen league grounds. Next up for me is New Mills in Derbyshire, a team sitting top of the Northwest Counties League Division Two, with only one defeat all season. They’re playing a team local to me, Stone Dominoes, who I fancy might cause an upset. A day out in the High Peak to see a new ground for about £4 - this is what football is all about!

The Groundhog is a monthly column about (mostly) non-league groundhopping around England. To read more, pay a visit to the groundhog's website.