That left "The Barber" on 105 matches for the season and 5,237 all told.

I saw my first match at Redhill’s old ground on the Brighton Road way back in 1961. If I remember rightly, we’d gone to see Palace v Hull at Selhurst Park but found it called off due to a waterlogged pitch. There was still time, we calculated, to catch a train via Purley to Redhill and take in most of Redhill’s match with Southall in the old Athenian League.

The Reds were already 1-0 up when we got there on a very damp Saturday afternoon. They went on to win 4-1 and Tony Williams, later the doyen of non-League football, scored twice. At ten years of age I was still obsessed with League football and must have confused those other fans standing near the tea hut with my shouts of "Come on, Reading!"

Not Reading…Redhill!

They ended up being my second team after Palace and they had some good players from the mid-‘60s to mid-‘70s. I saw them win the Surrey Senior Cup against Sutton at Tooting and the Athenian League Cup against Dagenham at Slough and Walton & Hersham at Leatherhead. I especially remember an Amateur Cup tie when we were 2-1 down at Horsham and hit both the bar and the post in stoppage time. More like heart-stoppage time.

I saw them clinch the last Athenian League title at Marlow in 1984 and soon after that they had to leave the Memorial Sports Ground. It was all very sad – but at least they kept going. Last Saturday the poor old Reds lost 3-2 at Eastbourne Town after being 2-0 up at half-time. They are now a Surrey club that plays in the Sussex County League.

It was still sunny, though cold, on Sunday morning as Town’s youth side took on Hastings United before a crowd of 28. Town opened the scoring in the second minute but there could have been an avalanche of goals at the other end after that. Hastings knocked in four and would surely have doubled that tally with steadier shooting.

The most unusual international match I’ve been to is probably St Lucia v Grenada in a tournament on Barbados.

Last night I saw South Korea play Greece at Craven Cottage with my friend Cris Freddi, author of the best-selling novel "Pelican Blood". Lee Chun Soo’s free-kick ripped into the Greek net with ten minutes to go and it won a highly entertaining match.

In the first minute the ball was passed out to the Korean right-winger and thousands of people were screaming and crying and holding their hands in front of their faces. I’d never experienced fanaticism like that at a football match before. It was a bit different to the Saffrons!