Another Trophy double at the weekend, featuring ties at Uxbridge and Fisher Athletic, has brought the superfan up to 5,585 matches.

Before that there was an FA Cup replay at a chilly Victoria Road, home of Dagenham & Redbridge.

I’d been very close to going to Grays’ replay with Carlisle. That was abandoned after 20 minutes due to floodlight failure, so Daggers v Hereford turned out to be the right choice. I thought the home side deserved to win (it was 2-1) and they earned themselves an intriguing away tie at Leicester. I’ve now been to a total of 60 First Round ties in my sparkling career.

Uxbridge’s ground is quite easy to get to from Paddington, being just a 15-minute walk from West Drayton station, but it was only my second ever visit to Honeycroft for a Reds’ home game. I did go to a special match at their previous ground in Cleveland Road, though – it was Uxbridge against an FA Amateur XI in 1971 to mark the club’s centenary.

I was doing the FA team’s expenses and I think we won 2-1. Roger Connell played.

Saturday’s Trophy opponents were Dorchester Town. The Dorset side were a goal up in six minutes through a penalty for handball (pictured above) and proceeded to look exactly like a team two levels higher in the pyramid. Then Uxbridge scored twice in ten minutes, both with shots from distance, and it proved to be enough to win the tie.

There was an unusual stoppage early in the second half. The referee saw an unfamiliar face in the home side’s No.15, at that moment tussling with a Dorchester defender who has played in the World Cup for St Kitts & Nevis, and showed him a yellow card for coming on as a sub without telling him.

The attendance was 110, the lowest of the round, so I made up 0.9% of the crowd – as opposed to the normal 25 per cent.

There was snow outside early on Sunday morning. Then there was an hour or so of torrential rain as the sky went black. It didn’t look promising, but at least it was dry when I left the hotel wearing five layers. I couldn’t get a Circle or District line tube to Victoria, or an overground train from Victoria to Denmark Hill, but I was inside Champion Hill Stadium nearly an hour before the start of Fisher Athletic v Havant & Waterlooville.

There was only one way into the ground and that was barely a foot wide. The person who took my £10 was a little girl of about 12.

The programme, which had a big picture of a piranha on the front cover, was only a pound. Fisher, aka 'The Fish', had just lost a clutch of first-team players and their new line-up did well to keep the score respectable (0-2).