One year, no wins: decimated Dover fight to avoid unwanted anniversary

The Solihull Moors striker Andrew Dallas achieved a personal best on Saturday when he scored all the goals in the 5-0 victory over Dover Athletic. While being on the receiving end of such a feat was painful for Dover, the club could soon register an even less desirable landmark. Failure to beat Eastleigh at home on Tuesday would mean the National League’s bottom side will have gone a full year without winning a match.

Actually, make that nearly two years. Because Dover’s 3-1 victory over Barnet on 26 January 2021 was expunged, along with all their other results from last season, meaning that, officially, their most recent win was the 5-1 triumph over Fylde on 22 February 2020. An amusing piece of trivia, perhaps, but Dover’s woes are no laughing matter. This is a club which had made great progress until the pandemic struck. The table only hints at how things have gone awry: four draws and 20 defeats from 24 matches this season have left them with a points tally of -8.

They began their campaign on -12 points as punishment for not fulfilling fixtures last season, when their chairman, Jim Parmenter, refused to take out a loan to enable his team to play on. Parmenter, who had presided over three promotions since taking over his hometown club in 2005, maintains that, once it became clear that National Lottery grants would only cover the first two months of last season, the responsible course of action would have been for the whole National League to stop until crowds returned. But as a majority of clubs (13) voted to continue, Dover were ordered to toe the line.

“Last season I said I’m not going to put the club in hock for half a million to a million pounds to play games in a nothing season with no crowds and no community