Read what Ben Clasper had to say in his programme notes ahead of our National League South clash with Chelmsford City from the Tuesday night.

Death, taxes, National League disputes and losing to Oxford City are life’s certainties at Dulwich Hamlet or were I should say after an enthralling encounter on Saturday chalked off the fourth of those.

To say we arrive at Marsh Lane these days with low expectations is an understatement, fans roll off the bus resigned to their fate and resembling my dog, Betty on a trip to the vet, only with slightly less visible trembling (Betty, not the fans). It’s not unjustified. This isn’t just a fixture we lose home and away, it’s a fixture in which we’ve often contrived to come third in a two-horse race.

Rocking up with a new manager for the first time naturally did create some rabble-shaped ripples of optimism that perhaps things could and would be different but those ripples were quickly smoothed away by the wave of blue and white hoops that shot out of the blocks and pressed their way into a lead after half an hour with a goal that in all fairness to our hosts could easily by then have been their second or third.

This time, instead of sinking beneath those waves, we rode them. This time it would be different, we would finally come home with a point, a beautiful single point that had finally burst the seemingly ever-inflating zero-shaped bubble of points earned to date in this match-up at this level.

As strange as it was to arrive home with that point from Oxford even stranger was our arrival time in Dulwich being before 5pm thanks to the League moving the kick off time to 12.30pm to avoid a potential clash if England had been playing in the Netherlands vs USA World Cup TV slot. Next weekend, not content with moving us to 12.30pm again the League have also moved us to Sunday and the reason is once again TV with our game at Braintree set to be the first National League South game broadcast live. What makes this unnerving though is these ‘exceptions’ come in the same week that the League announced the start of their ‘centralised’ streaming platform, despite not yet making any details available to clubs about how it works.

I am reserving judgment, but I feel we are being softened up for when the first large clubs in the division above ask the obvious question, ‘What is the point of a streaming platform when the law prohibits streaming of games at 3pm on a Saturday?’. If you need a change in the law or a change in the kick-off times there will only be one outcome and it is a precedent we should be extremely worried about.

This is non-league football and the guarantee of games on Saturday at 3pm is our lifeblood and a key differentiator from the professional game above. If the exceptions of this week and next are allowed to drip, drip their way to becoming the norm then the journey to the dark side will be complete. That is not a criticism of league football, which I happen to love, or clubs that fight hard to achieve promotion to league football, which I look on with nothing but admiration, but there will be nothing to admire if all those wonderful, big former league clubs currently gracing the non-league system find themselves back in the league because league football expands to absorb them again in the 5th tier rather than them achieving promotion back to the 4th tier.

There have always been people involved in the National League who want to see it become the bottom of the football league system rather than the top of the non-league pyramid but for the first time in history more than half the clubs in the division above are former league clubs and thanks to the failure of the League to address the imbalance of voting rights a block vote in the division above that approves a model that benefits that minority would be imposed on the majority at our level however damaging that model is to those smaller clubs. I always embrace progress but it must be for the good of the many, not the few and we, more than most clubs, know first-hand how serious the consequences can be when people act selfishly without considering the risk to our club.

The ex-league clubs make no secret of the fact that they consider the EFL their real home and they are all just visitors in our non-league home. I love visitors coming to stay, I welcome them, they bring excitement and variety, but I don’t let them redecorate my house while they are here.

I guess I have more chance of chalking off death or taxes next.