Rain stops play again: Arsenal’s trip to Brighton’s Crawley home ends in déjà vu
A second postponement in three years at Broadfield Stadium reignites questions over venue planning, scheduling pressures and the growing cost to travelling supporters
It is 20 minutes past 12 on a rainy Sunday afternoon, and a Southern Rail service from central London has pulled in at Crawley. Adjacent to the station looms an abandoned high-rise building known as Overline House, the brutalist design on show evocative of a different era. The grey concrete blends in with the sky above, the rain continuing to teem down as it seems to have done practically every day in Britain so far in 2026. It is this scene that welcomes the Arsenal fans who had braved the conditions as they travelled to watch their in-form side in the weekend's standout WSL fixture, hoping that their sodden hearts would be warmed by the football on show.
As it turns out, the Arsenal and Brighton fans who had made the trip had done so in vain. I arrived at the Broadfield Stadium mere moments before the postponement was announced. By the time I made it to the media entrance, the match was off. After non-stop rain all morning, the playing surface was deemed unplayable following a pitch inspection. Within five minutes of arriving at the ground, I was back on the bus to Crawley's town centre along with many disappointed fans from both clubs.
For many Arsenal fans, this would have evoked memories of a similar incident in the same fixture three years ago. In January 2023, many supporters made the trip only to be met with the same outcome. The events that followed would form an immortal piece of WSL lore. Ensuring that her team's supporters had not made the trip entirely in vain, Arsenal defender Lotte Wubben-Moy put money behind the bar for "cranberry juice and crisps" at the New Moon pub where fans had gathered, so that they could make an afternoon of their trip by having a few drinks while watching what would turn out to be a dramatic win for the men's team against Manchester United.
Farah Chowdhury, chair of the Arsenal Women Supporters Club, was in Crawley that day and recalls the sense of community on display at a time when the fan culture we are now used to seeing at Arsenal women's games was first starting to blossom. "It was annoying, but I think everyone just had a bit of a laugh with it."
Farah did not make the trip to West Sussex this time around, but suggests that while there was a sense of novelty and can-do attitude last time, the disappointment on this occasion is more acute. "I don't think there's that much excuse for it at the moment." In Wubben-Moy's aforementioned post, she went on to mention that changes need to be made, and yet, over three years on, here we are again.
Your mileage may vary in terms of where fault lies here, if anywhere at all. It is of course understandable that football fans who have been denied the opportunity to watch their team, while being left soaked and out of pocket, would want to pinpoint the exact problem to ensure that situations like this are kept to a minimum. Chowdhury suggests that Brighton's main stadium, the Amex, could have hosted the match. While it is true that logistical planning when it comes to ground-sharing between a club's men's and women's teams can be tricky, Brighton would have known five weeks in advance that the stadium was free on this particular weekend after their men's team were drawn away from home in the fourth round of the FA Cup.
Of course, where Brighton play their home games is their prerogative. They have used the Amex just four times since the start of last season, with their average attendance there of 5,500 roughly on a par with the capacity at the Broadfield Stadium. Perhaps, if the match had gone ahead yesterday, the rougher conditions would have benefited them more than Arsenal, who struggled on difficult pitches last season.
Besides a change of venues, there probably isn’t much that could have been done here. To borrow an immortal line from ArsenalFanTV’s Taiwo Ogunlabi, affectionately known has Ty, we must remember that it’s been raining. Could a decision to postpone the match have been announced earlier? Sure, but you are always going to be second guessing what conditions will follow if you make a call hours ahead of time. Some of it is plain bad timing, with this match sandwiched between dryer, brighter conditions on both the Saturday and the Monday.
We must also acknowledge the fact that player safety has to be the guiding principle here. In the men's game the same afternoon, an FA Cup tie between Grimsby Town and Wolves took place on a mud bath of a pitch that looked like something straight out of the 1970s. What sort of advert would it have been for the league if a WSL match had taken place in similar conditions? Lest we forget the disgraceful, dangerous conditions that met Arsenal and Real Madrid when their women's Champions League quarter-final went ahead on a muddy, waterlogged pitch 11 months ago.
On the footballing side of things, the most pressing implications of this postponement are the scheduling headaches it causes. The WSL deliberately do not dedicate any midweeks to full rounds of fixtures, instead keeping dates free to avoid a fixture pileup in the event of postponed matches. That said, assuming Arsenal progress to the Champions League quarter-finals (they lead Leuven 4-0 going into the home leg of their play-off tie this Wednesday), there will be no room in the calendar to reschedule this game until April. Thanks to their recent involvement in the Fifa Champions Cup, their home match against Leicester has already had to move to the end of April, meaning that, barring further postponements, Arsenal will have two games in hand on their rivals in the race for the Champions League spots going into the penultimate month of the season. They are currently four points adrift of third-place Chelsea, but know seven wins from their final eight matches would mathematically guarantee a top-three spot. Should they reach the Champions League semi-finals, a further two of their WSL fixtures would have to be moved.
Unlike in January 2023, Arsenal fans did not hang around for a cranberry juice and crisps in Crawley, with the match being called off a little earlier in the day this time. True to form, however, Wubben-Moy once again stepped up to look out for the fans, inviting those who purchased match tickets to enter a prize draw for a signed shirt. Hopefully, this is the last time the defender has to make a gesture of goodwill as a way of reimbursing some fans, but who can say for sure? After all, this is a fixture that has taught us to expect anything. Anything, that is, but the football itself.
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