Welling United

Gillingham arrived at Park View Road for a first-round FA Cup tie in 1989–90 as a Football League side facing non-league opposition, and left beaten, in front of the largest crowd the ground has held. The record stands to this day. A season earlier Welling United had gone further still, reaching the third round before Blackburn Rovers ended the run — the high-water mark of a club that spent fourteen seasons, from 1986 to 2000, in the Football Conference.

Syd Hobbins, a goalkeeper who had played for Charlton Athletic, set the club up in 1963 as an under-15 side in the Eltham & District Sunday League. Senior status came in 1976 with entry to the London Spartan League, and within a year the club had moved into Park View Road, a ground it inherited from Bexley United after that club folded. The Wings, as they became known, won the Southern League Premier Division in their first full season of note, 1985–86, then had to wait until 2012–13 for another title of that rank, the Conference South, which returned them to the top tier of non-league football. They went back down to the National League South in 2016.

Terry Robbins scored more than anyone else who has worn the shirt, his goals spanning 1986 to 1994, the same years that carried the club through its Conference era. Steve Finnan started here too, arriving in 1993 after Wimbledon let him go as a teenager, before a career that took him to Anfield. Dartford supply the fixture still called the Kent derby; Bromley and Ebbsfleet United fill out the list of matches that matter more than the table suggests.

Gillingham never got a replay. Park View Road, still Welling's home more than four decades on, saw to that.