I made a late decision yesterday afternoon to go to Champion Hill and watch the promotion showdown between Dulwich Hamlet and Fulham FC Women. Despite the Whites’ narrow defeat that looks to have handed Hamlet the chance to go up from the London and South Eastern Regional Premier Division, I didn’t regret the choice as much as having trekked to Nottingham to watch Marco Silva’s put in one of the most abject defensive displays from a Fulham side in recent times.

If you’ve watched any non-league football over the years, you’ll be familiar with how Dulwich Hamlet like to do things differently. Supporter-owned, family-focused and affordably priced, their unique brand of terrace humour, idealistic irreverence and communitarianism has proven popular in recent years and the club’s embrace of their women’s side is arguably the very best bit. The Pepper Army, a lively collection of enthusiastic supporters, made it their mission to evangelise about the beauty of watching Ryan Dempsey’s swashbuckling side – and they’ve lit up grounds up and down the division with their imitable backing. Spicy, it certainty is.

The exhortations of the Pepper Army certainly don’t hinder Hamlet’s progress on the pitch. They also deliver fans in large numbers. Without the base of a massive stadium or lavish facilities like Fulham, Dulwich have regularly attracted in excess of 400 fans – and, last night, for a pivotal promotion battle, they were 642 supporters in attendance (and four dogs, as the club’s amusing official Twitter feed declared, during the game). The atmosphere was electric, but not contrived, and were the Whites were a little ponderous, Dulwich dominated proceedings from the outset and fully deserved their two-goal half-time lead, which proved decisive.

Women’s football has overgone a huge boom since the success of the Lionesses a couple of summers ago – but it still attracts snobbery from some quarters. Even the WSL – launched decades too late to match Mohamed Al-Fayed’s attempts to make Fulham a professional force – relied on the passion of their supporters to get off the ground. Dulwich have the right blend of pride and high performance: their fanatical supporters roar on their players and drink pints with them afterwards, but they make the matches fun afternoons and evenings, supporting local charity initiatives at the same time as local business and a tight-knit squad clearly feels empowered to achieve remarkable things. Hamlet are helped by having fabulous footballers like a fearless goalkeeper in Saskia Reeves-Priestley, the excellent defender Erin Corrigan and the incomparable Summer Roberts, who Fulham foolishly let go last summer, but you also get the sense they are playing for more than mere points.

The game, especially at this level, is in need of some innovative thinking. There’s still only one ticket out of this division, which seems exceptionally half when three strong sides in Dartford, whom Fulham face at Craven Cottage on Sunday afternoon, and the Whites. But Fulham shouldn’t be discouraged: they should embrace the Dulwich blueprint in a bid to turbo-change their own upward aspirations. The Whites have a squad to be proud of, skippered by lifelong fan Mary Southgate who passed 150 appearances for the club earlier this year, with plenty of promising talent coming through a revamped youth system but seem to hindered by a lack of corporate ambition.

All the ingredients are there for the women’s Whites to thrive. They have the base of a couple of hundred fans who regularly watch matches at Motpsur Park, without much promotion. They have stars like Sasha Adamson, Sophie Manzi and stalwarts such as Chloe Christison-McNee, Becky Stormer and Lily Lambird. None of these players are household names: but their desire and application deserves wider recognition. This weekend at the Cottage, with thousands of fans in attendance, will show that there’s an audience if the club truly took up the cudgels. It may take a movement – and the Fulham Lillies are doing laudable work in furthering the interests of female fans – but Fulham’s deserve so much more from the powers-that-be. Just a fraction of the marketing budget being directed to Fulham FC Women would prove a game changer.