This Is How It Feels

I know it’s going to be awful, and it’s going to rain, and be cold, and we’re going to be crap and probably lose.

I wake up on a Saturday thinking these things to myself. The heart sinks at the realisation that I’m skint but I’ve got my season ticket so I have to go.

So we gather ourselves together, look longingly through the window at the beers that the rich ones with jobs are drinking, pre-match, and drag ourselves down Farrar Road.

But as we turn that corner next to the Foulkes garage, and start to head down the tiny alley that frames the turnstiles, things change. A flutter, unwarranted, in the gut. From here the tiniest sliver of the grass is visible, down the side of the tin doors where the mower can get in. Next to the club shop. There’s a merest whiff of ancient parchment; old programmes from The Good Times of three years ago. There’s a hubbub. Before a game everything is possible.

No matter how shit the team’s been this season, no matter how despondent you are, this one-minute final walk before entering the gates of doom still brings something primal out. Because one thing can never be relegated, and that is hope.

A game begins. A game happens. A game ends.

Some jeers and boos, maybe. Or, perhaps, the appreciative applause of ultimately failed, but honest, effort. At best a draw scratched out, another point toward the verdant potential of a new season and a new crack at it. Maybe, maybe even a ropey win. But usually not. Shaking heads. Staring at the floor as we, now in an evening shroud, trudge back down the ginnel. The opposition’s team coach is parked at the top. Younger and angrier amongst us find the rage inside to spit on its wheels. Most of us hardly bother to lift our heads up to acknowledge that we have been conquered, yet again. If we can scrape together enough for a few bottles of Frosty Jack, we’ve got a night of amplified self-hatred ahead. We usually manage it. But for now? For now some of us go up Ffordd Farrar, some for a self-soothing pint, and some of us head the opposite way. As we part, gloomily wishing to be anywhere else, any time else, we nod to each other.

“See you next week.”

“Aye.”

No other option is possible. This is, as the song goes, how it feels. Lonely, small, worthless. But let’s get one thing clear: defeated, skint, cold and dulled we may be, make no mistake that this is our misery.

Anyway, we nearly hit the post when it was still 0-0, didn’t we?