Cod Almighty | Diary

Football isn't coming home because it's never gone away

13 July 2018

The party is almost over. Just two games left. One that no-one cares about, but that we'll probably watch anyway, out of habit or a determination to drain the last knockings from the cup. Another that can never hope to bear the weight of expectation.

The TV producers are already preparing their end-of-tournament montages of the best bits. They always fill Middle-Aged Diary with sadness. Football isn't coming home. It's been and it's gone. If you missed it, it's too late now.

If the World Cup is a festival, it shouldn't end with one game: 22 players bearing the weight of the planet on their shoulders. Why not run the tape backwards? Let's have Croatia and France kick off the tournament, then build up from there, a stem dividing into many branches until it gives rise to a flowering of football: a multitude of matches everywhere, with players from all the continents playing with freedom.

Perhaps it will. The schools break up for the summer soon. Let the parks resound with a thousand mini-World Cups in every town. Then in three weeks the League season starts, and that really is the most joyous day of the football year, when there is everything to play for. No hope is so wild that it will not be entertained, nor even so wild that it won't survive that first, 90-minute brush with reality. Saturday 4 August is the day when football really does come home.

Until then, we have friendlies. And the Lincolnshire County Cup, a competition which really would benefit from being played backwards, as it is treated with slightly less regard each round, even as the teams still involved approach its final. In the quarter-final, Town have been drawn to play Cleethorpes, again. Next Wednesday, the day after we play a friendly against Sunderland. The Owls might be fancying their chances of a rare friendly-and-Lincolnshire-Cup double.

Unlikely to participate either against Sunderland or Cleethorpes is Elliott Whitehouse, who BBC Humberside are reporting has picked up a serious injury. That reduces Michael Jolley's midfield options to just six fit players, slim pickings admittedly compared with when Hurst/Bignot/Slade went on a three-man mission to ensure every journeyman midfielder in England saw the training facilities at Cheapside, but hardly a cause for hysteria.

Whitehouse, meanwhile, is preparing to fill the psychologically essential role of club permacrock. When the hopes invested in 4 August do finally begin to subside, there he will be for us to project onto him our expectations ("it'll be like signing a new player" as he returns to fitness) and our fears (he'll be "stealing a wage"). Naturally, we wish him all the best.