Cod Almighty | Diary

P57 and P58

29 April 2020

Miss Guest Diary writes: I have mentioned before how I feel sorry for people who don't follow sport, and football in particular. How they are missing out on an amazing emotional rollercoaster of triumph and disaster shared with thousands of other like-minded people. A family of, mostly, strangers who gather together weekly with one aim and one focus: to see their team win.

For committed football fans, the game regulates not just each week during the season – that Saturday afternoon or Tuesday evening ritual of meeting friends, going to the match, discussing the outcome – but the entire year. When one season is over, there's the anticipation of the new fixture list coming out so you can plan trips for the next season. Then there are the pre-season friendlies where you meet up with folks you haven't seen for a couple of months and check out the summer signings. Finally, the new season begins: a blank canvas. This could be the year your team does... whatever it is you hope for. And if they don't, there'll be plenty of shared experiences with your footballing family, both good and bad, along the way.

With the abrupt ending of football around the world last month this experience has simply vanished. Now I feel quite envious of those people who don't 'get' sport. While we are all having to forego anything but essential excursions from home, cancelling a trip to the opera or not being able to see your favourite group at a gig really doesn't compare to losing Town. Nor does reliving old games on iFollow come close to filling the void.

Last Saturday should have been the final game of the season – at home to Oldham. Coincidentally, a home game against Oldham was the last scheduled fixture of the 1997-98 season. That was when football really began to take over my life.

Fresh from the heady experience of the League Trophy final at Wembley, I made the crazy suggestion to my other half that we could get season tickets at Blundell Park. Crazy because we were living in Watford at the time.

With just one home game left in that season – the Oldham game – we decided to have a trial run. Setting off from home at 8 o'clock in the morning, we drove the 185 miles to Cleethorpes in a bit over three hours. All I can remember of the game is that, despite being May, it was perishingly cold and the performance was fairly dismal. The players parading the Autowindscreen Shield around the pitch at the end did little to raise my spirits. A three-hour drive home saw us complete a 12-hour football day.

Had we not had a second Wembley triumph later that month, I think our trial run might have remained just that. But the euphoria of winning the play-off final carried us forward and the following season saw us making the fortnightly 'commute' to Blundell Park. We managed three seasons of that before we cracked and moved to Lincolnshire. And the rest, as they say, is history. We'll be purchasing our 23rd season tickets as soon as they go on sale. What else is there to do?

UTM