The ice falls from the sky like so many tiny pieces of shrapnel. I pull my coat over my head. Why the fuck am I doing this? Bloomfield Road is gloomy and oddly quiet. There's a lack of match day energy. A mother in a lightweight and sodden white jacket leans into the wind. Her kids skip through the hail as if it's somehow a game. She looks so thin and cold.
The Bloomfield Club should be preserved forever. If it ever closes, it must go to Beamish. The light is warm, the wood panelling a comforting call back to a time that might loosely evoke 'childhood' or 'before things were like they are now and the world was mediated by people who maybe no longer are with us who smelled of fag smoke and leather.' The mirrored back room reflects us back at ourselves, the conviviality doubled by the second image. The talk is calm. The chat is resigned. We accept our fate. We expect little. It's easier that way.
The team is picked by bingo numbers we joke. There's no need to even analyse it. It makes no sense to seek meaning in the random. People spot patterns to make meaning. There is no pattern in randomness. That's the point. There's no pattern in the selections. There's no pattern of play. Just an aging fella and his mate hoping to hit the jackpot in a lucky dip. The team selection as lottery numbers. Mystic Meg is dead. Mystic Mick hasn't got the same ring to it.
---
Smoke channels towards the heavens. As send offs go, this is a pretty fucking good one. A fog of tangerine. A name ringing out around the ground. This is us. This is a goodbye. I don't know Tony, but everyone is once removed from someone who knows someone who does. That's how it is. We're massive. We're the biggest, best, most beautiful club in the world, but it's a tight knit thing as well. A tatty seaside town. A stubborn, brilliant and strange place. The night air, so cold and hostile outside is now imbued with an unknowable magic. Grief hurts. It's not my grief. It's not my place to claim any understanding of Tony or his loss but to air sorrow and to share in that is a basic human need and Bloomfield Road tonight is a church, a henge, a clearing in the woods where people gather. We live, we die. We need to belong and what is clear is that Tony belonged somewhere and that is something that matters in a way that goes far beyond the language we normally use to talk about football.
Talking of football - I barely remember to shout 'C'mon POOL!!!' at kick off. Around me gallows humour abounds. 'Another footballing feast for the senses?' Oh, how we chuckle. What are we doing here?
Fiorini the flick knife is sharp as the edge of a blade in the first few minutes. Clever first time touches. Bustling and weaving into little gaps. Giving, going. I like him. Oh, what could have been if he'd stayed fit I think. Now here's CJ. Why would you pick CJ? I know he's fast but he never matches that with impact. CJ shoves the thought back down my brainstem to wherever thoughts originate from by doing his full back with a burst of speed and then a cut back. Chaos. Handball! Handball! A WHISTLE!!!
Fuck me! We've got a penalty. The ref takes forever explaining something to one of their players. Why, I don't know. Maybe they're discussing a surprising shared interest they've just discovered, like say, collecting coins of the reign of Edward the 2nd... as I was under the impression a ref could say 'It's a handball, now fuck off' about footballing questions... Rogers waits on the spot as if protecting it from any skulduggery. Jerry lurks. I used to allude to his Slavic looks by suggesting he was a Russian Army sniper, but times have changed and that's enough to get me kicked off Match of the Day now. I hope he's still got the rifle sights though...
BANG! TOP CORNER. MAYHEM. I DID NOT EXPECT THIS!
How long to go? Only a mere 87 minutes to protect this lead...
Jimbo down the line. Jerry comes deep, a deft touch of snooker ace kissing one at angle into a side pocket... Rogers with a slide rule pass. CJ again... CJ with muscle, purpose, pace, determination, shrugs the man off the ball and cuts back and YESSSSSSSSS! ANDY LYONS!!!! TWO! YES!
How long left? 80 something minutes and an extra goal. We can do this. Maybe. Fucking hell. I'm almost more worried than we started about what the score will be cos it will hurt to fuck this up.
A free kick is lumped forward. The keeper comes. The keeper spills. Nelson turns and scuffs the ball in. The ref will blow. The refs always blow on us for stuff like this. There's no whistle. Has he given it? I check the linesman. I check the other linesman for good measure. I think he's given it! HE HAS! THREE?!! FUCKING HELL????!!!!!
How long left. 75 minutes. For fuck's Pool. Don't blow this. Please. Don't blow this.
Super Jimmy Husband has deserved a song for so long that I should give up on pointing it out - he makes a good block as QPR decide they might want to do something about being 3-0 down. That aside, we're good. There's little flicks and tricks. There's movement. There's a hunger for the ball and most tellingly, there's a sense that when we lose it, we know what to do and we've got a fair chance of getting it back. When we get it back, we do a passable impression of having a plan to get it towards the other end of the pitch that has more variance than simply 'boot it'
A corner. The lad next to me says 'This is the fourth' - I don't know why, but I believe him. It makes no sense seen as we're not very big and we are really bad at corners but something about his certainty speaks to the way that sometimes, you can feel a goal before it happens. The skinny underfed kid Patino puts it exactly where Thorniley is going to be... there's a gap, the ball comes from one angle, Jud from the other and then the net is full and the ground is delirious and the not-so-super-hoops are looking at each other and I'm hammering the seats in front of me and laughing in delight.
WE CAN'T SURELY FUCK THIS UP FROM HERE? CAN WE? I'm still nervous. Even though it appears that QPR have accidentally been involved in a terrible mix up and loaded a random group of lads onto their team bus whilst the actual team end up doing whatever the lads who've turned up should have been doing, like, I dunno, standing about smoking tabs between brief spells fixing a sewer pipe on a busy street or whatever gangs of about 11 lads might do... I'm still nervous.
They score. I can't decide if it's Fiorini getting carried away and hitting a not quite Hollywood pass (a Bollywood pass?) that dies just before it sets CJ away or whether it's CJ waiting for it and not reading that he needs to come a yard shorter and compete for it but they're out, up the right hand side, we're all desperately chasing, CJ nearly intervenes, but he doesn't quite and a cut back and a simple finish.
Fucks sake. Just before half time. Why is football like this? If we'd just gone 3-0 up at this point, we'd be feeling more comfortable than we do after they draw it back to 4-1. The maths is the same but the feeling is different.
---
I need a sit down. I don't quite know how to process this.
---
QPR are out early. Ainsworth has clearly had a strong word and he shuffles out behind them as if disowning them. From this distance he looks like a cross between a normal bloke and an actor playing Frankenstein's monster in a rock opera directed by Ozzie Osborne part way through dressing for the role. I'd probably be scared of him if I was in a confined space, so I fully expect QPR to be better.
They aren't. Rogers is at them. He's been great - he can run in straight lines and jink and turn in tight spaces. He's pulled them round and opened gaps. Lyons has another effort saved. He gets a corner as reward. Patino again floats the ball beautifully, deep, it slowing like frisbee to hover right where Lyons needs it and the Irishman profits from what he earned to the tune of a second goal. Free scoring full backs. It's the new thing and I love it.
I'm getting blase about goals I think. FIVE! FIVE! FUCKING FIVE!!! YES!!!
This has to be enough. Surely.
Things are getting surreal. My lad sends me a voice message 'Dad... Wake up. It's a dream...' - If it is, I'm staying in this bed. Another break. Another corner. Now it's Curtis Nelson, an even more unlikely winger than Gary Madine, but watch him shimmy, watch him lay it off... Rogers!!! Oh... so close, the post struck with a resounding noise. Now it's Jud... What the fuck is he doing... He's just stood up a ridiculous sand wedge pass the like of which our actual midfielders haven't managed all year and Jerry is cartwheeling backwards onto it in what looks like a perfect overhead kick and I think I am probably in another universe where we're Real Madrid and they're shit or something... Ok, the ball goes away from, not towards goal from Jerry's effort, but sometimes, you just have to applaud.
The 55th minute is one of those times. The ground up as one again. Memory. Belonging. Respect. Fuck you if you're so quick to diagnose football as 'a problem' - where else in the world do you get this feeling of being as one. Football is more than whatever you want to pigeon hole it as sometimes. RIP.
Jimmy Husband flying down the wing on his own for the mad fun of it. QPR getting all tetchy and stroppy like they're thinking of how far home it is and how Gareth will probably put his own music on all the way home and stare at them angrily if they reach for their headphones. Jerry, who has been in top cheeky chappy form all night gets involved in a little tustle. Patino runs over and makes like a little dog squaring up to a big one. Everyone is delighted. Jerry gets booked. Mick decides to make some sensible subs and Jerry makes way.
Even so, I STILL worry when they bring on their subs. I like their young kid, Armstrong. He's big, he's fast and he's got ability. Quite why they don't seem to play him, is a mystery to me. So paranoid am I, that I breathe a huge sigh of relief when an effort created in part by good work from their young sub drifts wide of the far post. Kenny Dougall slashes a chance created by glorious football a mile over the bar. Mick makes some sensible subs. Carey pirouettes his way through and is only stopped from a piece of magic by the offside flag. Keshi comes on and looks like a dancing barrel, a squat, classy little pony doing a dressage jig as he bounces on his toes in time with his name ringing round the ground.
Keshi heads one away. Nelson times yet another tackle. A long ball up the middle. CJ muscles into his ban, turns, takes the ball down, guiding it in the same motion to Dougall who this time slashes it home. Who the fuck needs Gary Madine when you've got CJ? I am beyond disbelief now. It's like I'm drugged up. The air tastes of sweetness, the noise is pure harmony and birdsong. This club is a drug. You think you're on the verge of kicking the craving, accepting that you don't have to care so much and they inject the magic directly into your bloodstream.
I think I can relax now. Even I can't see them scoring 5 in 2 minutes...
If I were a tabloid hack, I'd write 'after some admirable work by the indefatigable Hamilton and deft feet from Carey, the resultant corner resulted in Blackpool being denied seventh heaven only by the merest of inches as Connolly grazed the bar' - I'm not, so I'll just say 'fuck me, we even nearly scored again...'
The whistle. Noise. We love you Blackpool. I don't want to go home. This feels good.
---
So many times this year, I've clutched at straws. I've done it so often my fingers are red raw. I've tried to find things to say that aren't too cruel or perhaps neglected to comment on certain players because, well, you can read invective in a thousand places. Sometimes, I've made CJ the whipping boy because, well, I have and because, sometimes, frankly, I've thought he's been a bit shit.
Let me say clearly, right here in black and white... Christopher Hamilton was fucking brilliant. He actually looked like an international footballer. He played his game up and down the flank. He harried, he ran at people, he cut it back. He even joined in some neat triangles and showed himself aware of others and their movement. I think it's the best game I've ever seen him have. A simple role, played brilliantly.
Literally everyone else was good. Nelson has been excellent for a while. Thorniley was weirdly inventive tonight and that partnership looks as solid as anything we've seen this year. Husband was perfectly Jimmy, Lyons gave us roaring presence on the flanks and could easily have had a hattrick. From full back. Without ever seeming to neglect his defensive duties. How? I don't know. More please.
In midfield, Fiorini was a difference maker. It's not what he does as much as how quickly he does it. He sets a tempo. Patino played as well as he has done for what feels like forever. Connolly seemed to play both at the back and in midfield, just breaking things up and leaving it to better footballers to make the play. That's his ideal role for me. Rogers I thought deserved a goal as much as anyone on the pitch and Jerry deserved a goal as much as anyone in the world and it was joy to see him with a structure around him that let him roam, let people get beyond him and to see him playing with a verve and joy rather than just chasing lost causes.
It won't be easy to recreate this. QPR were fucking awful, to the point where I felt sorry for their fans almost, the ref was, for once in about 80 Championship games, possibly slightly generous (I know!!!) and everything we hit went in or close - but it was performance we needed and c'mon - for fuck's sake!...relish it, enjoy it!
It's done me the world of good. Imagine what it will do for those lads who've been dragging themselves around the country, losing week on week, confidence draining, the exhortations that 'we can do this' seeming more and more hollow as each game passes. If that doesn't give us belief, then honestly, nothing will...
We're staying up.
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