Football has changed and so have I, but a new season still gives me reason to hope

And so we put ourselves through this all again. Where exactly does the hope come from? Why have I put a – responsibly small – wager on Cambridge United to win the League One play-offs, when they only stayed up on the final day a couple of months ago? I look at our fixtures and cannot see us dropping a point in August. One game in and I’ve already checked the table every day since the weekend. Still fifth.

How much of my, albeit very limited, journalistic integrity have I lost by placing Spurs second this season? A prediction based almost entirely on a few gruff interviews from Ange Postecoglou and a 30-second clip at the Camp Nou of Tottenham playing out from the back for the first time since 2019? Please note Harry Kane is still there at the time of writing.

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But without the tiniest bit of hope, even the false kind, then there is no point. And if you can’t have it before a ball is kicked, then when can you? QPR fans had 33 seconds of it. Four-nil down at half-time at Vicarage Road. Watford even kept the same manager for the whole game. Port Vale fans watched a 7-0 gubbing at Barnsley. It wasn’t even opening-day-of-the-season sunny.

When you strip it back, what are we all doing? How can 11 people you don’t know and will probably never meet, wearing matching outfits, dictate your emotions for hours or days or weeks simply by getting an inflated round bit of leathery rubber into a small netted area on more occasions than 11 other people you also don’t know and will probably never meet in different matching outfits over the course of an hour and half (or perhaps a little more this year)? But for an accident of birth, you could well be supporting the other team anyway. It’s objectively ludicrous that people are paid unfathomable amounts to kick a ball. It’s equally silly that people are paid fathomable, but still generous, amounts to talk and write about the people doing the kicking.

The ball they’re kicking in the Premier League this season has been “honed over eight years” and undergone “1,700 hours of testing” – hopefully not all by the same person: 71 days without even getting to stop for dinner.

The Nike Flight football is a “revolution in consistent flight. Moulded grooves and 3D-printed ink fine-tune flight through the air to help players put the ball exactly where they want it – each and every time.” Clearly, Wout Faes wasn’t using that ball at Anfield last season.

But marketing bullshit is fine – quite fun in fact. There are bigger things to worry about. We all know by now that a lot of what surrounds the game is deeply depressing. Autocratic states and soft power. Racism, misogyny, tragedy chanting. Gambling addiction, clickbait, corruption. Concussion, brain injuries, social media pile-ons, leveraged debt and asset-stripping owners.

We have an ostensibly ridiculous thing with so much baggage to wrestle with on a daily basis. And yet – when your team do something good, perhaps even score a goal – everything else disappears.

In the 28th minute at the Abbey on Saturday, Saikou Janneh spun his man on the left wing – a collective ‘ooooo’, this has piqued our interest. A backheeled one-two with Jack Lancaster – ‘ooooOOOO’ – hang on something might happen here. A cross for Gassan Ahadme to head home. Not just a goal, but a good one. One that you see on telly. I don’t lose myself in the moment for quite as long as I used to, but I forgot all the other things in my relatively banal existence for a few seconds. And that is a wonderful thing.

It may be my 38th or 39th season of being a sentient football fan. It has changed. There are fewer random Shoot posters of John Ebbrell or Jesper Olsen on my wall. I don’t steal money out of my parents’ coat pockets to buy football stickers. I couldn’t bet my life on knowing every manager in the Football League. I spend less time playing Sensible Soccer.

The longer you work in it, the less it’s your escape – you find that elsewhere, in soft play centres and watching Death in Paradise. But I continually remind myself of the incredible luck I’ve had and what a privilege it is to be paid to talk about it and not to forget what made me a fan in the first place – even if it doesn’t stop me occasionally struggling to get excited about another conversation on the defensive abilities of Trent Alexander-Arnold.

The Dele Alli story is reminder not just that footballers are humans – we know that – but that all our analysis is limited. We can’t caveat every criticism, observation or joke with the fact we don’t know what happened in a player’s past or what is going on behind the scenes. But we should always be aware of our own superficial understanding – and sensitive about those we discuss.

We should also be consistent. How many of those deeply sympathetic to Dele will be yelling that some player is a total disgrace and should never wear the shirt again for turning their back at a free-kick or not tracking their runner in the 88th minute at Turf Moor on Friday night?

As for the predictions, of course Spurs won’t finish second and if Cambridge aren’t in League One in a year it’s unlikely to be in a positive direction. But you never know. Arsenal second, Chelsea with Frank Lampard in 12th, Roy Hodgson returning to Crystal Palace and a Big Sam Leeds cameo finale would have been bold suggestions last time out.

Although I love the hope, there is no expectation. Nothing is really new; it’s all happened before, the results don’t actually matter – it’s the nostalgia and the constants that keep us coming back.

“Get it fucking forward,” came a gnarled voice at the Abbey from behind me five minutes into Saturday’s game. It didn’t appear anyone around him even noticed. He must have yelled that for so many seasons, at so many different U’s defenders. It felt weirdly reassuring.

We may all yearn for someone other than Manchester City to win the league, and someone new to break into the top four (or five) – but if it ends up with the usual suspects, as long as I get another year of my dad texting me about Jimmy Greaves, of balls flying over the Newmarket Road End and of sometimes getting to Match Of the Day without knowing the scores, then I’ll take that.