Actually, football is coming home as Sheffield Wednesday prepare for muck and Bovril - Alex Miller column
We’ve been rudely awoken from the World Cup dream once again. Behold, the proper football starts soon enough. Alex Miller rambles on.
Take us to Doncaster. To Leyton Orient and to 10k at Milton Keynes. Let’s go to Cambridge and Stevenage and Mansfield and Wigan. To when the sunny days are gone and the Bovril steam rises and you’re on your way back from January’s 1-1 draw at Wimbledon arguing about the nuances of the manager’s post-match press hit.
There’s a midweek trip to Oxford and a Boxing Day at Burton. The local away days are - as things stand - logged for busy and bustling Saturdays, for crowded train carriages and town takeovers. The vagaries of any League One line-up make it one of the most varied divisions in the world in terms of club profile; a day out at Leicester City comes on the same fixture card as a pilgrimage to Bromley. Make no mistake, it’s not the Championship, but it’s where this Wednesday iteration sits for now. And when it goes well, it’s a fun league to roam in.
There’s a feel to club football in the muck and dust of the EFL, a smell and colour to it that comes with following a team around the country to some of football’s primitive outposts. For all the very genuine shared joy and togetherness that a World Cup run with England delivers, it’s one also played out through widescreens and Paddy Power hilarity and supermarket beer promotions and the drumbeat undercurrent of social media jingoism. Despite the best efforts of those who stand to cash in on it at any cost, World Cups are a colourful, vibrant and enrapturing television series shared with the whole country.
But now the proper stuff can take precedence, which in Wednesday’s case comes a long way removed from the VAR stoppages and the desperate capitalist computerisation of the national obsession. The Owls experience will be served by the stench of onions and debateable meat, the glisten of floodlights on wet and dreary car parks, the loss of feeling in fingers and toes, full-blast heating and full blast grumbles on the radio.
Last season proved above any other that at the heart of it, football is all about the shared human experience. In the case of Wednesday those experiences surfed the wave of fear, anger, defiance, unity, activism, celebration and just about every other emotion you could think of. It’s a year that you’d hope will never be repeated, but in a society increasingly short of community, it roused something that showed the very, very best of what it is to be part of something in unison.
And now the togetherness shifts from defiance to hope. Football is a naturally fickle game and the July acceptance that the enforced addition of 20-or-so new players into a changing room doesn’t often equal success may not carry much weight come December. From this humble laptop right here and right now, should Wednesday go on to build towards the automatic promotion push so many are dreaming of it’ll be a grand achievement. We should know more on that viability in the weeks to come.
For now, there’s the hope of something special being worked towards. There’s the summer warmth of achievement in a short space of time and the sense that grown-ups are running the gaff at long last. There’s the post-hangover glow of knowing the football club’s existence doesn’t rest in the hands of a character whose decision making could generously be described as confusing.
Sheffield Wednesday is a football club building towards something, from hot water and WiFi to who-knows-what. Great investment and expertise has already been thrown into the project and in these early days the signs of engagement, local focus, business understanding and get-up-and-go only point to encouragement.
So there’s a lot to be enthusiastic about. Stick your third-place kickabout, the World Cup is over. Prepare the horses for Wycombe.