As middle age creeps along, I am continually finding new, and less interesting, ways to measure the passing of time. For much of my 20s and all of my 30s I lived on a street with a food market and after a couple of years of burritos and Turkish flatbreads, I realised the greatest advantage was the refuse collection. Every day was bin day.
I took this freedom and wild abandon for waste completely for granted. I didn’t have to plan or think or tear cardboard boxes to shreds. Just toss a plastic bag on the street before 5pm and it was whisked away. I was truly alive. Now it’s a Sunday evening ritual: peer down the street – is it recycling or garden waste? That time again, eh, Frank? Feels like it was only last week we were dragging the yellow bin on to the curb. Do you have space in your green bin, Janet? I’ve been doing some pruning. There we all are, wheel them out and wait for the 6am trash-truck Monday morning chorus. Another week closer to death.
Granted it doesn’t always feel quite that bleak – in fact, Australian bin lorries have a mechanical arm that scoops the bin into the sky. It’s dramatic stuff. The first step to the robots taking over. My toddler loves them.
Football seasons feel a bit like bin day. Every year, suddenly I look up and it’s almost over. Where did that all go? There’s something about them: the consistency, the uniformity of it all. Check with the neighbours. Same again this year? Mid-table mediocrity? Ah, the fourth round, well that’s something.
And so, almost a year to the day that I’d logged in to iFollow to watch Cambridge United ultimately maintain their League One status, I logged in to iFollow to watch Cambridge United ultimately maintain their League One status.
Our season had been mildly chaotic. Sack Mark Bonner, hire Neil Harris, watch him flee to Millwall before he’d even arrived, bring in Garry Monk. And yet here we were almost exactly where we started.
Again my April was suddenly taken over by things I shouldn’t have time to care about: Burton’s remaining fixtures and Cheltenham’s injury concerns. We had messed up the chance to guarantee things in midweek. A Spurs lasagne-style illness deprived us of all our defenders against Wycombe at the Abbey. But we were resolute and took the lead midway through the second half. Then the substitute Lyle Taylor – an exciting January signing in the sense it was someone we’d actually heard of – gave away a silly penalty late on and reacted to some unnecessary stick by telling our fans to fuck off, in person and later on Instagram just to be sure.
Meanwhile, that same evening our local rivals Peterborough sent out a team of children away at relegation-threatened Cheltenham. Two-nil to the Robins. Thank you Darren Ferguson. Thank you Barry Fry.
Last year, the final day had been two hours of unadulterated stress – the U’s needed to win and rely on others. An MK Dons goal could have sent us down. I had been on TalkSport at the time doing a terrible job of trying to talk about football that other people cared about. The whole thing was exhausting.
This time it all felt depressingly ominous. Cheltenham had been in the relegation zone all season. We hadn’t spent a minute there. Of the 29 permutations involving us, them and Burton, only two would send us down. Even the world’s great optimists find ways to dread watching their own team play.
And then it was just, well, fine. Away at already relegated Port Vale, needing a point to survive. Full time: Port Vale 0-0 Cambridge United. It would be difficult to describe it as a football match. Nothing happened. Not a thing. I watched all 90-plus minutes intently and I cannot recall a moment, at either end.
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News from elsewhere had filtered, that’s the only thing news can do on a final day. It filtered from Fleetwood and it filtered from Stevenage and it filtered good news that Burton and Cheltenham were losing. The game in front of me was an irrelevance. I almost felt deprived of pain, the masochistic need to feel my heart race. Dangle some danger, put me on edge. This was just another chunk of life ebbing away.
Perhaps that’s what the whole season was and what they are. Just a constant that rarely goes anywhere. See who you’ve released, see who you’ve retained, be annoyed that someone with more money has taken your one decent prospect. Wikipedia the hell out of some new signings who are just a set of names. Watch pre-season videos on X of rondos and post-nutmeg-banter that make you feel like this team have “a something” about them. Start to believe. Admire a pitch in August that looks lovely. It’s perfectly mowed, we might win promotion. Win a couple. Stare at the league table after four games because you’re in the playoff places. Win zero games once the clocks change. Get a left-back who’ll “add balance” on loan in January. Somehow win at Barnsley. If you’re lucky, stay up. Rinse and repeat, just a year older and no wiser.
Recently, the Arsenal fan and comedian Ian Stone summed it up to me perfectly in a radio interview. “I’ve enjoyed the season, I’ve just hated the games.” And that’s Arsenal. Top of the Premier League. Three teams across Europe’s top leagues have conceded fewer goals. What hope for the rest of us?
In reality, League One for a fourth consecutive season is some achievement for a club of Cambridge’s size and yet you can’t help dreaming what Monk could do with a full pre-season “on the grass”. Squeak into the Championship and then go again, the Premier League. Heineken, schmeineken, champagne, caviar … Just 20 bin days and it rolls around again.