It should be exciting but it’s just horrible.
That’s the only line I can use to describe supporting a club aiming for promotion as the season reaches its climax.
You just want the next game to come along, hurry up – hopefully with points coming from it – and the next one to do just the same so that, come the final whistle of the season, you at least know your destiny. It’s the waiting, the hope, the unknown that kills you.
Come May, will you have been promoted? Is it the play-offs to prepare for? Or have you missed out? Whichever it is, even with the disappointment of the latter, you just want to know. You just want it over.
Football is meant to be an entertainment business. The anticipation for the Saturday to come along each week, to join your friends, family and fellow supporters in the stand and cheer your side on for 90 minutes, that’s what the most ardent supporters – myself included – live for every week. But come this stage of the season, that feeling all disappears. Every game is a slog. It’s 90 minutes in which you go through all of the emotions and feel physically drained come the end of it.
A lot of the time you find yourself on your phone – a sin really, in my eyes, when you are at a live football match – desperate to know how your rivals are getting on. Hoping that results elsewhere will calm your own anxiety and render the fortunes of the team you follow less important. If everyone else is losing, you can calm yourself in the knowledge that defeat for your own side matters less – somehow it’s rather cathartic.
Arguably British football’s greatest ever manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, coined the phrase ‘squeaky bum time’ as a way of describing the tension experienced by those involved in either the latter stages of a game or of a series of games i.e. the run-in at the end of the season. Ferguson said it as his Manchester United battled with Arsenal for the 2003 Premier League title, a battle he eventually won.
Pundits and current managers alike often re-use the term – and it’s this stage of the season now that it is made for.
My team is Notts County. Kevin Nolan’s men are pushing for promotion from League Two. When the season began, the majority – if not all – supporters would have snapped the hands off of anyone who offered a position in the top seven with five games to play. Last season was another struggle and a fight to avoid dropping into non-league, a battle that was eventually won. A stark contrast to this campaign, which has largely been spent in the top two or at the very least top three.
But a run of inconsistent form and mainly a poor away record since the turn of the year has seen the Magpies fall from the automatic promotion reckoning, as Accrington Stanley pull clear, Luton Town continue to do enough and both Wycombe Wanderers and Exeter City achieve better form.
A huge victory over play-off rivals Coventry City – a first win in five games – consolidated Nolan’s men in the four spaces that will get the chance to compete for the final place in League One via the play-offs and eased the nerves of supporters who, earlier in the campaign, could realistically dream of automatic promotion – even a title bid – but were instead anguishing over whether their side would do enough to even be within a shout of making a first appearance at Wembley since the Twin Towers were demolished.
But the full range of emotions was experienced over the course of a dramatic 90 minutes, though mostly it produced a nervous tension and a feeling of dread in the stomach. Notts won 2-1, but it was far from enjoyable. That’s nothing to do with the football served up, even if it was far from vintage, but all to do with what the result meant. Three points for either side would go along way towards firming up a play-off place, while defeat wouldn’t be the death knell but it would make things very difficult with games running out. Mentally as much as anything.
The game was typified by a two-minute period towards the end of an edgy encounter as the Sky Blues equalised, sparking the obligatory away end flare and a mini pitch-invasion, before the Magpies used kick-off to go straight down the other end and restore the lead a minute later. From nerves, to despair, to excitement and – some 10 minutes later – pure relief for those of a black and white persuasion when the referee blew his final whistle. Several City players slumped to their knees, while no doubt their supporters would have done the same if space between the seats allowed.
It should have been ecstasy, elation or excitement. Instead it was just relief, thanks and a nod towards the next week. It couldn’t be enjoyed because there were still four games to come – three after Saturday’s victory at Colchester United – four more Saturdays to go through the mill. Three points in Essex came brought with it more torment, with the Magpies a goal down at the break and results elsewhere unfavourable.
Come 5 May, all will be over. We’ll know where we stand. And then maybe we can go back to enjoying going to the football again – unless we are in the dreaded play-offs…
