Well this is weird, isn’t it?

This piece was published in OTBC, the Norwich City matchday programme, for the Premier League game against Everton on 24 June 2020. Subscribe to OTBC here.

During months of lockdown, like many of us, I’ve had time to reflect. When I learnt that the Premier League was resuming, and therefore these columns would, too, I went back through what I’d already written, to reacquaint myself with a time that already feels like the distant past.

“Well this is weird, isn’t it?” is how I began my first OTBC piece, which, well, is weird, isn’t it? It could describe not just this season but our current existence: queues outside the supermarket, cashiers behind panes of perspex, facemasks on the bus, veering off of pavements to avoid other human beings, chatting to friends and family from six feet away, no pubs, no restaurants, no haircuts, no spontaneity, no office chat, no toilet roll.

And, of course, no football, which for many of us has been the strangest thing of all, at least at first. All of a sudden we faced a yawning expanse of homogenous days, without the structure and rhythm football brings. In a matter of weeks it became almost vulgar to discuss it at all, and an apologetic caveat began to appear alongside coverage of its absence — that football, of course, obviously, was not the most important topic right now, as if it were indulgent to dwell on it.

That, to me, felt even weirder. Wanting to talk about the things we love and miss is surely a natural response to the chaotic times we have found ourselves in: it is a small solace, but a solace all the same. I felt the exact opposite: that this was the perfect time to celebrate football, a game played and loved and followed the world over for reasons of pure, simple joy. Now more than ever that was something we all needed.

We are complex beings: it is possible to hold several thoughts in our heads at once. We can acknowledge the suffering caused by coronavirus while also lamenting the loss of a big part of our lives. Discussing it was not the same thing as calling for its return: in fact the majority of supporters, as far as I could tell, were fully in favour of its suspension, and in no hurry to see it come back while the risks remained high and while the resources it would have taken were more in need elsewhere.

Still, now, I am sure there will be many fans who feel uneasy about the resumption. I am one of them, not least because the push by the sport’s authorities to play out remaining games may not have come from entirely pure motives; the opaque phrase “reasons of sporting integrity” has been doing a lot of heavy lifting.

There is also something undeniably jarring about this bit of life resuming when so much of the rest of our routines remains suspended — and then there is the fact that we can’t be there to see it. Football will be reduced to a solitary experience for fans, who can’t even gather to watch the game together, to soften our new status as exiles from our own stadiums.

But despite my reservations, I don’t think it’s wrong to feel excited, too. “Sporting integrity” is just one of the reasons that the resumption of the top-flight season has been prioritised by both the government and the footballing authorities; the other, to raise morale, sounds equally naff but is perhaps truer, and more easily understood.

We all remember where we were, for example, when we watched England’s penalty shootout against Colombia at the men’s World Cup in 2018. I was in a south London pub with my sister, who is categorically not a football fan, yet she, too, was swept up in the celebrations (I texted her to ask how she remembers that night: she replied, “Even I enjoyed it. And I hate football”). One of our friends leapt up on his chair, whipped off his T-shirt and windmilled it around his head — what else, beyond football, makes a man do that?

I saw this on a smaller scale recently, when my dad — along with hundreds of other season ticket holders — was lucky enough to get a phone call from Tim Krul. (I should clarify: no, Dad did not whip his top off.) Dad is in his mid-60s, recently retired, and lives with my mum; they are both perfectly fit and healthy and would be the first to say they are fortunate in all sorts of ways that mean lockdown has not been too much of a struggle. But even so, he was thrilled by that call, and not just because Tim is a delightful conversationist: it was a welcome, warming reminder that football is still there, even if it is not being played.

Those calls were both an acknowledgement and an illustration of the two-way relationship between fan and football club, and indeed fan and football player. That link has not been severed just because we can’t be there at Carrow Road to watch them, but our duty is different now, while theirs has more weight than ever. We’ve been there for them all season — now it is their chance to lift us.