Cod Almighty | Diary

Happy Christmas, pre-season is over

1 August 2025

Better than Christmas Eve, DA said in yesterday’s pre-match interview and who is your A46 Diary to disagree with that? Yes, it’s the best day, our annual day of nervous apprehension, of excitement, of swinging from blind optimism to blinder pessimism, of the jitters, of the shakes, of flustered eagerness at the end of the withdrawals. It’s our shared 24-hour frisson of August anticipation.

Right now, all we have is hope and expectation. Right now, at this cusp of everything as new, the questions are the key. Right now, the answers have to wait. Right now, there is no detail, only yes or no, the devilment will have to wait.

So, no, we don’t have a 10 or a 2 yet; yes, we have injury worries already; no, we’ve no idea if Jamie Walker's legs have gone yet; yes, we’re almost certainly getting over excited and putting too much pressure on Jaze Kabia to be everything we’ve wanted (for a long time) in an exciting, young, pacy forward; yes, Khouri begins his tricky second season; no, Danny Rose is not, for now, our only option; yes, we have forwards in Gilsenan and Amaluzor that we have no idea on reliability; no, we don’t know if Sweeney or Staunton can do what Hume did; yes, Soonsup-Bell has left his club; no, we have no idea if he’ll sign for us; yes, I want someone with a name like that to play for us; no, I shouldn’t be basing decisions on how impressive the name is; yes, these new iron-grey training tops give our press conferences a dystopian feel; no, our owners are not dystopian tyrants.

Yes, expectation is higher this year, perhaps too high, perhaps even fevered; no, I don’t feel scared to hope because it feels like our turn, like we’ve earned this sense of expectation, like it isn’t out of place or just some childish Christmas Eve dream of a train set and dolls. It’s been 19 years since our last Football League play-off finish, 27 years since our last Football League promotion.

It's too long, too real, too frustrating. The feeling of failure ours, has been ours for so long that it is us. This dissatisfaction is us. This waste. This anger. This perennial disappointment. It's ours. It both belongs to us and gives us our sense of belonging. We use it temper our expectations and to ridicule our ambitions. That's why DA focuses on progress instead of promises; it’s we who must change, we who must turn around our beliefs, we who must recognise that we too can be the change.

Let's take these years of frustration and turn them inside out. This is our impatience, our stubbornness, our suffering, our pain, our strength, our energy. This is our moment to let that energy free, to explode in a black and white storm that can be seen from the edge of the solar system, flaring on this distant pale blue ball, alone in the blackness of space, captured by the cameras of a probe launched decades ago when a scientist, Mariners pin secreted beneath the lapel of their lab coat, checked their data and tried not to let the anticipation of the new season affect their calculations. The summations of expectations in the future with the achievements of the past and how often we fall and bounce back to where we want to be meant they had no idea of the wilderness years to come. Those numbers, unimaginable then, are recalculated now and the infinitesimal existences across those vast distances can believe that this is our time, when we stand or fall together, and it's high time those numbers changed. It's high time we reach for the stars.