Into Battle.

I was sitting in a pub in Liverpool Street, and something happened that made me remember.

I got chatting to a young Cobbler called Alex, who it transpired had just lost his Mum to cancer earlier in the week. He hadn't been sure whether he'd make it to Dagenham, but using his Mum's old Northampton Town shirt as inspiration to shield his pain, he bravely decided to step out into this crushing new world.

It took me back to when the same happened to me in late 2009, and though I wrote about it at the time and though I received some phenomenal messages of love and support, there have been a lot of moments when football has never really felt the same. It takes a long time to recover from losing your hero, from turning the seat next to you from a haunted one into something that breathes and roars with the passion of life again. 

What I really remembered though on Saturday, was not an identical kind of emptiness, but a mutual kind of strength that comes from having another family to help you through. It is not fair to compare a football game to the trauma and terror of a hospital ward, but being part of a collective, being absolutely together with people you don't really know is the kind of medicine that gives us faith to carry on. We injected ourselves with some kind of special spirit on Saturday, and all I could see amongst empty pint glasses and totally confused tourists, were hearts that were full to the brim with pride and passion - of what is it to follow a football team and to follow each other in turn.

Maybe you'll call me crazy, but a part of me felt like that claret longing bled into every single player until they couldn't help but be absolutely magnificent when the time came to fight. It has felt like a fight for me for the past few years - a fight to start enjoying life again - a fight to start enjoying walking through that turnstile alone. A fight, sitting there and watching us play like absolute fucking morons. We have been so bereft of ourselves, so absolutely on a downward spiral toward bloody averageness instead of the bond of brotherhood that being part of this should always bring. Anfield aside, I can confidently say that football has become a chore of habit rather than the frank expression of celebration that I once gasped in as a youngster.

When I saw Alex walking out of the ground on Saturday, his smile lit up a season of such desperate nothingness, that there was my highlight right there. Because yes, it helped that we won, it helped that one of our own had captured those playing field dreams that we all had and still hope to have, but what really made a difference was every one being there for every one else, and us all, knowingly or not, being there for him. When Ivan dared to flick the ball up and become a performing acrobat, time was suspended in that glorious moment of disbelief, where suddenly we allow ourselves to be free, where suddenly we allow ourselves to embrace a thousand grown men and women as if they are a part of us.

Even if the unthinkable were to happen on Saturday and we sunk to our lowest ever depths, I would still find comfort in the joys and agony of being part of this. But we must reconnect, we must close our eyes and push away the Johnson's of regret and the Boothroyd's of blandness, and we must, absolutely must remember how to have some fun again. How to feel again. 

So, for fucks sake, get your voice on, get your scarf out, and swing it about like you just don't care even though you know you do more than anything. Claret is our colour and it will be on show like never before tomorrow, but it is the sheer nakedness of our souls on display when we want something more than them that will blind Oxford into sorrowful submission tomorrow. 

We have never been a non-league club, and whether we are by my next blog post will ultimately depend on whether some guy kicks the ball into the back of some net. But the point is, we are a tribe that can influence someone who has absolutely lost their everything, and therefore we are a tribe that can influence whether we give a fuck about staying up or not. And we really, really do. Because we are not meant for this.

Come with me tomorrow, join with me tomorrow and we will do this. Prepare your lungs for battle, prepare Pat Gavin for the reception of a hero and maybe, just maybe, another miracle of an arse will affect the trajectory of another ball and help lift us off the bottom of this heap of misery we've been suffering under.

Come on the Teyn.

#gavinitlarge

Watching from afar.

As I looked down from the hill a few short weeks ago as we faced Bury, it was hard to feel anything at all.

I had a train to catch before the final whistle blew and perhaps the hardest thing was how easy it was to decide not to be another click through the turnstile. Instead there I sat, an attendance of one in my own private box of isolation, a recovering addict who'd withdrawn sufficiently but who needed that little shot of something to see the day through.

So from a prescribed position of safety, I stared blankly on at the family I once shared a bond with, and even as the heart was ripped out of them again and again, even as the bodies probably slumped gutlessly over - it was really okay, to be honest. The only half of the pitch I could see was the only half I identified with. A barren stretch of nothingness where cowards ceased to venture and attacks failed to grow - the opposition's half.

I left at half-time, at least, I clambered from a grassy verge, my football club now reduced to a distant numbness and the North Stand now a cover for the once predictable pain that was finally out of my sight. The journey to not-really-giving-a-fuck-any-more was almost complete, it was just a wonder I hadn't booked a one-way ticket away sooner to pursue a relationship I did actually still care about.

Football fans are fickle but for good reason - we ride together on a wave of emotion and climactic moments, of giddy goals and disgraceful decisions. Through a sporting lens, life is suddenly magnified a thousand times over and presented in front of our fervent eyes, all the passion of what it is to be alive is suddenly condensed into ninety minutes of glorious escapism from the mundane and monotonous. If I am rational and diplomatic away from a football ground - then I am biased as hell when on the inside - I am what society sometimes doesn't allow me to be or I don't allow myself, but by bloody God I am part of a community that cares.

Somewhere along the line, I started retreating back into my shell. I started dragging all the worries of my week with me to Sixfields, and all that we created was an ampitheatre of anxiety, a place too familiarly like the outside world. All we got back were eleven fearful shadows, or one-hundred-and-three if you count the Gary Johnson (error) era. It may be difficult to quantify, but there are moments when you step into a football ground and you just know that there is a special feeling, you just know that you can help carry them over the line. What we have suffered through, particularly since Wembley, but mostly ever since we wilted pathetically away at Leeds not long after dreaming of the Championship, has felt like one of the worst spells that I can remember and it's no wonder its reduced us to this absolute apathy.

This season has been coming and coming to get us for a long time now, and whilst we have just about gasped for breath at the vital moment previously, after the Bury game I rationally and diplomatically looked at it, and thought we were finally screwed. More to the point, we almost certainly deserved it. Then, something curious happened.

I don't know why but I walked up to Sixfields on the afternoon of the Burton game, and I started to believe. I walked into the ground and this time something did firmly click into place, because I could feel that sense of belief beginning first, as just a piece of card on an empty seat. What had seemed a cheap gimmick then started to spread into something more productive, as clap banners battered my ears, cynicism slowly being replaced by the thunderous beating of positivity amongst the claret faithful. If I heard those pesky things every week I would probably halve the average attendance with a shotgun, but in that moment of need, we needed a tool to repair us and by some kind of miracle, I think it started to work.

There was an admirable air of patience, the man at the back of the West who loves to shout 'GET IT FORWARD!' at every irritating opportunity was drowned out by a sense that we were driving forward in unison, for the first time in a long time. We were tenacious, tough-tackling and together. Even if the Burton goalkeeper may as well have been sponsored by the Northampton clown, it was a start. We could survive. We really could.

Looking back now, I think that Bury game finally awakened us from a slumber. We took a good look inside ourselves, as fans and players and decided it wasn't good enough, and it quite simply hadn't been good enough for a while. Instead of moping inwardly we began to look outward again at each other as we committed to a single goal. Not too big to go down and certainly not too good, but too shaken by years of depression and too damn proud of what this club can be and what it should be: a football league club for now and for our children yet to come.

To be continued...

The Sound of Silence

Hello darkness my old friend, I've come to talk with you again.

Cobblers fans are used to trips into the night. When you've lived a mostly quiet, unassuming existence on the very edge of the horizon, black humour becomes a second nature - you have to learn to laugh at yourself when you're just not very good - whilst the occasional glimpses into the light prove all the more satisfying. Sometimes we remember the time when we rose magnificently with the sun, only for it to scorch our sensitive skins as we sunk just as spectacularly, knowing nothing could survive but the distant memories of a quickly-fading sunset.

It was fun, so they say, but we are not born to grace such dizzy heights. We are born into grumbles and goalkeeper fumbles, into ploughed fields and yet more sodding loan deals. It is sometimes remote, nomadic. There is nothing quite as removed from the riches at the top than Accrington on a blustery Tuesday night. Yet there is nothing quite so healing as looking round at the other hundred freezing souls and knowing you have travelled a thousand roads together. A loss is a shared pain, a win an inevitable dream of glory. It can be so fucking miserable that only they would understand. It can be so fan-fucking-tastic that only they could get the intensity of those special moments. So rare, so meaningful.

So, together you share as a family. Nothing shakes the community spirit like the loss of one of your own, yet the awful news of Saturday was a rallying call, a cry to help a broken family; a longing to remember the sadly departed with a silence that sings to them. Supporters support each other first.

We must separate a game from the gut-wrenching moments of human loss, yet as I write this, I feel like I am losing something that matters. Not so much the players or the penalties, but the passion and the places we have lived and lit up together. They are falling not like a sunset of memories, but like a journey into a fast-approaching black hole where everything is forgotten in an instant. Suspended in terrible timelessness, the face of the clock seems to tick for others but for us it stares blankly back. We are too gripped by the fate of the inevitable to do anything about it.

Instead of reaching out to feel the familiar touch of family, we have fallen into a deathly silence that controls us. As I write, it is 24 days and counting since we've been falling. Perhaps it is longer, it hasn't really felt enjoyable for a while but there's always been you to reach out to. Now I reach out but so are you, limbs flailing limply through empty weightlessness, no direction to head but into nothingness.

The only thing that grips us is the feeling that no-one gives a fuck about us anymore. Even Andy King is falling, admitting that the strain is getting too much. The only certainty uncertainty, and whether you like the slightly bullish bloke or not, you have to have sympathy that his day-to-day contract is taking him down with us.

I have had a huge amount of respect for our chairman but the current lack of anything is eerie, as if he'd rather be back on holiday than on our trip to the trapdoor. For fucks sake, David, do something, do bloody anything, just stop the feeling of grieving and self-pity that is swallowing us up. Our club is not dead, a visit to the conference needn't be a visit to oblivion but at least show some balls and act like we have a future. The irony of your insufferable wait to redevelop is that now you finally have the tools in place, everything that truly matters is crumbling all around you. Us. Your fanbase.

Find a direction to go in. Personally, I am sick of short-term solutions to long-term apathy and cannot fathom some people's desire to appoint a Bore-royd mark two. If we are really heading into non-league make plans for it yes, but how about risking a chance at survival? It needs someone on the way up to halt our downward trajectory, it needs someone with ambitions to be a success no matter the level.

Non-league, league, Champions league. Winners are still winners. Don't treat what is beneath you with disdain when we are almost there inside our heads. Appoint a Wilkin or a Burr. Give us someone who can budget for a victory, who has knowledge of what it is that can make football fun again. Just please, don't leave it any longer.

We may have twenty-odd games to save ourselves, but every day that silence falls feels like another million battles lost, the battle to save the heart of our followers. Don't lose us. Without us there is nothing left. Stop us from falling.

Make some God damn noise.