31 & Out.

There came a moment, about two minutes before the referee whistled time on our moment of history, when we finally realised. It had come to an end, inevitably with a whimper - inevitably with a performance which told of nothing of what had come before. Yet, we refused to let our voices be quietened. The party-spirit would not be dampened.

We could have been critical. We could have fallen silent. We could have clapped politely, acknowledging effort but little in the way of quality. We did none of those things. We remembered.

'31, 31 undefeated. 31, 31 I say....'

As it dawned on us that it was 31 & out, the chorus began to chirp. First, as a single voice, then as a gradual expression of acceptance, of pride, of everything that it has meant to us and everything that it will continue to mean.

'31 31 undefeated, playing football the Cobblers way!’

Then it kept going, and going and going. We had been defeated - finally - but we refused to lose the love transported to our lungs.

'31 31 UNDEFEATED....'

It was now a volcano of noise, erupting over the muted cheers of the home fans and overspilling into the street on the way home. They were still singing it in the pub, on the train. All the way back to Northampton. Moulton Lava, still bubbling.

I had a tear in my eye at the end of our 3-1 defeat to Chesterfield. It was maybe the same tear that wetted my face at the end of our FA Cup victory at Coventry when we were teetering on the brink, or the tear that recycled in my eyes once more as we lifted the league trophy gloriously to the skies after a tumultuous season of such highs and lows.

Not so much a sadness that our run had come to an end - it had to at some point - but a realisation of just what we've achieved along the way. How many times have you been taunted on the playground, mocked amongst many a friend for being a Cobblers fan? Whilst they hunt for glory, we hunt for misery, bonded by a mutual longing for despair. We were there when we laughed back. We were there when we turned good.

Thirty-one. THIRTY-BLOODY-ONE. Say it, it doesn't sound real. It doesn't sound humanly possible, not when you're used to seeing eleven bloody strangers stagger incompetently around a pitch. It was hard to believe, as it was happening, because it started against a backdrop of still-raw uncertainty, it continued with new-found spirit borne out of staring the darkness full in the face, and it seemed to just accelerate through the most fun time I can ever remember.

We may never do this again in our history. We may never be quite as good for quite as many games. We were approaching some of the all-time records - but whilst we can't quite match the famous Arsenal 'invincibles' - we can match anyone for sheer, filmic drama. They say Hollywood are going to make a film about Jamie Vardy's rise to the top. We may never reach the pictures, but the images will remain ingrained forever in our hearts & minds, the memories will live on as we pass them on to future generations.

‘Let me tell you son, about that Ricky Holmes goal at Stevenage. Let me tell you about how I tumbled down seats, down the steps, into the arms of the ecstasy all around me.'

We went from almost-oblivion to obliterating everything in our path. We would not be beaten, for so long that it sometimes felt like floating through a space full of surreal stars that shined only for us.

Soon, it’s time to rest out feet back on planet Earth. Soon, it’ll be time to digest, to groan & moan, to be bloody awful again. But for now, we are still steadily rising – no longer undefeated – but with a renewed purpose that we can learn a lot from where we’ve come from, what we’ve been through & how vibrantly we’ve supported along the way. I hope, whilst we may lose some of those feelings & maybe even the occasional match, that we can recognise that & move forward as a club with a belief that we can still improve, both on & off the pitch.

Besides, what better time to lose? We got that rare defeat out of our system. Just in time for United. Ironic because that is what we are these days, whilst they already seem divided by the arrival of even more ego.

Theatre of dreams? Pah! I had a dream that we went thirty-one games without defeat. I had a dream that I saw us win the league by thirteen points.

I had a dream that tonight is going to be a famous night…

Try aiming a little higher

Get a bloody grip of yourselves some of you.

Get a bloody grip.

We are Northampton Town, comfortable with our roots firmly planted on the ground with our weighty, well-made leather boots that will probably last a lifetime.

Yet last year from a factory familiar with toil & sweat, we started exporting something more beautiful around our division, we took over grounds with a new-found belief in learning how to reach for a new identity & stop looking to the bleak & melancholic history of everything that's gone & everything we lost along the way. We stood tall & grew together against a torrent of abuse, against those looking to grind us back into the dirt. Against those looking to destroy the past & the future.

Thankfully, it wasn't too late to boot those arseholes out & remarkably we even managed to pick up a decent Chairman in the scraps of what was burning, enraged by the flames we stoked ourselves into a frenzy of support & burning passion driven by our manager, driven by a desire to bond players & supporters as one in our hour of greatest need. We set ourselves on fire & we never stopped until the heat rose to the top. It was a bloody glorious sight.

I don't want to miss last season. It was horrible. It was terrifying. It was loopy. It was at times, allegedly, illegal. It was fun. It was mad. It was winning. It was Hollywood.

We need to take the script, make some alterations, accept that we have to delete some really good stuff out of necessity & move on to create a sequel. Yes, it's true, rarely are sequels better than the original but there is no point writing the review before we've seen it. Those are the dumbest critics.

The scene in which Chrissy Wilder left us was inevitable. The scene in which Ricky Holmes left us was inevitable. Even as they crept cruelly across our eyes, those cuts were still brutally final & painful for all involved in the creative process - when trying to develop something as good as the original is such a challenge.

We can still miss things, we can still look back on what's left us with fondness - that season of romance & rising from the ashes still so fresh in our beating hearts - but we absolutely must not pine for it, we must not ache for it, we must not believe we are nothing without those heroes, now sadly separated from that glue we felt might stick for good.

We need to learn as a football club to stop heralding that 'one season in a generation' as being some kind of qualified success, but instead yearn & strive for more sunny days. We cannot win every game, we cannot always create the unity from division that arose last time around, we cannot think we have the right to storm another division without some seriously hard work & improvement on every level.

We can however, continue to have some fun, after seasons upon seasons of treading stagnant water under the Cardoza regime, we have a new sense of purpose, a new face in Kelvin Thomas who seems to believe in a common sense approach to improving things for all of us, not with an airbrush but with a steady, firm hand that understands sometimes you first need a decent canvass to start painting a masterpiece.

HE EVEN PUT IN AN EXIT TO THE TOILETS IN THE WEST STAND FOR GOD'S SAKE. HALLEBLOODYJULAH! Now, finally, I can go for that warming piss in the chill of Mid-December without feeling in fear for my life in the impending crush.

We have a new manager too - someone who seems to have been an entirely sensible appointment - someone who exudes a calmness in the chaos that could have threatened to envelop us after Wilder's departure to his boyhood club. Rob Page has kept a club healthy in League One on limited resources twice now, a club in Port Vale who at least these days are similar in size to ourselves. He knew how to operate despite having a nutty owner creeping close behind him in the shadows, so now he has what seems like a totally sensible one the fit will only be smarter.

He is someone that has youth on his side, has international experience, has an eloquence & presence that can match his predecessor, has time to learn & adapt to his new surroundings. It's impossible to know whether one has picked the right candidate until a later date (Gary bloody Johnson anyone?!), but this date feels steady & assured & in no rush to get into the bedroom & create irreparable damage (Johnson!) to the loving dynamic that went before.

Sometimes relationships in that initial caress of chemistry are a beautiful blur of endless nights & days that seem to light up even the murkiest of souls, but the knowledge that something is too good to be true can still persist even in the midst of embrace. Today, when I look at the teamsheet - perhaps even more than missing our general off the pitch - I will miss our foot soldier on it.

Ricky Holmes could run & run & shoot the opposition down from anywhere, such was the magic within his weaponry. He almost-certainly will never quite have another season soaked in such searing sunlight, for as soon as he was transferred from medic to battefield in the blistering victory at Kenilworth Road, he entranced the oppposition with his dancing feet, leaving defenders dazed & hypnotized & fallen in a pool of their own tears; leaving us in heaven as we rose, finally above the clouds to the summit.

Something about him was almost celestial when he put on a Cobblers kit but despite the God-like collection of goals, we had to fall back to earth with a nasty bump. We may have lifted a trophy in adversity, but we weren't yet ready to hold on to superstars. His star shone so brightly that it was no surprise when he shot off down the road to Charlton, where he will probably never be quite the same again.

We must regather, reassess, reassure ourselves that even in the sadness of break-ups we can break our mould & continue this momentum surging through us. We cannot afford to & mope at the imperfect summer recruitment, or being ridiculed by no-hopers & non-leaguers in pre-season. There's a clue in the name. Pre-the-sodding-season.

We have not yet begun our attack on the real deal of the division above, so we must not panic, we must not judge too harshly, we must think back to the time after losing at Swansea when perhaps a majority wanted Wilder's head, or think to the horrible heartache of how we nearly had no club left to support. These are good times, these are fun times. We are still here, we have an owner who owns with authority, we have a fanbase united in a wettened appetite for more success, we have to adopt a wait-and-see approach rather than spitting our dummies out before we even know the score.

Please, please, please, let's try & give Rob Page a bloody chance. Let's learn from our mistakes & remember that England win all their flippin' friendlies sometimes but still limp out when the heat is on. It means nothing. It would be nice to not have injuries, it would be nice to sail smoothly through & romp this division too, but in all likelihood it ain't gonna happen. This is going to be a slog at times, it may even be a struggle. But it should still be a ball again, it should be a new-dawn with new-hope & new-stars, if we try aiming a little higher than the defeatism which has inflicted us in the past - maybe, just maybe, we can grow this fresh set of crops into something hearty & wholesome again.

Stop grieving, start believing. Bring on Fleetwood. Bring on football.

In tribute to Rob Dunkley

Just as we have reached the summit

We are plunged back into darkness

From which we thought we had left behind


Just as we have come together

So you have broken away;

Broken hearts and memories.


But though they are shattered

Though they are fragmented with grief

We will remember, clearly


A vision of dedication.

A man of every fact.

Intoxicated with knowledge


But the fact that is official

Is you are gone too soon

Away from us, away from home.


A train to another platform.

A game that we can only mourn.

But what I am pleased for,


Is at your last you saw us reach for the stars,


And now we hope you are too.


R.I.P mate. Thoughts with your friends & family at this sad time x

You'll never take our heart

I don't remember much about my first game at Sixfields. I think we were playing Cambridge, but it might have been Colchester. I think it was 1-1, but it may have been 0-0. I just know it was a typically drab lower-league affair which makes it virtually impossible to distinguish from so many of the other similar stodgy slog-fests.

Nostalgia has a funny way of making things seem glorious in its hazy past-light, but the truth is that I remember that moment not because of the feast of football on offer, but because I became nourished by the sense of community around me, because I had my first taste of how dirty and grubby and gritty watching something in the flesh can be.

Those might not sound like attractive adjectives, but the moment I put down the glossy sheen of pristine prints in my 'Match' magazine, the moment I turned off the television, took off my quite clearly fake Manchester United top, and let my Mum lead me by the hand toward something real - it was from that moment that I could never again let go of what gripped me so preciously. It wasn't long before I was asking for a Northampton Town kit, and the day I unwrapped it under the tree was a day I'll never forget. I put on a badge, I wore an identity. I showed off a genuine claret-soul and it fit so perfectly that I knew I'd always belong.

There are people I know that don't like sport. Some of them ask me what I find to love about football? I understand - with some of the goings on in the modern-world of egotistical egomaniacs - even I feel alienated by some of the answers. But then I close my eyes and I try to remember the heart.

The heart is that kid, who can't concentrate in school because he's thinking about that evening's glamorous affair against the might of Hereford. That kid, who's trying to emulate his hero Ali Gibb on the playground by running the ball smoothly along the wing and then producing a cross to absolutely bloody no-one, instead of attempting a cheeky Cantona chip like those who just didn't-quite-get-it around him. That kid, who looked down on those dizzyingly bright lights from the hill and could taste the magic in the air, could see what many generations had passed on before him - not necessarily a love for beautiful football but a craving to belong, to grow up and be part of a pride that felt personable. To share this bond with those around you. No longer strangers, but now united in a common understanding.

That heart of essentially wanting to forget our loneliness is what made me really love it - that heart that still beats strongly even now before kick-off because singing with friends is still such a spectacle. Emptying lungs, emptying all the s**t that life can throw at you and just remembering to escape together. Everyone has their different s**t - but the Cobblers have always been there to get me through. Through s**t like losing my identity as a teenage-carer and caring for nothing much around me. Through s**t like losing that hand that once held me so preciously and staring at an empty seat beside me. We all go through s**t. We all lose things we love, but the Cobblers is one thing I cannot bare to lose. They have been with me through all of it, through many agonising moments and many of euphoria. I cannot now, remember my life without them. It's precisely because they heal my loneliness and give me a place to call my home.

There have been moments - most notably throughout the Cardoza era where I have felt that comfort tested - where some of that love began to dwindle toward apathy. Perhaps it was the promises, the ridiculousness of a 5 year-plan toward the top when all I'd really known before had felt like a lifetime of averageness. But that was just fine. That was just my team.

There have been moments of horrific hardship on the pitch, when it felt like the trapdoor below was opening up and begging us to fall into its doom-mongering depths. Looking back now, I realise those words are overly-dramatic. We might have been desperately crap, but it was just a game of football. Some you win, some you lose. Sometimes you keep on losing and its rubbish but it's all part of the ritual.

Then there have been the last few months - frozen in this terrible, nightmare collection of moments and memories, suspended in the disbelief that everything that Northampton Town stood for could be just so cruelly taken away. Just like that.

The convoluted web of lies and deceit that has eaten away at those feelings, the ghastliness of greed that has threatened to shatter our sheer existence - normally those are things that would make me write, normally those are things that would force me to act. Yet, somehow I have found the idea - that words could do justice to an ever expanding world of worry - an idea out of reach, because we have all felt like we are flailing desperately without knowing whether we had anything left to hold onto.

What's more - understanding the scale of the thing has been beyond my comprehension. How could a little club like us attract such massive, catastrophic corruption? Why would anyone, when finally given what they had asked for, choose to throw everything away - to threaten to throw us all into the shocking realisation that we might be about to cease being for good.

I could go over the insanity of certain individuals 'misplacing' millions of pounds of public money, I could go over every intricate detail in the wicked plot to bring us down upon our knees. As revelations have come (and continue to come) to light it has felt more like the script from a film than the script written by a fourth-tier football club, but all these things are now finally being documented elsewhere. I am sick of it all, I am sick of standing in the rubble of rumours - where we all knew things were collapsing but no-one quite seemed to know how or why. Now is not the time though, to talk about how we almost crumbled. Now is the time to remember our foundations - to remember why we survived and how we can strive to stand tall once again.

So I say sod those horrible months of depression, let us talk about what we learnt, how strongly we stood together and how much more resistant the force will be if anyone dares f**k with our home again in the future. This is going to be quite some rebuild.

It was a thread on a messageboard that began to slowly uncover the sordid truth. Yes, we can look back with regret that only a couple of us dared to ask difficult questions, but the truth is that though we must never be such a soft-touch again, it's also true to say that this story has been driven by the fans. Whilst the media may make the noises now, it was some diligent detective work that started to uncover the real murkiness of this mystery: where the hell is this stand we were given so much money to build?

From the bottom of my heart, I would like to thank all those that took it upon themselves to sniff out the awful stench of sliminess with their consistently staggering research. I would like to thank all of those who expanded on the information with legal or financial knowledge - who helped us draw a bigger picture of exactly what was going on whilst we were looking the other way. I would like to thank everyone that helped out with the protests, be it volunteering, committing cash to help us shout a little louder, or simply those that took part. Despite the cynics, you were proved right and you did your bit to help publicise our perilous plight.

I would like to thank the Trust. There are tough questions that still need to be asked of how it was our fans became such a feeble voice, but for now let us rejoice in how they have acted with so much downright dedication to help us through these sleepless nights. The hours upon hours that you have all given up, the sacrifice and the steeliness to make sure that we still have a club to support - those are things that I could not be more grateful for and things I hope I can say I've done in the future if the need arises. Because we are stronger, when we trust each other to work as one.

I would like to thank all the supporters therefore, because the unity has been unbelievable. How dare you try and attack us, how dare you! Because this is how we respond. In unison; with chants; at matches; on social media. We have been anywhere and everywhere in the pursuit of keeping this club alive, and in turn I have been humbled by the support of others - others who share simply a common desire to tell owners in it for the good of themselves where to piss off to - others who wish football to be ultimately in the hands of the people who keep it alive. Us.

The biggest thanks though, with the obvious exception of Kelvin Thomas for helping save us, must go to Chris Wilder, his majestic management and all the staff and players that have not just kept us going, but have somehow worked through the darkest days to help us see a hopeful dawn, blazing with the promise that the sun will rise again. Some of those people have gone unpaid for weeks upon weeks. Some of those people have kept their head down when they could have given up, have probably struggled to feed their families yet have refused to starve us of what we hold dearest. My God, I hate the overuse of this word sometimes but you are all bloody heroes, at least for today.

That sheer will to carry on has bled from the backrooms to the front-of-house where we have somehow risen to almost the very summit. It's absolutely astonishing. Normally to have a degree of sporting success stability is a key factor. Well bloody hell, we are making up our own rulebook right now. We have done this because we have never, in my time supporting NTFC, felt so totally together. When the team came over to celebrate the brilliance of the Coventry success, it just felt different, somehow. It felt like we had all been there that day to provide a frank expression of what it had meant to us, it felt like they knew and they really did care back. And then I started blubbing.

This is like a terrible speech, where I thank everyone in overlong overtures of emotion but I don't really care. Because we have so many undiscovered notes left to play in the future, so many sweet melodies to create on and off the pitch. Because, finally, oh heck finally we can concentrate on football once again. It's great that we're winning, I hope it continues. I hope we win the league.

But not even that.

Still I can walk through the town centre that I sometimes despise but is unequivocally mine, and I can sing through the streets that I have always known. Still I can look at that photograph - standing proud next to the Christmas tree with my shirt ridiculously tucked into my shorts in an uncool-kind-of-lower-league way, and I can think about all those people that we've lost. Here's to you, Brian Lomax. Here's to you, Mum. Here's to all the generations that now can sleep peacefully - safe in the knowledge that we, Northampton Town Football Club, will never die.

Here's to many hundreds of years more of it.

Here's to a future bright, always full of claret and white.

Here's to our still-beating hearts.

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.