Droylsden 3 Us 1

Looking at this ragtaggle mob, they beat us last night. It’s difficult to know whether the Conference is an insight into the lunatic fringe or the oncoming revolution. It seems fitting, therefore, that the humiliation kicked-off at 5.15, in the twilight zone of the day.

I started this blog to document a march from the bottom of the barrel to the Champions League; it feels like I’m chronicling the last days of a once great civilisation.

Perhaps there’s nothing we can do about it; perhaps we’re victims of a macro-political shift in football. Maybe Droyslden, Salisbury, Histon and Farsley are, in fact, being lead by hideous mutants like the MK Dons to a new epoch in professional football. Perhaps we are witnessing the minor rock falls that preclude the destruction of the game’s gaunt edifice. Maybe this is a sequence of apparently unrelated moments that will ultimately lead to today’s super powers; Chelsea, Manchester United and Liverpool becoming the equivalent of the Corinthian Casuals, Royal Engineers and other lost giants of the Victorian age.

Perhaps we’re just messengers sent, from the pinnacle of the game to the lunatics at its the depths, to say that the revolution is coming and that their efforts will be rewarded. We’re the sacrificial lambs, next will be Wrexham, Bradford and Leeds. The Premiership giants living on mountains of debt, Newcastle, Arsenal, Manchester United, will eventually crumble to the floor leaving the new breed to thrive. Like locusts in a holocaust.

It’s easy to blame the management and owners, the players, the fans, and the TV companies. It’s everyone’s fault and, at the same time, nobody at all. On Thursday, Oxford-on-Sea arrive at the Kassam; the gloating faces of our past; Hargreaves, Mansell, Zebrowski, Sills; like some kind of final reckoning where you confront your former demons. Make-or-break for the season? Maybe. But perhaps its always been out of our hands.