Forget the Community Shield: for thousands of fans the curtain raises 24 hours before that

By Ian Winwood

Published 11:16 05/08/11

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Sunday afternoon sees Wembley Stadium hosting the Community Shield, where 90,000 people – some of them Mancunians – will gather to witness Manchester United play Manchester City in what is traditionally known as ‘the curtain raiser for the English football season.’

This phrase works well were it not for the fact that for the overwhelming majority of clubs, the football season began 24 hours earlier (or 48 if you support Hull or Blackpool).

Not that you would know it from watching television, listening to the radio, or reading newspapers, but the Football League season starts this weekend. On Saturday hundreds and hundreds of thousands of fans will celebrate the drought of a long, ho…, er, long summer by seeing their team kick a ball in anger for the first time since May.

The dominance of the Premier League may be such that (whisper this) even for fans of clubs who grace the fields of the Championship, and Leagues 1 and 2, feel that the domestic campaign hasn’t really begun until some ex-pro or other has given their opinion on the top flight’s first weekend, but even so the token mentions given to the 72 teams that will take to the pitch this weekend suggest that the players are only putting their boots on in order to get out of going to IKEA.

Believe it or not, this is not the case. For them - and for those of us that support them - this is real. And it is certainly more relevant to us than Joey Barton’s Tweets, or Arsenal being booed at home while playing New York Red Bulls (an organisation so heavily sponsored they make Manchester United look like the Morning Star’s pub team).

Football fans realise that any summer in a year that ends with an odd number means at least a dozen barren Saturdays. It’s not the end of the world, but it is the end of the season. And with no World Cup or European Championships to soften the blow, it certainly feels like it.

So you would think that even the arrival of a new season in the ‘lower leagues’ – the poor, pitied, despised lower leagues – the media would at least pretend to give a damn about such obscure and poorly supported clubs as West Ham United, Birmingham City, Leeds United, Nottingham Forest and Derby County.

But no, all the lead up to the new season seems to be about is 20 clubs. And the topic of conversation only really concerns itself with a handful of those.

On Saturday, fans of Notts County, AFC Wimbledon, Stevenage Borough and a host of other clubs who most likely will not appear on television between now and May – that is, unless they’re cast in the role of ‘plucky underdog’ in a cup tie against one of the ‘big boys’ – will gather secure in the knowledge that for most of us the football seasons starts tomorrow, not a week tomorrow.

The game at this level may not be as glamourous as many would have you believe, but for us the wait is over.

Football League blog: West Ham, Huddersfield and Swindon for a table-topping treble?  

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