How Barnsley have left me with the strangest feeling

By Ian Winwood

Published 10:02 19/03/10

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With something like 10 games remaining in the current season, this week I found myself experiencing the strangest of sensations: complete relaxation.

For the first time since Barnsley, the team that I support, were returned to the second tier of English football in the spring of 2006, it seems like we’re not going to spend this year’s spring half-expecting to get sprung from the Championship.

I can’t lie – I’m not quite sure exactly how I feel about this.

On Tuesday night my South Yorkshire Super Reds beat a very handy Nottingham Forest – surely one of the surprise packages of the season – at Oakwell. In doing so the home team, who in the thick of autumn were bottom of the league, had amassed 49 points, a tally which places them in 12th position. Talk about mid-table security.

On Sky Sports News the pretty presenters talked about my club having “kept their play-off hopes alive”, but I don’t believe that for a moment. (Alright, I do, but I’m not admitting out loud that I do.)

For the three seasons before this one, Barnsley Football Club has diced with relegation pretty much right up to the last game of the season. The only time we secured safety before this final date – we managed it in the campaign’s penultimate game – we then journeyed to the Hawthorns to be beaten 6-0 by West Bromwich Albion.

On the final day of the season in 2009, Barnsley were away at Plymouth Argyle while this Barnsley supporter was away in Seattle, eight hours behind the UK. The game kicked off at 1pm GMT, 5am on the Pacific coast. Every five minutes I’d get a text from my mum who was at the game and by ten to seven my time I knew my team were safe. So I got up and treated myself to a slap up breakfast in the fish market that overlooks Puget Sound.

Beat that for a way to start the day.

But this year there’ll be none of that. I might sound like a lunatic saying this, but in some ways I will kind of miss it. The point of following a football team – if indeed there is any point to it at all – is to experience emotions that are unusually intense. Now I might feel very differently about this had my team not escaped relegation for three seasons on the bounce, but we have, so I don’t.

This Saturday Barnsley will play Ipswich Town at Portman Road. As the calendar would have it, it is currently the home team who have fears of downward mobility. If we win at the weekend it will be great, and if we lose it will suck. But it doesn’t really mean anything, not in the grand scheme of the season’s campaign.

I can’t lie, this spring I am kind of missing the stress caused by the threat of relegation. But then again, I could get used to this new, relaxed way of living.

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