The first day of the new Premier League football season.

The first day of the new Premier League season.

How football fans right across the country used to long for this day, a relentless yearning that could never be properly understood because only the die-hard loyalists who would buy their yearly season tickets at the end of the previous season could be relied on to push their way through once rusting turnstiles. Then they would find their reserved seat and then absorb the inherent tribalism of it all, the earthy rawness of that cavernous football stadium. Football used to revolve around its fanatical fan participation, the incessant cheering and chanting from feverish terraces. Football used to feel loved and wanted.

But here we are on the opening day of a new Premier League season and still football finds itself at square one, soul-less, drained, diluted, totally diminished as a spectacle and wondering whether it'll ever know what it'll be like to have its supporters back in their rightful place again. When Project Restart completed the full circle of those remaining nine matches of last season, some of us felt sold down the river, exploited, essentially robbed of the game's vital acoustics and dynamics. It wasn't the same and it didn't take a rocket scientist to find out why.

For the last four almost five months the whole world has been shackled and chained down by the lockdown, the global pandemic coronavirus and football was the first victim of terribly unfortunate circumstances. First there was shock, then bemusement, followed by dismay, utter confusion and then thousands of questions, doubts, moral outrage, blame, counter blame and then a barrage of criticism. Football went into hibernation, abruptly stopped, horrendously suspended until further notice and, from time to time, threatened with termination. Football faced a complete shut-down and possible cancellation.

Come the end of June and football was back on the road again. It was business as usual. The remaining nine matches of the last Premier League season were promptly played out behind closed doors, against an antiseptic, dull and lifeless backdrop of no fans, no joviality, no banter, no industrial language, no humour and none of the witty badinage that used to come so naturally to football before lockdown.

The season was promptly finished with Liverpool declared as Premier League champions,  confirmation of something we already knew back in March anyway. Liverpool were 25 points in front of everybody else and were so far ahead of all their challengers that perhaps a towel should have been thrown into the ring by way of surrender. Manchester City qualified for the Champions League, Watford, Bournemouth and Norwich were relegated to the Championship and Leeds United had returned to the big time of top-flight football for the first time since the beginning of the new century.

So here we are gathered together for a brand new football season and it's hard to know whether we should laugh or cry because nothing has changed. The traditionalists will believe that this is not the way they would have planned this one. They'll express their frustration and disgust, tied up in tangled knots of cynicism and not quite knowing how to react. Of course they'll listen to the game in their living rooms, the pubs and the clubs but the fact remains that the physical interaction between the supporters and the players on the pitch still looks a long way from a return to real time.

We all remember those defining moments of the game when a team, having scored a crucial goal- or any goal for that matter- would celebrate seemingly ad infinitum. The goal scorers, quite clearly on a high, would rush over to the corner flag, slide along the ground in an ecstatic trance, kiss the club's badge adoringly and then topple over the rest of their colleagues. Then some of the team would race towards a small section of the ground where a majority of the home supporters would normally have been situated, grinning fiercely and smiling widely at those same fans.

Then the fans would tumble down in their hundreds and thousands in perfect unison, hurrying to ensure that they get the best possible vantage point for their moving displays of congratulation. But certainly for the next couple of weeks or so this will not be the way of things. The fans will just have to get used to more deprivation, a feeling of loss mixed in with an obvious sense of confinement. Their presence on the terraces and the seats will be surplus to requirements and that won't be easy. For the time being anyway.

For instance the Premier League champions Liverpool meet newly-promoted Leeds United at Anfield in a setting that would probably have seemed very alien and frightening to some extent during the 1970s. More than any other top-flight fixture these two teams provided a surefire guarantee of excitement and drama, melodrama and controversy. Liverpool against Leeds was the preserve of Bill Shankly and Don Revie, two managers with big-time temperaments and very similar philosophies on how the game should be played.

Leeds, under Revie were though a mass of contradictions at times, sublimely beautiful when the mood took them but then quite the toughest and dirtiest of any team in the old First Division. Leeds tackled ferociously, shoved, pushed, kicked and punched at the slightest injustice but then astonished us all with the breathtaking purity and subtlety of their football. The ever so slightly schizophrenic streak allegedly running through Revie's team manifested itself too frequently for our liking but when Billy Bremner, Eddie Gray, Peter Lorimer, Mick Jones, Johnny Giles and Jack Charlton came out to play you were sure that the world was in a good place.

Today though  Leeds, under the enormously well respected Argentine coach Marcelo Bielsa, will start this afternoon at Liverpool aware of the club's illustrious history and determined to replicate some of the club's more commendable achievements rather than the ones that were X rated and just abominable. Leeds have been away from football's top tier for too long and whatever you may have felt about some of their football when the danger signs were out, the more favourable aspects of today's Leeds may provide the club's fans with something sweeter to chew on.

And so the new Premier League season is with us again and the next nine months will surely be completely unlike any we are ever likely to see again. Away supporters will not be allowed into the grounds and the home fans who would usually have packed into their favourite part of their ground so creating quite the most unlevel of all playing fields will only see the glass half full.

Any opening day of any new football season carries with it the unknown and unexpected although some events will unravel in quite the most predictable way. The top six of Liverpool, Manchester City, Tottenham, Manchester United, Wolves quite refreshingly and Arsenal will comprise the upper class section while the economy class of Leicester City and Everton will be taking it in turns to bother and pester the aristocrats. The order of merit may be open to guesswork but the overriding impression is that coronavirus or no coronavirus, the established pattern will remain stubbornly unchanged.

As for your personal choice of football club this may be yet another of those tiresome and wearisome  seasons where everything that could go either wrong or right may still not come as any surprise. West Ham United are still under the very workmanlike David Moyes, a man who quite clearly has some kind of attacking plan up under his sleeve but may find that everything he does is so incompatible with the West Ham DNA that he may be forced to tear up that piece of paper and start all over again.

Opening days of a new football season take you back to West Ham's first relegation season from the old First Division in the late 1970s. On a warm August afternoon at Upton Park, West Ham overpowered Notts County with a thumping 5-2 victory. For the next three seasons West Ham struggled and strived painfully to re-establish their top flight status but did get there in the end.

Now though West Ham have once again discovered that this could be another make or break season in the Premier League. Already the natives are restless at the London Stadium and the negative dissenters are still calling for criminal sentences for both the board and chairwoman, the two Davids Gold and Sullivan accompanied by ruthless entrepreneur Karen Brady. It is though the first day of term for everybody so we do hope you'll stand still in the playground, do as you're told and listen to your teachers. This is an important year for the class of 2020-21 and we could be here for quite some time. So straighten that tie and tuck in your shirt. Let the football season begin.