The eve of the new football season

 The eve of the new football season.

In the distance you can still hear the clattering, rattling sound of horses and their stirrups, a jangling, evocative sound that keeps resonating in your  mind even today. It is still high summer and yet the autumnal pageant has yet to arrive at Upton Park. It is early August 1978 and you're about to enter that crucial penultimate year of secondary school. It was that vital turning point of your life where the men were sorted from the boys and you simply languished in the margins of academia. 

 Now this was a school solely designed for those teenagers who never quite made the grade or whose only dalliance with academic brilliance was a flair for writing long winded, wordy and verbose English essays. You were never destined for university and that was final. Most of the kids at my school were bright, well adjusted, clever and streetwise, either joining the family business or muddling their way successfully through life and just making the best of what they had. You, for your part, had to carry around with you a huge inferiority complex but that's a story perhaps for another day. 

Anyway, it's the opening day of the new League season 1978-79 and West Ham are about to embark on their first step of the ladder that they were rather hoping would lead back to the top flight, the old First Division or in today's money the Premier League. The men in claret and blue had been relegated to the old Second Division for the first time in exactly 20 years so this was a massive cultural body blow to the system. Having never experienced this sensation before, it was a sobering, painfully chastening setback. But it was far from the end of the world. 

West Ham's first opponents 48 years ago in the old Second Division were one of the oldest members of the Football League pyramid and a club who openly admitted to wearing the same black and white stripes of Juventus. Notts County had never won anything of significance in the club's history and were consumed with unnecessary envy because their neighbours Nottingham Forest were about to win the old First Division or the League Championship under the incomparable Brian Clough not once but twice in succession. And yet County ran out into the baking heat at Upton Park and were afforded a respectful round of applause. 

It was weather more suitable for the traditional summer game of cricket, where willow bat met red ball in harmonious unison, T-shirts were the order of the day and some of us were delighted to be back on the terraces again. But there were no centuries, googlies, maiden overs or pigeons at midwicket discussing the possibility of the first female Prime Minister. But what did Margaret Thatcher know about football? For those who had gathered in a huddle in West Ham's South Bank this was genuinely a venture into the unknown. 

Fearing no-one in particular, West Ham set about the task rather like hod carriers on a building site with bags of cement, a basic foundation stone, a couple of strapping brickies and hope. The task ahead, although apparently an easy one, never quite worked out in the way most West Ham supporters thought it would. There was an air of arrogant entitlement about the club, a naive assumption that come the end of the season, West Ham would be back in the old First Division where they felt they belonged. 

What should have been regarded as a much tougher assignment became three more seasons in the second tier before finally the new tyres had been fitted, the engine and carburettor were working like a dream and the machinery sounded as smooth as anybody could remember. West Ham did have an open road but that long, gruelling thoroughfare was fated to be clogged up by heavy traffic, hundreds of tailbacks and a journey that seemed to go on indefinitely. 

Anyway West Ham's opening day of the season resulted in a thumping, emphatic 5-2 victory for the Hammers and no complaints from here. David Cross, the bearded and former Coventry City and West Bromwich Albion striker, weighed in with some vital strikes and the goals were liberally scattered across the afternoon. Brian 'Pop' Robson was still scoring goals for fun, Pat Holland, Geoff Pike, the sublime Trevor Brooking and an emerging Alan Devonshire who had arrived from Southall for peanuts, started as they wished to go on. 

But the overwhelming memory of that mid August confrontation between West Ham and Notts County was one that will live on for many a season to come. Everything felt fresh and new, even the supporters, with their burgers and hot dogs oozing rivers of tomato ketchup, had a twinkle in their eyes. Most of the men were bare chested and tanned from their customary excursions to the Mediterranean. It felt good to be back again and yet slightly alien and confusing. 

You had discovered quite early on that West Ham were unpredictable, neither here nor there, winning when the mood took them but then slumping into some moping, morose melancholy when things took a turn for the worse. You'd seen most of West Ham's nail biting, narrow victories the year before. It didn't make for pleasant viewing and sometimes the body language was there for all to see. Teams would take an early lead, shutting up shop and quite literally putting up the defensive shutters. 

But on that remarkable day back in 1978, the Upton Park loyalists kept the faith. The following year, you can still remember cheering yourself hoarse when history was made. A year later, Phil Parkes became the world's most expensive goalkeeper in Britain with a price tag of £565,000. What a tidy, princely sum if chicken feed in today's stratospherically shocking, multi million pound transfer market. But Parkes was a ruggedly tall and imposing keeper who blocked all avenues to goal for the opposition. 

The back four of Paul Brush, Frank Lampard, Alvin Martin and Billy Bonds would become the established defensive unit who seemed to understand each other quite perfectly. Eventually they would see off the less heralded likes of Oldham Athletic, Preston North End, Cardiff City, Swansea, Shrewsbury Town and their local East End neighbours Leyton Orient. And yet the Os had the audacity to beat West Ham on a very late 1970s Boxing Day fixture and that was a punch to the midriff. 

Still, back on that late summer's day back in August 1978, that first fixture in the old Second Division did have some kind of meaning and resonance. West Ham had been brought down to earth quite abruptly because this was football in a environment that their solid fan base must have seen as distasteful and degrading. And yet you marched past the police on horseback and that enticing perfume of hot dogs and burgers, feeling optimistic with pristine badges, banners and flags of every colour in the rainbow. 

There was something still refreshingly summery about that day that still sends a warm glow down your spine. You were still at school and that in itself was something of a reality check. But the opening day of any new season reminds you of your first day at school. You might have been dreading the prospect but deeply embedded in your heart, there was a sense that eventually you'd get to know friends of your own age without worrying too much about the future. 

West Ham had a player sent off that day so that spoilt the copybook, taking an edge off the game. But we knew, we were convinced that one day Liverpool, Arsenal, Spurs, Chelsea, Manchester United and Manchester City would all be longing wistfully to be reunited with West Ham on the level playing fields of the old First Division, a sight to behold, a joy to the eye, rightful opponents on the day.

And as for the opening day of tomorrow's new Premier League season, football will always evoke the same sense of nostalgia, the way things used to be and always will be. The pitches of course look like snooker tables with every blade of grass, immaculately cut in straight vertical or horizontal lines depending on your point of view. Even the goal posts and crossbars will reveal a richly deserved coat of emulsion paint  while the touchlines will almost be handsomely illustrated for the rest of the season. 

Back in the dressing rooms, the players will be digging out their lucky charms, perhaps kissing the Blarney Stone for good luck or just fantasising about an immediate return to the Premier League. The usual suspects will be lining up for inspection and the familiar chants will resound around those gladiatorial amphitheatres as if the Romans really were waiting for a good, old fashioned difference of opinion. Let the good natured hostilities commence.  

Arsenal, the new Premier League champions, will be champing at the bit. The regular fans, hitherto traumatised by finishing runners up to Manchester City for four successive seasons, will be chipper, lively and upbeat about their chances of retaining their title. Throughout the Arsene Wenger era there was a classical panache about their football which suggested that sooner or later, City would always get their comeuppance eventually. By then of course Wenger had already left the building and gone but the expansive nature of their short passing game across the wide and central areas of the Emirates Stadium did bear fruition. 

But now Mikel Arteta has got Arsenal exactly where he wants them. Last season Arsenal became renowned for their free kick and corner expertise. Here we had the perfect demonstration of what happens when you find the easy way through a stubborn defence. A vast majority of Arsenal's goals last season originated from well designed set pieces. Still, though much of football's continued to please the eye with its eye catching originality and free flowing fluidity. 

For Manchester City's Enzo Maresca, their new boss, this may be another transitional era for a team who used to be regarded with all the ridicule of a music hall joke during the 1980s and 90s. City used to resemble a team of downtrodden dray horses ploughing the farm lands of Middle England. Their football owed much more to the arduous tractor than the more cultured exponents of the game who did things the subtle way. City were explosive and impulsive pass masters who demolished their opponents as if they were simply not there. City, though, will surely be a work in progress now. 

The likes of Chelsea, Aston Villa, Manchester United and Liverpool can never be discounted in any Premier League title race. Chelsea will probably blow hot and cold with varying degrees of  success and failure but then the swashbuckling style of their football could always be guaranteed a visit to Stamford Bridge if only for its novelty value. Chelsea's fans will hope to be reminded of the electricity once generated by Peter Osgood, the late and much missed Ray Wilkins, the probing and scheming Charlie Cooke, the muscular virility of Ron Harris, the long throws of Ian Hutchinson and the charming Dave Webb, always holding the fort at the heart of Chelsea's defence as if born for the role. 

Manchester United will be desperate to recapture the years of idyllic mastery as once exerted during the Sir Alex Ferguson era. Then Beckham, Scholes, Giggs, Butt and Sharpe were unstoppable and unsurpassable so much so that once the Treble was once achieved and nobody could break down United's seemingly impenetrable fortress. United must be hoping that Michael Carrick will wear the same set of smart of clothes of Sir Alex at his most elegant. 

Liverpool, under the new management of Andoni Iraola after the surprise departure of Arne Slot, will be on their starting blocks, ready and waiting. Liverpool's determined effort to hold onto the Premier League title two seasons ago left a bittersweet taste in the mouths of those who probably believed that Liverpool were on the verge of recapturing the giddy, heady and euphoric years of domination in the top flight. Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley were always going to be an impossible act to follow. But a top six place may not be entirely beyond the realms of reality for the Kop at Anfield. 

So here we are at the beginning of a new Premier League season as well as the Championship, League One and Two. For some of us it's back to the drawing board of second tier football and perhaps a season or two of adequacy and mediocrity. But whichever team you support, you may be sure that the game will never lose its timeless intrigue or that wondrous source of fascination. And yet the jury will remain out on VAR, white sprays, ridiculous offside decisions and draught excluders. Oh and before we forget. We may have to wait several centuries for goals to be either ruled out or given. Some things never change.