When Skies are Blue. Terrace Edition is on Bluesky

Words: Tom Reed

Images: Tom Reed

Football goes with the sky, like it does with the earth.

Blinking at a long ball.

Dazzled by the floodlights as you stare at the heavens when a goal goes in.

For too long, the social media landscape has been slate grey; smothered, friendships dwindling, contacts drifting off.

Clickbait nastiness has been promoted and the themes that unite us relegated to an afterthought.

But the football fan culture on the terraces has endured, crossing boundaries and reminding us why we fell in love with football in the first place.

When we were kids having a kick-around, if one team were losing badly, a player or two would swap onto the weaker team to even things out.

We had an innate sense of a fair fight. There’s no fun in trouncing the opposition out of sight, no joy in the strongest overwhelming through sheer weight of numbers.

Far better a keener contest, that goes to the last.

That’s all we want, a fair fight and a decent sport to pass onto our kids.

We love a rivalry and despite the strongly felt grief for our derby opponents, we need each other.

Just like we need every team in the football pyramid. The game is only as strong as its weakest link and the clubs down the bottom deserve the chance to get up from the deck and dust themselves off.

Marginal voices should be heard. It’s often the brave souls that put their head above the parapet that root out the wrong uns in the game before anyone is listening.

Hopefully, on this new platform, the skies are clearing, there’s some blue coming through.

We all prefer a W to and X in the form book.

Then we can get back to whinging about how long the queue to the bar is, the state of the refereeing and all of our shared experiences in these fleeting Saturday’s that punctuate our lives.