Johnny Phillips: Eery matches show football really is all about the fans

allowed inside stadiums. Nobody knows how many more will pass before the turnstiles open once more.

At what point does the current situation start feeling like the norm? This week Wolves manager Nuno Espirito Santo raised his fears for those who may never discover a love for live football.

“There are some generations now who are getting into football in a different format,” he said, ahead of Wolves’ 10th home game without supporters, against Crystal Palace last night.

“They only see games on the TV. They’ve never felt the atmosphere. If they don’t know what they have, I don’t know if they will go for the first time.”

These behind-closed doors fixtures have taken on an absurd quality. On one level it is a privilege to be able to attend matches in a professional capacity, when so many others are desperate to see their teams.

But the experience is more surreal than enjoyable. At times it is like walking into an apocalyptic scene, at others like stumbling into a Monty Python film.

At The Valley on Tuesday night, neither team was allowed to occupy the dressing rooms owing to the protocols in place.

The home side, Charlton Athletic, emerged for kick-off from an executive lounge halfway up the main stand, the players’ clacking studs echoing around the empty arena. Opponents Oxford United got changed in the media room, which like the press areas at all other stadiums has been out of bounds for journalists during these fixtures.

Away teams hate it all. The sight of players wandering up steps, along concourses and even exiting the ground through one gate only to re-enter through another has been a hallmark of this period. Post-match interviews are sometimes conducted pitch-side with managers while their players file past along the touchline wearing only a towel as they head to the dressing room showers adhering to a strict rota.

When Preston visited Luton towards the end of last season, they had arranged to use a hotel on the outskirts of town for their post-match showers, owing to the unsuitability of the Kenilworth Road layout.

In the end, the players persuaded manager Alex Neil to forego the detour on an already long trip home and they travelled back to the north-west unwashed.

The empty stadiums at least allow for the previously private conversations of players and managers to be heard. When Peterborough played Fleetwood last month the match officials had a particularly testing afternoon in the face of verbal pressure from both sides.

Some of it was brought on themselves. When a linesman flagged Fleetwood’s Ched Evans offside, when he was clearly a couple of yards on, the striker was visibly incensed. A tirade of invective spewed forth towards the flag-bearer, culminating with the richly comic threat, “It’s decisions like this that make me want to retire!”

Clashes between opposing dugouts have had their humorous moments too.

At another League One game recently there was an astonishing dispute between two managers which referenced a night out in Marbella a couple of years earlier when the pair had crossed swords in the Spanish holiday resort after a few drinks.

Pathos is all around us. Covering Barrow’s first game back in the Football League and Harrogate’s first ever home game as a Football League club were occasions that should have been historic but in reality were a torment for two wonderful clubs who have worked so hard to achieve their league status, but were denied the very people they wanted to share it with.

At Portsmouth last month, it seemed our ears were deceiving us. Midway through the second half the bell usually rung by Pompey’s obsessive fan John Portsmouth Football Club Westwood, from his seat in the Fratton End, started tolling.

It was only on leaving the ground half-an-hour after the final whistle that it transpired Westwood had been ringing it, as he sat slumped against a wall outside the ground with a few other die-hards who still turn up on a matchday, despite the lockout.

The walks to and from stadiums are joyless affairs. Streets usually buzzing with fans have a 28 Days Later feel. The pubs, shops and other small businesses so reliant on the fortnightly trade are shut down too. Some, no doubt, permanently.

Attaching meaning to it all is hard, especially when staggered kick off times appear to blur one fixture into the next.

Can these games really be memorable or should they be respected just for being staged at all? Perhaps this is what the wartime fixtures were like: matches staged to boost morale as the world burned all around.

From the perspective of attending games in this period, there is one fixture that has left a memorable mark, though.

It came last week at Mossie Park when it was genuinely heart-warming to join 134 other souls for some North West Counties League Premier Division action.

At step nine in the football pyramid the turnstiles are open. As Charnock Richard and Bootle battled it out, the sounds of supporters cheering their team on, bemoaning refereeing decisions and heckling opponents provided the welcome reminder that it is the fans who will always make football what it is.