First Love
As Argyle prepare to meet Huddersfield Town at Home Park in the first game of the 2023/24 Sky Bet Championship season, Rob McNichol ponders its significance, in a love letter to the opening day...
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Here we go again, then.
It has been 90 days since Vale Park. 90 days since Rands equalised, since the skipper put us in front, since Finn sealed the deal.
What a weekend that was. We could regale with tales of the Vale and the ale, the day before we celebrated together as a club, and as a city.
What I don’t understand is how it feels like yesterday, and yet it feels like forever ago.
If my mind is playing tricks with me on the timeline, that really doesn’t matter. What matters is that we made memories to last a lifetime. Memories to go alongside Villa Park, with Rochdale away (for two different reasons), with “2-0, that’s it…”, with running riot against Newport, with Wembley in ’96. (Good morning, Neil.)
Now, though, we have the chance to make memories of a different kind.
My first game watching Argyle was in December 1993, which is a corner kick away from being 30 years ago. It took a little over a decade from that point for me to see my first game in the second tier of English football at Home Park. I was nine at the start of that period; 20 when we made the Championship.
It brings it home for me that we will have people at Home Park today, across a gamut of the age range, who have done a decent stint among the Green Army, put in some good years and clocked up some mileage, who get to see the Greens in the Champ for the first time. Enjoy it, won’t you?
Actually, it doesn’t matter whether you lucked out with last year being your first season as a fan, or if you haven’t washed your hand since Jumbo Chisholm shook it. It’s still a great day. We’re back, whichever way you slice it.
We cannot live in various stages of our past forever, but there will be a part of me at 2.59pm that remembers that we nearly faded away. We were nearly trawling Plymouth for a spare park, with our Green Phoenix FC, starting at the bottom and clawing up. We nearly had nothing.
I don’t think there has ever been a more emotional opening day than Shrewsbury Town away, 6 August, 2011. Relegated from League One in the May, a club in turmoil, in administration, in crisis. We were odds against to even make it to the Meadow that day. The kit – the wrong green – was off the peg, the team was a scratch one to say the least. Ten of the 13 who played were debutants, but among them was the captain, a man soon to be the boss.
You can file Carl Fletcher’s late equaliser among the goals I have celebrated the most in my life. Bradley Wright-Phillips at Swindon, Peter Hartley against Portsmouth and, popping outside of my green remit, David Beckham against Greece, probably complete the set. I’m not sure any top the moment when Fletch bagged in front of us at Shrewsbury. It meant so much more than a 1-1 draw.
And how amazing that Callum Wright, at the other end of the same ground, maybe pushed himself into that top ten list when he popped up with a vital effort only a few months ago (109 days, if you are counting).
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To the outside observer, the last time Argyle were in the Championship, it was quite unremarkable. Four years of steady progress, one dalliance with the top ten, a season holding our heads above water, then a sudden, alarming descent. It’s hardly Liverpool under Shankly, Forest’s rise under Cloughy or the Arsenal Invincibles. Or, for the that matter, Huddersfield in the 1920s.
But it meant something to us. We saw Barry Hayles bossing defenders; we saw the best player I’ve ever seen (apart from maybe Steve McCall) play for Argyle in Peter Halmosi; we saw loan stars like Paul Gallagher and Elliot Ward; we saw the peerless, classy Lilian Nalis; we saw Scott Sinclair twisting Crystal Palace defenders in so many different ways that they still can’t eat a pretzel without seeking counselling.
But for Ben Foster’s greatest ever game we would have been in another FA Cup semi-final. What if Sylvan and Gosling and Chuck Norris had stayed? And I still think back to Rory Fallon’s brace at Bristol City to send us sixth in the middle of March. I honestly thought we could do it. Honestly thought we could reach the Premier League.
And you know what? We can. We might. One day. Why can’t we? Are we really all that different to Brentford or Luton or Bournemouth or Blackpool or, yes, Huddersfield?
Look, it probably won’t be this year. Or the next, or even the next. And maybe it will be never. But we are allowed to dream. We MUST dream. Otherwise, what is the point?
On Thursday night, at the Fans Forum, Neil Dewsnip said we are not in the Championship this season merely to crawl above the dotted line. “I promise you our ambitions are not just to survive,” he said, to applause from the floor, who were delighted to have some positivity to hang their hat on.
I respect that. In fact, I love that. Personally, I would be thoroughly ecstatic to stay up on goal difference on the final day, but I’m not running the football club and it is a jolly good thing I’m not.
A potent combination of pragmatism and positivity got us 101 points last season. That, and some really very good footballers. Three of whom, by the way, have decided to return. What a thing it is to have our love reciprocated.
It isn’t just about Morgan, Bali and Finn, though. It’s about numerous others who got us up last year, who are still with us and get to have a go at the Championship, many for the first time.
And then there are the total newcomers. Good luck to Pleggy, to Kaine, to Lewis, to Conor and to another Lewis. You are currently the only five Argyle players to have never made a mistake. Treasure that.
It is hard to know what to expect from the next nine months or so. Be truthful, when Barnsley came to Home Park last season, what were you thinking? I think most of us thought we had a good chance of the play-offs, and with a prevailing wind and the bounce of a ball, we could hit the top three. 101 points? Behave.
But maybe you did think we would win the league. If so, fair play to you – and hopefully you backed up your convictions with Sky Bet. How do you feel right now, about this season?
Southampton aside, none of us have anything on the board yet, but 138 precious points are there to be played for (135 for Sheffield Wednesday).
If you polled a healthy cross-section of every club’s supporters, you would probably get three or four sets of fans thinking they can win the league; another half dozen believing promotion is on the cards; two-thirds of the division probably think the play-offs is a shout, and the lot will think they can stay up.
Not everyone can be right, but the same number of teams as every year will be celebrating come May.
This is my 30th Day One as a supporter. It is as exciting as any other. I have never lost that tingle you feel on the morning of the first game. Without a pre-season friendly on Home Park, the expectancy is heightened that little bit more this season.
New season, new start. It is a little like a first date. The nerves, the anticipation. You’ve slightly forgotten exactly what their face looks like. Pre-season is the equivalent of the flirting in the office, the time spent as friends first, or maybe the online to-and-fro of falsely insouciant messages.
Where does it lead? Will this season prove to be the briefest of trysts? Is it a solid and fulfilling relationship that ultimately runs its course? Or have we met the one?
Actually, that questions answers itself, doesn’t it? And, in which, the metaphor crumbles.
Reaching the Premier League might be the ring on the finger, but the point of the obsession is not the top flight, not the Champions League or even the Championship top half.
It is simply Argyle who are the love of our lives, and we’ve known it all along.
Enjoy the season. It will feel like a lifetime, and it will absolutely fly by.
See you on the other side.
