West Ham start their season on Saturday; I am nowhere near ready | OneFootball

Time stops for nobody; in the blink of an eye, May has become August and I have become my father.

Standing in the away end at Ibrox a few weeks ago, watching Rangers and West Ham contractually oblige their way to a goalless draw, I was hit with a wave of football fatigue.

For years, I’d be counting down the days to the new season while my dad was vaguely annoyed that its impending arrival would intrude on the cricket.

“I need time to get back into it,” he’d say, bouncing off my uncomprehending brain. “Get back into it? We’ve just signed Pablo Barrera, Dad.”

But working in football means no let-up from football. My sleep cycle has barely recovered from the World Cup and my heart has barely recovered from relegation. And now the nights are drawing in again.

More than needing a break – and not just when Rangers fans tried to get a round of Rule Britannia going – I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to expect this season.

At the start of August, West Ham had more takeovers than new signings. Sullivan is thankfully gone, but the Gold-Kretinsky-Stavely ownership saga has the clarity of soup.

At least we’ve been spared a 2003-level fire-sale. The money raised from Matheus Fernandes and Crysencio Summerville’s departures means Jarrod Bowen avoids becoming this generation’s Joe Cole.

In an era when season ticket holders are the pebble in a club’s shoe, 50,000 have signed up at West Ham. In truth, the board could hardly afford to turn them away.

But away tickets are harder to come by; I’ve missed out on Burnley and Watford, despite travelling almost everywhere since COVID. They’re also more expensive without the £30 Premier League cap.

Friends attempting empathy, speaking of West Ham in the Championship with the hushed tones you’d use to discuss an acquaintance at rehab, expect us to walk the league.

This also bounces off my uncomprehending brain; the team I saw at Ibrox was one destined to draw about 20 games, solid in defence but badly lacking pace and midfield craft.

Bowen was isolated on one wing and James Ward-Prowse was improbably on the other, possibly as a forfeit for breathing during one of Nuno’s team talks.

Taty Castellanos, a rare West Ham striker who scores goals, has an agent furiously swiping right on every La Liga middleweight. And the still-to-score Pablo looks uncannily like Drake moonlighting as Dominic Calvert-Lewin with his new braids.

I left for the long train home with more questions than answers.

But there’s something else too. Making the most of a society that has minutely documented the immediate past and refuses to let it go, I’ve revisited our last three second-tier seasons on YouTube.

I use ‘second-tier’ because it was called Division One back in 2003/04. Both the world and the league felt smaller then; Walsall, Rotherham, Gillingham and Crewe were all on the fixture list.

Highlights were restricted to 30-second snippets on Sky Sports News and news disappeared from Match Magazine. Relegation was effectively an exile.

Names even Sherlock Holmes’ mind palace would not have retrieved from my subconscious kept popping up: Neil Mellor, Wayne Quinn, Rob Lee and Niclas Alexandersson.

I was on a caravan holiday in northern Spain for the 2004 play-off final, remote even without the era’s analogue technology, and the possibility of following live was nil.

My grandad ended up texting us that we’d lost to Crystal Palace. Not even the consolation of unlimited bimbo bread could soften that blow.

Christian Dailly and Tomas Repka are remembered as cult heroes – Dailly for his chant, Repka for being unhinged – but YouTube reveals both as the ultimate Scene Of The Crime defenders.

Rarely was a goal conceded without one of them flapping uselessly and the other gawping close by. Alan Pardew did well to get West Ham up in two seasons.

In 2011-12, Sam Allardyce packed the team with Premier League experience and essentially arm-wrestled his way to promotion via the play-offs – even if Ricardo Vaz Te almost shanked the winner onto the Jubilee Line.

All three seasons were slogs, littered with home draws against 10-men-behind-the-ball opponents, humblings at Reading and plenty of empty calorie victories.

Much like going for a run, the only satisfaction came after it was all over. They were only fond memories because we ultimately wriggled back to the Premier League.

Will it be different this year? Reading are in League One, at least. There is talk of new signings and anybody still simmering over *that* disallowed goal against Arsenal will be relieved by the absence of VAR.

Wolves look more Championship-ready, while Norwich are meant to be pretty good. It’s hard not to see Burnley, Middlesbrough and Southampton up there either.

I’d normally be drawn to the unpredictability, but both my head and heart remain heavy. The desk fan pushes hot air around my bedroom and the return of football will raise the temperature even further.

Even the jubilation of promotion would be tempered with anger that all this could’ve happened at Upton Park. Not going up doesn’t bear thinking about.

Deep down, I’d love nothing more than another month off. Deeper down, all I want is to be enthused again.