It’s not the hope…

First round of Football League fixtures complete? Check. Community Shield decided on penalties? Check. Ludicrously timed international friendly coming up? Check. After a three month hiatus, football is well and truly back.

The first week of the season is always exciting for any fan. For many, it means the end of a summer of Saturdays spent trawling round indoor shopping centres with their partners. Whilst others will don their new replica shirt and head to the first match, fully expecting another season of silverware and the bragging rights in the office.

But what excites all fans from the lowest rungs of the football ladder to the promised land of the Premier League’s top four, is the hope of the first week. A decent win on day one puts you top of the league. A run of three wins will be considered good at any time of the season, but in the early weeks it will be enough to make fans think this really is their year.

Newly relegated clubs meet recently promoted ones, both on a level playing field when just three months ago they were two divisions apart. Strikers score first day hat-tricks only to wait until the New Year for their next goals. Summer signings look like world beaters, new managers like even better Jose Mourinhos. The first week is full of hope. Anyone can win the cup, and anyone can win the league.

But just as the referee blows the whistle on the first 90 minutes of the 2009/2010 football season, some fans will already know they won’t win the cup, and they won’t win the league. Where their colleagues still have hope in their heart on Saturday night, they have despair.

One game down, and already bottom of the league. The new striker looks worse than the old one, and the manager still doesn’t have a clue. Even worse, the beer in the bar is flat and the Bovril lukewarm.

Fans of Norwich City will know this feeling only too well, having just seen their team beaten 7-1 at home by the mighty Colchester United on the first day of the season. Two fans reacted to the team’s dismal performance by storming onto the pitch and throwing their season tickets towards Norwich’s manager Bryan Gunn. Fittingly on a day when Norwich played almost as badly as is humanly possible, they missed.

Norwich fans must be thinking things can’t get any worse than that. The logical approach would be to assume that the result was a freak, and that the season’s low point has already passed. Things can only get better right?

Well football fans don’t really do logic. Norwich fans are much more likely to be thinking that this is just the start of a hopelessly miserable season.

They will do well to remember the old adage that a football season is a marathon and not a sprint though. There are 46 games in League 1, and Norwich fans will surely not endure such an embarrassing afternoon again before the season is out.

As fans we know only too well how quickly things can change in football. Whilst we start the season full of hope, we know despair is just around the corner. But twist and turns are what bring us back to our seats time and time again, and whoever tops the table this week is just as likely to prop it up come May. And of course, vice versa.

Whilst the despair won’t kill us, the hope just might…