I am not, in the general run of things, a man who attends football matches. I am a man who attends coffee houses and occasionally, when the weather is tolerable and my knee is not objecting, the park. My relationship with sport is the relationship of a man who reads the cricket scores in the morning paper and feels that this is sufficient engagement with the athletic endeavour.

But Felix Rensler, who knows me better than I sometimes wish, pressed a ticket into my hand on Friday afternoon with the words: “Go. You need to hear it.” And because Felix has never been wrong about what I need — he is the man who introduced me to Darjeeling, and also to the concept of moderation — I went.

I will not describe the match. Fairfax will do that elsewhere in this newspaper with his customary passion and his considerably greater expertise. I could not, in honesty, tell you precisely how the second goal was scored, because I was watching the wrong part of the pitch, which appears to be a habit of mine in all areas of life.

What I will describe is the sound.

The First Sound

Forty-eight thousand people make a noise before the match begins that is not quite a roar and not quite a hum but something between the two — a vast, low, expectant vibration, like a tuning fork the size of a city block. It is the sound of collective anticipation, and it enters through your feet as much as your ears. The old wooden stand where I sat — high in the eastern terrace, wedged between a woman in a Rovers scarf and an elderly man in a flat cap who smelled faintly of pipe tobacco — shook with it.

I have not been in a crowd this size since the centennial celebrations of 2019, which were splendid but orchestrated. This was not orchestrated. This was organic — a city that had decided, without anyone issuing instructions, to be in the same place at the same time and care about the same thing.

The Second Sound

When Haverford scored — I will not pretend I understood the tactical significance, only that the ball was in the net and the wrong people were celebrating — the stadium fell silent. Not the comfortable silence of a library or a coffee house, but the awful, ringing silence of forty-eight thousand people holding their breath at once.

The man next to me — the flat cap, the pipe tobacco — said, very quietly, “Oh.” Just that. “Oh.” And in that syllable was everything: frustration, fear, the accumulated weight of a season that has been more ordeal than entertainment.

The Third Sound

The equaliser came before half-time, and the noise that greeted it was unlike anything in my experience. It began as a roar — sudden, violent, involuntary — and then transformed, almost instantly, into something else. A song. The entire eastern stand, and then the northern terrace, and then, from what I could see, the whole ground, singing a song I did not know the words to but could feel in my sternum.

I asked the woman next to me what they were singing. She looked at me as though I had asked what language we were speaking. “It’s the Rovers song,” she said. “Everyone knows it.”

I did not know it. But I knew what it meant. It meant: we are here, and we are together, and this thing matters to us.

The Fourth Sound

When Blackshaw came off — the centre-back, the one with the injured knee, I gathered this much from context — the sound was different again. Not a roar, not a song, but an ovation. A standing ovation of such warmth and duration that even I, who did not know the man’s name twenty minutes earlier, felt my throat tighten.

The man in the flat cap was weeping. Not copiously — the quiet, steady tears of a man who was not embarrassed and did not consider an explanation necessary. He clapped, and he wept, and when it was done he said, “Good lad,” and sat down.

I did not ask him why. I think I knew. He was not weeping for a footballer. He was weeping for something he recognised — a man carrying an injury and doing his job anyway, because other people were depending on him. This is not a sentiment confined to sport.

The Fifth Sound

The winning goal, late in the second half, produced a noise that I can only describe as seismic. The stand lurched. The woman next to me grabbed my arm. The man in the flat cap threw his hat in the air and caught it with the practised ease of someone who has been throwing hats in the air at Bridgewater for half a century.

And then, in the minutes that followed, as the team defended and the clock ran down, the ground produced a sound I had never heard before and may never hear again — a low, collective, anxious, hopeful roar, sustained without interruption for what felt like an eternity but was probably four minutes of stoppage time. It was the sound of a city holding on.

After

Bobington does not agree on much this week. We do not agree on copper or tramways or what to do about the fishermen in the Kaelmar Strait. On Monday, a commission will convene to argue about hundreds of millions of florins, and the argument will be real, and necessary, and probably unpleasant.

But yesterday, for ninety minutes plus injury time, the city was one voice. Not because it agreed on anything important — the relative merits of a 4-3-3 formation are not, I submit, among the great questions of our age — but because it remembered what it is like to be together.

“You see?” Felix said this morning, when I told him. He was pouring my tea. He nodded, as though confirming something he had already known. “It’s not about the football.”

He is wrong about this, of course. It is very much about the football. But it is also, and at the same time, about everything else.

The tea, incidentally, was excellent.