It is a beautiful, ridiculous fixture. Caravel City — the leaders, the favourites, the side that has not lost a home match since the second weekend in October and that will, barring two consecutive defeats and a result Caravel themselves regard as theoretical, lift the Premier Division trophy in two weeks at the Foundry — host the Bobington Rovers, who are fourteenth in the table and twelve points clear of relegation and entirely safe and entirely free.

There is nothing for the Rovers to play for, in the league sense. They will be fourteenth on Sunday morning whether they win or lose. They will be fourteenth on the eleventh of May, when the season ends, regardless of any combination of results across the final three rounds. They cannot move up. They cannot fall.

This is, in football, a particular kind of freedom. It is also, in the wrong dressing room, a particular kind of danger.

Phillipa Corbett does not have the wrong dressing room.

The team sheet was posted at the Thornhill training ground at 9:14 AM on Thursday, taped beside the noticeboard with three pieces of brown tape and the customary practical joke that someone — usually Dunmore, occasionally Harte — had drawn on it during the previous evening’s clear-up. Eleven names. Three substitutes named (the maximum permitted under league rules), four reserves listed for the bench. The headline, for those who read team sheets carefully:

Blackshaw — start.

Orin Blackshaw has not started a Premier Division match since 8 November. He has come off the bench twelve times since 21 March, scored twice (the equaliser against Port Caravel, the winner from a Dunmore corner at Bridgewater), and trained at full intensity for six straight weeks. Dr Sorrens, the club physiotherapist, signed off on his return to ninety-minute fitness on Tuesday afternoon after watching him complete a 12-kilometre run with the youth squad on the long loop at Thornhill.

Corbett told the players in the team meeting on Thursday morning, with the doors closed and the curtains drawn against the spring sun:

“Orin starts at Caravel. Sully wears the armband, as always. We are not going to the Foundry to make up the numbers. We are going to win a football match. The table will not change. The thing that will change, if we play well, is what this group remembers about itself when it comes back here in August.”

She paused, then added — and the line is reported by three of the players present, all of whom asked not to be named because Corbett has a rule against quoting team meetings:

“I am not interested in being safe. I am interested in being good.”

The Foundry holds approximately fifty-two thousand. Saturday’s match is sold out — has been sold out since Tuesday — and Caravel’s club office confirmed on Friday that the away allocation of approximately three thousand four hundred has been fully taken up by Bobington supporters. Eight Transit Authority specials have been laid on for the journey south, the first leaving Bobington Central at 9:45 AM and the last returning at 11:20 PM.

The match itself: Caravel start the league’s leading scorer, Lucca Nestor (twenty-three goals this season, two of them in the 2-1 win at Bridgewater in November when Blackshaw was not yet injured); the league’s most capped goalkeeper, Vico Pradel; and a midfield three that has not been broken up by injury, suspension, or selection in eleven matches. The Rovers, by contrast, have started no fewer than seventeen different players in midfield over the same period, a fact that says less about Corbett’s indecision than about the catalogue of injuries she has had to manage. Blackshaw’s start completes — for ninety minutes, at least — the line-up that won the Merchants’ Cup at Bridgewater on the fourteenth of February. The same eleven who lifted the cup will start at the Foundry on the twenty-sixth of April.

Sully Marsh, asked on Friday afternoon at Thornhill what that meant, smiled in the way a captain smiles when a question is asking him to be sentimental and he is determined not to be.

“It means we have eleven fit players who can play for ninety minutes,” he said. “It means I get to lead them out at the Foundry. It means I get to stand next to Orin in the tunnel. I am not going to pretend that I am not pleased about it.”

There are two matches after this one. Coldharbour at Bridgewater on Saturday the third of May. Thornbury Academicals, away at the Crescent, on Saturday the tenth of May. Then the season ends, the trophy is lifted (by Caravel City, almost certainly, unless something extraordinary happens), and Corbett begins the work of reshaping the squad for next year — a work she will undertake under a new contract, her two-year extension having been signed three weeks ago.

Bobington’s Premier Division season has not been a great season, by the measure that counts most matches. It has been a remarkable season by every other measure. The Rovers won a major trophy for the first time in eleven years. They survived a relegation scare that, in February, looked terminal. They restored their captain to fitness, they integrated their veteran centre-back, they discovered a young goalscorer in Nadia Osei who is now on sixteen league goals and who, on the basis of three weeks’ watching, may go on to twenty before the season ends.

This afternoon they go to the Foundry. Kick-off is at 3:00 PM. Referee D. Ashworth, who refereed the cup final.

Bring it home if you can, Phillipa.