A final despatch from Italy. Yesterday was Ferragosto, a national holiday to celebrate the end of the harvest and thank workers for their toil during the hot months. We cycled to the nearby lakeside town for the festivities where hundreds of slices of watermelon are given out for free. I guess it’s supposed to be for impoverished farmhands, but it mostly seemed to be for middle class German tourists from Dusseldorf.

A DJ soundtracked the scene playing a series of vaguely Latin-adjacent pop songs while nervously looking up at the sky as an ominous wind whistled across the square. A storm was coming, the opportunity to play his peak-time bangers was closing, he slammed on Mambo Number 5 and hoped for the best.

We’re in the mountains, where fierce prescient winds make way for sudden and violent storms. Even the limoncello sellers were packing up their curb-side displays, so we made for home. It’s about a mile back to our apartment, through a park along a lakeside cycle path. Usually, the only dangers are the adrenaline fuelled mountain bikers making for the mountains and the odd teenager chewing on a panini in swimsuits that cannot have had parental approval.

As we headed into the park, huge raindrops sploshed on our forearms. The rain grew fiercer, lightening lit up the lake, thunder bounced off the mountains amplifying ten-fold with each echo. We’d got our timings wrong, horribly, horribly wrong. Unbeknownst to us, one of our party crashed to the floor as cobbled areas became like glass, another skidded violently towards the harbour wall, but thankfully saved themselves before plunging into the water.

Had we simply thrown ourselves into the lake, we would have been dryer. I imagined the DJ in the square, his white linen shirt clinging to his torso, smashing out It’s Raining Men as people scattered. We were riding into a wall of rain so hard, eventually we had to dismount and push the final few hundred metres to the sanctity of our apartment. If Ferragosto is thanking people for their hard work, this storm was god telling them to get back into the fields you lazy feckers. 

It was twenty to nine local time, five minutes to kick-off back in Derby. There’s something vaguely tragic about building your holiday plans around livestreams so iFollow hadn’t been part of the plan. But our options had been taken from us, we were trapped in our apartment, it felt nice not to have a choice.

iFollow threw up an error I’d never seen before and then randomly gave me a link to a page which allowed me to buy a match pass. It felt like that classic evening away-day when you arrive late and have to negotiate alternative access into the stadium. 

Eventually Pride Park appeared, the summer evening light casting a soothing hue that you don’t get for most of the season. The kits are refreshed, the players lightly tanned, the game seems stripped of its angst, results are of less consequence. 

But, then there’s the rampant amygdala, the part of the brain that stimulates your fight or flight response. Defeats to Cambridge and Bristol City had triggered a reaction, Carlisle eased the tension. While the frontal lobe, the logic system, could be satisfied with an encouraging performance and no points, the prospect of another defeat – three in four – would agitate our haunting doubts.

Schrodinger’s football match – meaningless and meaningful. Having survived near extinction, Derby fans seem to have navigated the surprisingly short path from being thankful that they have a club to being expectant that former glories will be restored without delay. That means the rapid removal of ‘teams like Oxford’. 

But when the expectation grows, the skin thins so it’s is easier to irritate when things don’t go their way. 

And things didn’t go their way; we had a stonewall penalty appeal waved away early on as we played with a freedom and confidence that suggests Liam Manning’s approach is bedding in.

After half an hour, Cameron Brannagan pounced on the ponderous Curtis Nelson and played in Mark Harris on the right. He unleashed a fierce shot that beat the keeper at the near post. Jerome Sale, lamented that it had hit the side-netting, alluding to the Oxford fans being tricked by the illusion that it had gone in. His sentence trailed off when every data point in front of him contradicted his conclusion – the crowd’s celebration, Harris shushing the away fans, the small fact that the ball was literally in the back of the net. 

Mid-sentence, he changed mode, moving from a wistful lament to the excitable pitch he announces goals with. Two entirely different voices melded into the same sentence. In time, this is what Jerome Sale will sound like when he’s converted into an AI bot. 

Derby’s response was blunt, we were totally in control, it felt… what? Mature? We had some great away wins under Karl Robinson, but they were often wild and frenzied; seven goals at Gillingham, six at Lincoln. In some ways this more controlled, it felt better.

With 18 minutes to go, the lightning storms had subsided, but still lit up the skies up in the mountains. The internet buffered, suddenly it froze with the ball in midfield, we waited for it to regain its composure and re-connect – when it restarted Jerome was screeching again “…ris SCORES!”

It took a while to piece it together, but Harris had gone and done it again sweeping in a lay off from Billy Bodin, the points seemed secure.

Enter Gatlin O’Donkor, in baseball there’s the idea of a closing pitcher who specialises in seeing games out. O’Donkor may be the country’s first specialist closing striker, a physical presence there to be difficult rather than score goals. It was aggressive, menacing and masterful, and nearly even brought a third goal. 

A Derby consolation three or perhaps it was twenty-three minutes from time brought a heightened sense of tension, though outside the storm had cleared and calm returned. Perhaps it helped relieve any sense tension. 

Perhaps more than the three points, the win instils a sense of belief. We have a system which seems to be bringing Bodin, Browne and O’Donkor back to life. It’s given them purpose where, perhaps last season, they were listless. Maybe, for once, our emotions were right, this did mean something.