I was later than normal getting to the ground yesterday having spent the morning wrestling with setting up an analogue sound system for the first time in about 15 years. As we approached the stadium, an unfamiliar noise emanated from within, it sounded like there was something resembling a pre-match atmosphere. 

‘Someone’s got a drum.’ I said, like a veteran audiophile whose just set up a record player for the first time in a generation, that finely tuned ear never leaves you.

‘That’ll be the Cod Army.’ Brinyhoof reasoned.

It was so loud, I thought it might even be us, but if it was the Cod Army, then they’d evidently come in numbers. Perhaps their relegation fight had stirred the emotions and mobilised the good fisherpeople of Fleetwood to bellow sea shanties all the way to safety. 

Many years ago I remember Bristol Rovers, then on the verge of relegation from the Football League, filling the away end. It was like the cinema scene from Gremlins with bodies flying around and a cacophonous noise. Despite the evident misery of their season, they’d collectively decided to give the team one last whirl. It worked, they won (obviously) and in the process saved themselves. We were fighting for the play-offs, but the defeat confirmed that we weren’t good enough. Oh god.

Getting into the ground, it turned out that the noise was indeed the Cod Army, but the numbers were tiny. Perhaps they’d been over-fished. It was a decent racket, like The White Stripes, Royal Blood and The Pet Shop Boys, you wonder how so few people can make such a noise. Obviously, our response was a gentle expectant silence. Over the sound system Break Out by Swing Out Sister is playing… don’t tempt me. I get it, we all have our home game routines, but nobody seems to have factored in mundane things like ‘cheering a bit’. 

Of course, we started very deliberately and very slowly. It’s in the playbook – ‘play from the back’ although there seems to be a typo in our copy which says ‘play at the back’. Bennett to Brown to Elliott to Long to Elliott to Brown to Bennett and so on and so forth, like the Doomsday Clock ticking down as a reminder of our mortality.

I’d go as far as saying that playing from the back is as damaging to entertaining football as the back pass to the goalkeeper. Perhaps we need a new rule, in the opening twenty minutes, every time the ball completes a full cycle across the back line, the manager has to take a piece of clothing off. Strip Playing From The Back might encourage a bit more energy. No wonder Steve Evans doesn’t entertain all that nonsense.

Where Manchester City’s version of this is purchased from the finest suppliers, ours is a knock-off from Temu, so it tends to break fairly regularly. Sure enough after a few minutes, it did and they fluff a clear chance to open the scoring. As the ball bounced wide, the defence turned as though that had been part of the plan; don’t show them your weaknesses.

Thankfully, Cameron Brannagan is cross about all this; he’s all slap-your-thighs-shoot-from-distance frustrated about the lack of action. Unless he demands attention, the self-proclaimed ‘machine’ gets about as much use as that bean to cup espresso machine you bought after that weekend you had in Italy once.

When he does get the ball, he’s quick to spray it out to the wings to animate our attack. When we go forward, it turns out Fleetwood are utter garbage. Josh Murphy sweeps past people with ease, happy to take risks, but also to sprint the length of the pitch track back and defend. He glides across the pitch, like hovercraft powered by magic powder. But it’s not effortless, there’s enormous amounts of effort involved, maybe the others don’t realise that, I’d say half the fans don’t. Give Des Buckingham credit – he’s got Murphy playing.

Brannagan opens the scoring with a deflected shot as a family arrive in front of us just in time to watch the players high fiving each other. They’re a quarter-an-hour late and will leave with 25 minutes to go – that’s not even trying. 

Fifteen minutes later Mark Harris gets on the end of a superb Murphy cross for number two. Harris is the unhappiest goalscorer in history, like the first things that goes through his mind is that a) everyone is going to now remind him how long it’s been since he last scored and b) everyone is going to expect him to do it again.

Despite the scoreline, a couple of people around us have some pre-scheduled moans that they’ve forgotten about. ‘Sort it out Buckingham’ shouts one. He has sorted it out, at least for this afternoon. It turns out you can just run through the holographic Fleetwood midfield, which is weird because they look so real. Sometimes they pass the ball, but it just rolls out of play. It’s like watching a lower league version of Abba Voyage.

Owen Dale, full of satisfying industry, makes it three. In truth, they have a few clear cut chances – including hitting the bar – which have the potential to make things much more awkward than they are, but the reality is that in a weak league, they’re determined to be the weakest.

Streaky Harris completes the rout with another deflected goal and celebrates like Eyeore finding someone has eaten the last Dairy Lee Triangle. If this was a play, critics would have called it an enjoyable romp. Nobody’s complaining about the outcome or the entertainment, but that Fleetwood character was under-developed and the game lacked chemistry.

I go to the gym on the way home because I’m an absolute hero. In the changing room, someone sees my Oxford top and asks the score. I tell him it was 5-0 – it’s less than an hour after the game and I’ve already forgotten it.

Where it leaves us in a world where nobody wants promotion, who knows? Alive and kicking? Or just alive? It’s just what we wanted, and just what we needed, but it also doesn’t fit the narrative of imminent collapse that some fans subconsciously seem to want to prove a point. If the game were a film, it’s the kind where you need to read the reviews afterwards to find out if you enjoyed it.