One summer, before mobile phones and wall-to-wall TV coverage, I remember coming back from holiday on the opening day of the season. We’d been camping in Europe, and our connections back home were limited to the squealing shortwave frequencies of the World Service. In those days, we were so out of touch, one year we spent a week thinking Boy George had died due to our mistranslation of a German newspaper, and, in an even bigger bombshell, we had the delayed shock of Des Lynam’s defection to ITV after reading a three-day old English newspaper.

As we drove towards Calais to catch the ferry my dad put the radio on, there was a static hiss and occasional blast of French pop music, but we held firm because we knew as we travelled north, we’d eventually pick up a signal for Radio 2 emitting from good old Blighty. 

By the time we got to Calais; Sports Report was in full swing. The presenter opened with the line ‘as the results come in, who came out on top and whose dreams have been dashed?’ 

Even back then, I was appalled, having your dreams dashed is not what the opening day is for. As sobering as a bad result can be, your fate is not secured on day one, the first fixture is an amuse bouche for the coming season, the prologue to a ten-month saga, a forward defensive block at the start of a five-day test match. No season should start with an end.

Yet, this season, that’s exactly what we have; the decision to put the first round of the EFL Cup on the opening day is simply wrong. Apparently, it’s to accommodate a late start to the League due to the bloated World Cup finishing just three weeks ago. As a result, the start of the League season has been pushed forward a week, but then, oddly, the resulting gap has been filled with a round of EFL Cup fixtures. The result is that the de facto start of the season is the same as it always was.

But at the same time, it wasn’t, the Leyton Orient game was lost in a liminal space; neither a pre-season friendly nor the true start of the season. The EFL Cup First Round is usually about giving your star academy prospect a run with the big boys or, if you’re lucky, being wowed by Xemi Fernandez. It’s not about fielding your strongest team. With this new arrangement, the science is less clear; should you play your full-strength side as you would on the first day of the season or give a few marginal squad players a run as you would normally in this competition?

Not that Aaron Ramsey will ultimately have much choice on this matter; there’s no difference between our first eleven and the margins of the squad. That hinterland has been eroded by our transfer embargo. If previous seasons are anything to go by, it won’t be long before the endless cycle of niggly injuries kick in and Ramsey will be forced to select whoever’s available. It’ll be like coaching a school second XI; the team will be chosen from anyone who hasn’t got a detention or a trumpet lesson who is not too disruptive on the minibus to the game.

But those are tomorrow’s problems. Even with the embargo, the season cannot really start until we know the squad we’re playing with. We’ve yet to conclude the merry dance that is the transfer speculation surrounding Stan Mills and Brian De Keersmaecker. We all know how it ends; it’s like a performative LinkedIn post, in the same way we know you’re not ‘excited’ by your new role or ‘sad’ to leave your great team, and your mother’s cancer diagnosis doesn’t make you think about cyber resilience strategies in the fintech industry, we know that what’s being said and what’s happening are in parallel; the players are being packaged up in preparation to be shipped elsewhere. In the meantime, Ramsey’s got to play along finding more elaborate ways of explaining the players’ absence and we’ve got to pretend to get increasingly angry about their lack of dedication to our cause. This ignores that we’d be up in arms if they’d played, got injured and we’d sacrificed a few million pounds in much needed transfer fees. We’re all stirring the pot on this conspiracy and need it to be over as soon as possible.

All that the defeat to Orient has given us is a canvas onto which we can project our greatest fears for the season. Everything we’ve worried about over the summer has apparently become real; all because of 90 minutes of football which is so hard to get a measure of, it’s impossible to really conclude anything.