Carabao Cup, 2nd Round, St. Andrews Park, Birmingham

Tuesday 26 August 2025, 19:45.

The good ship Valiant rolls on, rolls on like a dream in the fog, like a beat-up Cadillac cruising through the third round of the Carabao Cup with no headlights, no map, just the hum of destiny in the engine. No trumpets, no ticker tape—just the creak of old wood and the ghost-sigh of forgotten cheers echoing down the alleyways of memory.

The crew? Shadows in boots, nameless, faceless, beautiful in their anonymity. No cheers, no tears. Just motion. Just being. Just the eternal now. A dark sky of stars and angels.

And Birmingham City — oh Birmingham City! Were they ever really there? Or just a whisper in the wind, a bureaucratic checkbox ticked by some cosmic clerk in the sky? Can you beat a ghost? Can you win against absence? The scoreboard says yes, but the soul wonders.

This Cup, this strange machine of fixtures and rules and dates and deadlines—it looms like a concrete god in a desert of doubt. We don’t even want to walk this path. We’d rather fall on our own sword, noble and tragic, but even that takes forms in triplicate and the nod of some invisible suit behind a desk. And yet, here we are, once again imagining ourselves experiencing one of those wondrous nights where nothing makes sense anymore, Vale ripping apart some big noise from London or Manchester or Liverpool, everyone drunk and stoned on the sheer joy of it all.

The league — ah, the league! That shifting sand beneath our boots, that Kafkaesque maze of outcomes and algorithms and unseen hands pulling strings. But tonight, tonight the gears turned our way. Not joy, no, not joy — but a quiet nod to the universe. We’re still here. We’re still aboard.

And then — bam! — a moment, a flash, that starving cat seeing the mouse, Croasdale and Walters, two cats moving like jazz notes, like instinct, like fate. Croasdale’s cross, it sliced through the Birmingham backline like a memo lost in the Ministry of Forgotten Things.

And there he was, Headley — Jaheim Headley — there at the back post, like a wild-mad genie leaping out the bottle, he knows he’s going to score, we know he’s going to score. That moment of absolute joy!

Birmingham City? They were a void in kit. No shots, no aim, no presence. Just absence. Just the idea of a team, redacted.

Final whistle—more like a bureaucratic chime. One of their players, he came on as a substitute, as impotent as the rest, you know the one, that expensive striker – in everyone’s face, bitching and whining, wailing and stomping, all red face and ugly bitterness. We didn’t answer. We looked away. Not in fear. In understanding. In knowing. In the absurdity of it all.

And Gauci, that cat can handle a ball like it’s a baby bird, but his feet? Like jazz hands in a thunderstorm. Mo Faal — awkward, impossible, beautiful. A walking contradiction. A handful for the suits on the other side.

We ain’t pretty, but we’re real. We’re better than the table says. We’re beat, but we’re alive. There is so much more to come. We roll on.