Saturday 20 September 2025, 3pm.

Vale Park, Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent.

Ninety-five minutes gone and the world hangs on a whistle, the ref a god with a plastic trinket, Ronan Curtis standing there like a man on the edge of a dream he didn’t earn but got anyway, a cheap foul like a back-alley deal in the rain, and the rain is falling hard now, slicing through the Vale Park floodlights like divine judgment, and the ball is there, white and waiting, and Curtis breathes like a monk, like a boxer, like a sinner about to be saved, eyes flicking from leather to keeper to sky and back, and the whistle blows and the silence is holy, and he moves, he strikes, he is lucid, he is defiant, he is everything and nothing, and the net ripples and the crowd erupts and the scoreboard blinks 2–1 and Mansfield have ninety seconds to rewrite fate but fate is stubborn and they don’t and it’s over. Mansfield might feel that it wasn’t fair and it wasn’t just. Well, it just doesn’t matter whether it was or wasn’t. Was it beautiful? That’s a definite nope. But it was football and football is life and life is busted and brilliant and mad and we love it anyway.

We gaze over to the Bycars Stand, the rusted coliseum of the Potteries, where the fans from the town of Stags and Scabs — patched jackets, coal-dusted dreams, hearts full of vinegar and brass — sit like ghosts in a theatre of shattered illusions. Just minutes before, they were gods, they were thunder, they were the scream of the earth itself, erupting in joy at the equaliser, a bolt from Zeus himself, arrowing into the top right corner like a jazz solo that bends time, that rewrites the laws of gravity. A fight-back from their 10-men. Port Vale 1, Mansfield Town 1.

And it cancelled out our opener, the Zen Master – Devante Cole, the man who moves like smoke through a neon-lit alley, who touches the ball like Miles Davies touched the horn, like Jimi Hendrix bent the strings of the universe into a new religion. He’s not just a player, he’s a prophet, a whisper from the other side, and we — us — mere mortals, we watch and we weep and we wonder.

But now — now — they stare. Those Mansfield fans. Dead-eyed. Into the abyss. Into that familiar inferno that burns your soul to the ground, that place where hope goes to die and memory dances in the flames. We’ve all been there. We’ve all felt the sting of the gods turning their backs, the silence after the storm, the long walk home under sodium lights and broken dreams.

And we’re marching now, soaked to the bone and buzzing, down Hamil Road like pilgrims of the pitch, the Vale faithful, the mad and the merry, the broken and the blessed, and the rain is biblical, hammering down like the gods are angry or drunk or both, and we don’t care, we’re alive, we’re victorious, we’re unjust and we’re jubilant, and we’re heading for sanctuary — Clayhanger,  The Bulls Head, The New Inn, The Crown, Post Office Vaults, Johnny’s, Bursley Ale House. We are philosophers and we are artisans, pints are poured like poetry, those Titanic ales, those craft beers, those ‘authentic’ Spanish lagers brewed in Burton and Northampton, we talk and we shout and we remember and we forget, and we love and we loathe and we live, because this is Burslem, this is Port Vale, this is football, and this is us.

Arsenal are next at Vale Park. The Carabao Cup. Wednesday evening. Our dreams wrapped up in one huge swing of the bat. A free hit. Anything can happen.