Wednesday 24 September 2025.

5pm and the Bulls Head is humming, a low jazz of clinking pint glasses and belly-laughs, three hours deep in Titanic Ale and the kind of pre-match buzz that fills the soul with joy. St. John’s Square is a stage, and we’re all players — the North London Valiants swagger in, Andy hawking his fanzine like a potteries prophet: “Derek I’m Gutted”, a title that sings of missed penalties and broken pies.

Arsenal fans sip Madri like it’s holy water, continental fizz in pint pots, while we cradle our Burslem brews like relics of the earth. Titanic Plum Porter, Steerage, Iceberg — ales named like ships, and we’re sailing toward kick-off on waves of laughter and shared stories. The accents mix like paint, London and Stoke in a palette of football love and tribal teasing.

6pm and we’re moving, a pilgrimage past Henry Doulton’s stone stare, the Angel atop the Town Hall watching like a sentinel of old pottery dreams. Lemmy’s ghost thunders through the bricks, basslines echoing off Moorland Road as we turn left onto Hamil – Adidas, Nike, Puma crunching pavement, hearts thumping like drums in a brass band.

We sneer at the half-and-half scarf merchants — plastic souls selling compromise — and those who buy them, lost in the middle of nowhere. Into the Fanzone, where Boomer the mascot jerks to techno so limp it could be a wet sock in a tumble dryer. But the kids love it, and maybe that’s enough.

Tommy’s is packed, standing room only, elbows and shoulders, the smell of ale and hope. We drink more, because that’s what you do when the floodlights are near and the pitch is calling. Port Vale vs Arsenal. Tonight, the world shrinks to ninety minutes and a thousand voices. And we are ready.

8pm and the floodlights hum like neon gods, the pitch a stage for the cosmic ballet, and Arsenal — slick, sharp, celestial — begin their dance. They pass like prophets, swift and certain, their boots whispering secrets to the ball. We chase shadows, we orbit their brilliance, caught in the gravitational pull of a team that knows its own destiny.

They score early, like a warning shot. They score late, like a signature. But in between — ah, in between — we become something else. Not victims, not passengers. Warriors. Workers. Saints of the struggle. Our players, weary and breathless, push and push and push. The boulder rolls down, and they push again. No illusions. No miracles. Just rebellion in boots.

And when the whistle blows, it’s not silence — it’s a roar. Because we didn’t break. We didn’t beg. We stood. And standing, we became more than a team. We became a testament. To effort. To resistance. To the sacred act of showing up when the world says don’t bother.

And so we stagger out into the night, the floodlights fading behind like the last glimmer of a dream, hearts still thumping with the echo of near disaster. Back into the town’s crooked grin, into the old post office,  we drink to survival, to those players who didn’t fold, didn’t flinch, didn’t get thrashed. A couple of whiskeys to warm the bones, beer to rinse the nerves, and laughter that spills like smoke into the alleyways. Then the walk back up to Tunstall, past shuttered shops and sleeping dogs, the kind of walk where the cold bites but the soul burns, and you know—just know—you’ll do it all again next week.