Coventry Sphinx stride into the unknown
I’m about to start the football season and so are you
Good morning.
This week’s newsletter is, mainly, about my club, Coventry Sphinx. Our season begins on Saturday and I’m a bit excited, so it stands to reason that I’m going to focus there today. Soz.
I hope you, dear football supporter, will be able to relate to the main piece below regardless of who you follow. I’ve tried to touch on what unites us at this time of year because I sincerely believe most of us are more aligned emotionally five days before the first game than at any other time.
Normal service will be resumed next week with something about Arsenal or Christian Benteke, probably.
Coventry Sphinx stride into the unknown
At first glance, what jumps out of the nascent table for the Pitching In Northern Premier League’s Midlands division is just how familiar it is.
Of the nineteen opponents awaiting Coventry Sphinx in 2023/24 we’ve met fifteen in the relatively short time I’ve been following the club. Eleven of those were league rivals either in the Midland Football League or the United Counties League.
The others are Bedworth United, regular Sphinx opposition in pre-season and more than once in cup competition, including last season; Anstey Nomads, who visited Sphinx Drive in the FA Vase in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic; Sutton Coldfield Town, who played Sphinx in the Birmingham Senior Cup; and Loughborough Dynamo, friendly visitors to Sphinx a few years ago.
Anstey, Sutton Coldfield and Loughborough will be new grounds for me, along with AFC Rushden & Diamonds, Cambridge City and Corby Town. The fourth and final new opponent will be Spalding United. Sphinx played Pinchbeck United there in 2022/23.
Yet while trips to the likes of Lye Town, Boldmere St Michaels, Walsall Wood and Coleshill Town will be a retracing of oft taken pre-covid steps, it’s only really the physical settings that will be known quantities for Coventry’s leading non-league football team in 2023/24. In every other regard we’re about to enter uncharted waters.
On 12th August, Sphinx Drive will host Step Four football for the very first time. Sphinx were promoted from Step Five after our spectacular title-winning season in the United Counties League Premier Division South. We became champions by winning our last eleven league matches and the 2022/23 squad will always be remembered at the club for being the first to reach English football’s eighth tier.
Sphinx’s opponents on opening day will be Quorn, a Leicestershire side who have also been promoted from Step Five. They were in the MFL at the same time as Sphinx and they will meet at least three times this season, having been drawn together for Sphinx’s first FA Trophy tie in September.
Sphinx’s season actually begins not in the NPL but in the FA Cup, which kicks off with the 2023/24 Extra Preliminary Round (so called because it’s extra preliminary) this coming weekend. On Saturday, Sphinx will play an away tie against Stourport Swifts – another former MFL rival.
Rising up before us, beckoning, is a season of new challenges and new experiences. There are a handful of new grounds to visit and new opponents to meet. Even the old ones represent fresh foes. Sphinx are testing ourselves at a whole new level and it’s a mammoth task.
The promise of a new season is always special at this time of year but for teams, like mine, preparing to explore unknown territory, it takes on an even sharper edge. The wait seems a little longer. The pitches look a little greener. The thrill of what’s to come is that little bit more acute. It is – to put it bluntly – bloody exciting.
There’s a tendency among a lot of football fanatics to allow only the negative side of the game, only the pressure, to make a mark on the soul. For these people winning is the emotional baseline. Their teams can only disappoint them. They experience fandom as the weird sort of obsessive enmity that necessarily results from constant disappointment.
But supporters who experience and embrace the lows are the ones who are really on the rollercoaster and August is the beginning of another go round.
For most of us – Southend United are perhaps chief among this year’s obvious exceptions – it’s a clean start. Football supporters are seldom as united as we might be were it not for the accelerating club tribalism that now colours so much of the sporting experience.
The eve of a new season is different, I think. Hopes and dreams, fears and trepidations – these are the stuff of summers spent staring out towards an unsullied, unexplored horizon. The new season is a time of thrilling expectation because unpredictability is football’s secret psychological weapon, the drug by which we’re gripped.
It’s exciting because we don’t know, can’t know, what is about to happen. The eight or nine months stretching out ahead of us will throw up an infinity of possibilities. Some of us will get the good. Some will get the bad. Almost all of us will, at some time, find ourselves in the in-between. No two experiences in football are alike except for before they happen.
The football addiction is perhaps at its most potent in the week before a new season. It’s the end of the long wait but we’re not quite there yet. (Many leagues have indeed already started, but you take my point.)
It is, I believe, a feeling somewhere between optimism and pessimism that’s special for two reasons. First, because it’s felt at pretty much the same time by every supporter no matter their affiliations or geographical proximity to their clubs or their priorities. Second, because people who do not have sport in their lives will never feel it.
As 2023/24 looms, the life of the Coventry Sphinx supporter has become consumed by the promise of the season ahead.
We have hundreds of players in our junior section and a significant role in the Coventry football community, but the ultimate truth is that we are, in non-league terms, a tiny club punching above our weight. We are where we are on merit but the building of the exceptional team that got us here was a miracle.
The reward for all but one of them is a season at Step Four. The odd man out is Callum Stewart, the young forward whose goals did so much to secure the title last season. He’s gone up another level to join Leamington, where he made a scoring start in pre-season.
By the end of the season Sphinx will have played at Step Four for the first time after bringing eighth tier football back to Coventry for the first time in four decades. We’ll have played in the FA Trophy. We’ll have started the FA Cup with a match against a team desperate to take us down a peg. Our ground will look very different from how it looks even today, never mind last season.
All of that starts this weekend. We might be small but we have big ambitions and we’re taking our step up very seriously. We’re fully embracing a new adventure and we plan to compete irrespective of weight class, on and off the pitch.
Do you want to bet against us?
If you enjoyed the main piece, please share this week’s newsletter using the button below.
“She is gloriously multifunctional: the passing master, capable of dipping into space and passing on the turn but also a security guard against the counter attack to which England increasingly look more vulnerable than we would like. Walsh links together defence and attack like nobody else and [Sarina] Wiegman, off the record and when at her most honest, would concede as much.”
Unfortunately I haven’t been able to watch as much of the Women’s World Cup as I’d have liked. The match times play a part, not that I’d use that excuse. Life’s just got in the way.
Anyway, I did manage to come back to the second group game played by England at the end of last week. Midfielder Keira Walsh’s knee injury rang alarm bells but the positive news after the fact was that it wasn’t the dreaded anterior cruciate ligament damage. Nevertheless, the sense in the moment was that the injury was a bad one and Walsh’s vital importance to the team – captured above by Daniel Storey – was thrown into sharp relief.
Salty beef extracts
Shot out of darkness (Terrace Edition)
Why every Premier League club is talking about Financial Fair Play this summer (i)
The most striking thing about the Mbappe saga is the shock and awe (Unexpected Delirium)
Arsenal, Identity, and Evolution (Football Paradise)
Remember Trevor Francis for what he achieved, not what might have been (The Guardian)
Dessert
Am I in favour of AS Roma’s new away kit? Yes I am. Creamy.
By the way…
High Protein Beef Paste is a free newsletter.
However, if you’ve enjoyed my writing over the years you might consider purchasing a Systematic Decline art print.
I’m open to writing commissions and artistic collaborations. Get in touch if you’d like a chat.
That’s your lot. Thanks for reading. Please subscribe if you enjoyed it and haven’t done so yet.
Don’t be shy when it comes to sharing the newsletter. If I can get a decent handful of subscribers I can sack off Twitter and isn’t that the dream for all of us?
Have a week.
Same for us at Berkhamsted FC. First time in Step 3, and without last season's league and cup double winning team & manager, and with the lowest budget in the Southern League Premier Central. It's going to be hard. Very hard.
Good luck Heathy and the lads. Up the Comrades.
Enjoyed that until the bit where I was forced to remember that I’m a Southend United fan.