Saturday's match between Coventry Sphinx and Loughborough Dynamo was called off five hours before kick-off because the pitch was frozen solid.
I made my other plans and settled down, ten minutes before it should have started, to watch Alfreton Town v Walsall in the FA Cup.
While I certainly wouldn't and couldn’t claim to be a Walsall supporter, I do have some affinity. I've been to watch them this year. So I had, at least, that little something it takes to care about a game.
Match of the Day began, aired its interviews with the two managers, and immediately ended. The match was postponed as everyone suspected it would be, and BBC One gleefully switched back to its regular diet of throwaway antiquing shite.
Social media soon ignited with Alfreton and Walsall fans demanding the opposition go bust or whatever, but the truth is that non-league clubs – television or not – face an impossible situation quite regularly every winter.
To quote the amazing Faith No More: here's how it works.
When a fixture is under threat from rain or ice or snow, we'll typically have a decent idea the day before as to whether it's likely to survive the weather. With very few exceptions (i.e. when the league issues blanket permission for early postponements) there's nothing we can do with that information.
On matchday, the initial pitch inspection is at the club’s discretion. The grounds team will inspect the pitch early. Should it pass that test, we're either confident enough to proceed until the match referee arrives, or we'll bring in a local referee to do another inspection.
Then, when the match officials get to the ground, they'll make a decision. It is naturally subject to change and that crack in the matchday edifice is just one of the many fences at which a fixture might fall.
All the people who look at the pitch want the game to be played. That's the default and the reason there are late postponements.
They're frustrating but they come from a good place. Nevertheless, travelling clubs and supporters are inconvenienced and left out of pocket and the determination to play a game is sometimes misguided. Having seen the pitch at 12.20pm on Saturday I'd argue that Alfreton against Walsall was one such occasion.
It's something I've written about before but the cost of living crisis makes the issue even more significant. The instinct to play is noble. Nobody wants matches to be postponed in the morning when better conditions or a bit of elbow grease might make it playable come kick-off time.
But that instinct can be a hindrance to common sense. This is a tightrope we needn't walk. The sensible call is a cautious one, unfortunately, and regulatory changes to enable and encourage that – and to minimise the risk of late postponements once a game-on decision has been made – must surely be considered.
The future of football and social media
If you spend any length of time thinking about football and social media you will inevitably end up considering Football Twitter, the toxic anarchy of trolls that's leached into and leeched away from football supporter culture in the last five years or more.
Football conversation online is vibrant, active, almost limitless. It's also increasingly poisoned and poisonous, and a pretty negative place to spend time. It hasn't always been like that. Football and social media are inseparable, so natural a pair of bedfellows that supporter culture and social media have evolved together for the better part of four decades.
From user groups and mailing lists in the early- to mid-nineties to the absolute ubiquity of football in social media today, supporters have always been at the forefront of new developments. When it comes to early adoption, there's pornography and technology obsessives, and then there's football.
Messageboards, websites, blogs, podcasts, vlogs – every major content democratisation refresh in what we used to call new media has been jumped upon, advanced and monetised by football supporters with a voice. There have been a great many positive outcomes but the present – in which Twitter continues to dominate football social media even as it crumbles around us – is fundamentally broken.
Football discourse and content has never been more plentiful or more geared to the lowest common denominator, more damaging, or more apart from the actual experience of going to football matches as an active participant in the sport and its supporter culture.
Twitter is a football derelict at best. Other social media platforms are riddled with racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic abuse and worse, all right out in the open. Yes, there have been some benefits. Talented writers and broadcasters have emerged from social media and some truly special content has been created. But the overall picture is grim and football culture is suffering.
It’s easy to assume social media will always be this way. Facebook is the biggest platform in the world and almost 3 billion of social media’s global population of 4.76 billion are active Facebook users. It’s approaching its twentieth birthday. Twitter, by comparison, is tiny – in football, though, it remains perhaps the most significant of all. It was founded in 2006.
Social media analysts recognise that minor updates to these platforms occur all the time but many sense that the rate of genuine innovation has slowed in the past five years. The mid-2000s birthed the platforms still dominant today and, in terms of mass participation on a worldwide scale, bugger all else is really happening.
But that’s not how social media works. Evolution is inevitable because technological advancement is as human as war. Change is always likely because the next potential catalyst is never more than weeks away.
Twitter is football’s social media home and has undergone a seismic shift since it was taken over and gutted from the inside out by a vicious wolf in the village idiot’s clothing. Facebook’s billionaire owner might be less outwardly malevolent but is every bit as powerful and unhinged.
One of the most noteworthy rumbles in the underworld of social media is a growing rejection of not just these two monsters, but the whole idea of monsters ruling massive centralised platforms at all.
Apparent dissatisfaction with Big Social platforms and the demented alien lifeforms who own them is coinciding with a desire for greater control and ownership on the part of social media users.
Mass social brings with it the algorithmic feeds, advertising, spam and aggression that make Facebook and Twitter so unpleasant. Any benefit of publishing there is nullified by the fact that the platforms can change the rules of the game at will and, ultimately, users don’t own their profiles, their content or their audiences. Little wonder we’ve had enough.
Furthermore, we’re increasingly embracing identity with many faces. As online individuals, we’re finding communities that relate to shards of ourselves. These fragmented communities, now and especially in the future, own their spaces in order that sexually inadequate space robots can’t pull the rug out from under them on a whim.
Right now that means the growth of Discord servers, subreddits and messaging groups for specific interests. A football server here, an ice hockey subreddit there, a WhatsApp group of likeminded music fans – we are where we speak.
What that means for the short- to medium-term future of football and social media is uncertain but we can make some guesses based on the prevailing winds of social.
There will be new places online for football communities as supporters opt in to self-selecting social. Internet supporter culture will splinter as we dump Twitter and Facebook, decide whether the mouth-breathing dregs of the game belong in our lives or need to be left to their perverse fandoms, and wear our memberships like badges of identity.
Subreddits, Discord and WhatsApp (Meta-owned) are merely the first phase. Decentralised and federated social will follow.
Bluesky is bubbling away just under the surface of Twitter’s pancake complexion. The attraction for most users – and its primary advantage over the more complex and less rewarding Mastodon – is that it’s easy to use and just does its job of being a bit like old Twitter. It’s small but it’s catching on.
This is significant. Bluesky was built as proof of concept for the Authenticated Transfer Protocol, the networking technology upon which it lives. In time, ATP will be home to other networks.
Instead of a Facebook page Manchester United could launch a whole social network. It would own the platform and its content, all of which can be moved between ATP platforms. Supporter communities can do the same thing and a single log-in potentially unlocks every element of the identity pick ‘n’ mix we choose for ourselves.
Perhaps more importantly, the emergence of new technologies and platforms means new cultural developments to go with them, and, as far as football goes, a chance to abandon the vacuous and reinstate the virtue of quality.
There will be new ideas, not to mention new influencers or creators or whatever we’ll end up calling them, and with them comes the prospect of both greater value and more landfill garbage. But, without the gigantic cesspits dominating social media, the shit of football supporter culture shouldn’t float. Even if it does, we will simply be able to opt out and move our whole selves, intact, to somewhere else.
Such sociological matters are interesting and substantial but there are also serious football issues up for grabs. The changing social media landscape will by definition take the widely abused concept of fan engagement with it.
Might that mean a clean slate? Could cheap engagement be less easy and make way for a strategic focus on more powerful, more genuine engagement? Will individualised control of our online participation lead to better use of social media as a force for meaningful supporter representation within clubs and the game as a whole? Will the media need to up their game? We can only hope.
This is all theoretical. There’s a bit of knowledge, a little reading and a lot of guesswork involved. The winds of social media are blowing away from the big rabid dogs and supporter culture will necessarily fragment and reconstitute itself along the lines set out for it.
In decades gone by youth culture emerged tribe by tribe, subculture by subculture, and there’s an argument that online fandoms share that root. It’s inherent in the trending direction of social media.
But there’s a twist: football is different. The internet is filled with fandoms outside the world of sport but none of their wonky zealotry can match the mania that infects us, for better and worse, as football people. Football has a long history of punching above its weight socially, politically and economically, and that sets it apart. We can’t just break and rebuild.
Sure, we’re our individual tribes. The future of social will comprise club platforms, partisan supporter groups, fan-led communities and fan media, as well as fantasy football collectives, league-level discussion platforms and places for cynical old duffers like me to congregate around the things we hate.
But we’re also football.
Historically, the game has been a global powerful voice that speaks only the universal language. In a splintered social internet that’s more subculture than mainstream, with no town square and no centralised control, where, and how, will we continue to convene on the issues that really matter?
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“I feel like a bit of a test case for this kind of model covering clubs at this level, so I really hope it works…obviously for myself, but also for the fans, who depend on knowledgeable local media to represent them in holding clubs to account, to help contextualise decisions and issues affecting the club, and to provide more detailed coverage than they’re going to get in the national press.”
My pal Steven Chicken is changing the game.
Salty beef extracts
Trying to understand what happened at Villa Park with Legia Warsaw (House of V)
Crystal Palace’s existential crisis goes far beyond Hodgson’s miserable football (i)
What if they never get the bug? (Unexpected Delirium)
We’re not really here (The Football Fan)
Photographer Tom Harrison tackles Hackney Marshes referees in cinematic series (Creative Boom)
Dessert
Here’s the adidas Predator 30 football boot. A Predator in black, with a tongue and an updated red(ish)/black/white colourway that is, honestly, gorgeous. I’m sold.
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