This couldn’t augur well. Neither could the fact that our next game fell on my birthday, 21 March

It’s the hope that kills you. I was doing OK when relegation looked inevitable, in so much as while my psychological condition was critical, it was at least stable. Now I’m all over the place. The bedside monitors are squawking in alarm and the heart monitor graph describes an alpine skyline. All because my team went and drew a couple of games and then actually won a match! Our first win of 2026. There were calls for an open-top bus parade down West Bromwich High Street. I wrote earlier in the season about how everything had been going well until a falcon dropped a half-eaten pigeon on the pitch during a home game against Derby County. It felt like a portent of doom, and so it was. Nothing had gone right since. But now this win made me feel like the spell had been broken. Except maybe not because, incredibly, when I get back to my mum’s house, she told me that very morning a commotion beneath her kitchen window turned out to be a falcon dispatching, yes, a pigeon. A macabre scene. This couldn’t augur well.

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