FOOTBALL behind closed doors didn’t seem too bad at first. I suppose this is what happens when the hitherto unthinkable becomes normal. A change was as good as a rest. And in some senses, it didn’t make a lot of difference. You still felt delight or despair or something in between. If it was delight, then you may have wished you’d been there yourself; if it was despair, you may well have been glad you weren’t. But either way, for more than many will admit, it wasn’t awful just to have watched it on the box.

Neither did it make a lot of difference to outcomes. Home advantage stopped being so important; there was an increase in the number of points accrued away from home. That’s logical, as is the fact that, as ever, the best-funded clubs ended up doing well, and the poorer ones didn’t. Now though, slowly but surely, the whole caper has come to feel more and more pointless, soulless and, kind of literally, hollowed out. I’m pretty sure I don’t feel this way because my team’s had a horrendously poor season, even by our standards.