A Tuesday night, two divisions down

Four hundred people, give or take. A stand on one side, a fence on the other three, and a wind coming across the pitch that made the whole thing feel like an endurance event for everyone including the linesman.

I go to these because of how close you are. Not physically, although you are — close enough to hear a centre-half organising a wall and to notice that nobody is listening. Close enough to hear the ball, which is a sound television has never once got right.

What strikes me every time is how much of the game is talking. On television you get crowd noise and commentary over the top of it, and the players might as well be mute. Live, at this level, in a half-empty ground, it is constant: instructions, complaints, encouragement, a running argument with the referee conducted almost politely. The match has a soundtrack made entirely of people trying to organise each other.

Nobody filmed it. There is no clip. If you were not there, the only record is a score in a database somewhere and whatever the two or three hundred of us who stayed until the end happen to remember.

I think that is why I liked it. Not because it was better football — it was not, in any measurable way — but because it existed only once, for the people who turned up. Everything else I watch has been recorded, packaged and argued about by ten thousand strangers before I get to it. This just happened, in the cold, and then it was over.