I walked past the Wanderers Grounds at 6.45am this morning.
Given it sits snugly between my apartment and my local gym, there’s nothing unusual in that fact. As it happens, I walk past it most days. Taking a more circuitous route adds a few minutes to the journey, but it’s something I do through choice. I like to see the day-to-day activity of the place; the ATV lawn mowers purring across the grass, the concession trucks pulling in and out, the waft of portable toilets peppering the air. It’s an alive place, a happy place.
But this morning, it was a heavy place. The ruby red of Canadian Championship paraphernalia – utterly incongruous with the navy blue of everything else – wrapped itself around the perimeter of the pitch, yet to be taken down. Atop the bleachers, sad flags flapped in the wind. The goals at each end of the ground were raised onto wheels, ready to be moved from the grass. The whole scene resembled a recently concluded funeral reception; an empty event hall full of stained white table linen and half-eaten cheese sandwiches.
Rarely has this stadium looked smaller, or sadder.
Early in the night, something felt off.
There was a breakaway – was it minute fifteen or minute twenty? – as a Halifax attack broke down and CS Saint-Laurent aggressively countered. Streams of grey shirts poured forward as the Wanderers defence retreated. A pass was misplaced, a run mistimed, and the ball was cleared for a corner.
Dan Nimick – captain for the night and one of the few players who left the stadium with their reputation intact – looks up aghast at his midfielders and attackers. “One” he points at the first player he sees, “two” he shouts at the second, “three, four, five” he screams at the rest, counting the Halifax players who hadn’t kept up with the wave of bodies in Saint-Laurent’s counterattack.
“For fucks sake, boys!”
My dad was a Chelsea fan, but not that kind of Chelsea fan. He pre-dated the billions of pounds of investment and the trophies that arrived in 2003 by a good thirty years.
Despite him growing up in North London and having Arsenal-supporting parents (for their insistence on having at least one Arsenal-supporting grandchild, I am forever grateful), he was drawn to the blue of West London for reasons he never fully explained to me despite repeated attempts to do so. Like many fathers and sons, the space between our words was where the big stuff lived.
As a season-ticket holder in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, he became rather accustomed with failure. During this period, Chelsea Football Club was a mid-to-low end of the table team, with relegation into the second-tier of English football occurring three times before the 80s were over. This experience with mediocrity-cum-fuckingdourness shaped his view of what a supporter was, and in turn shaped my own.
The key learnings being these: supporting a club isn't always a reciprocal relationship. You will have your heart broken more than you fall in love. Unbeknownst to you, you signed a blood-pact in the early stages of the relationship and there is no escaping it. Stop pretending you're so angry at losing that you're not going to show up next week. You will be there. And you will pay $12 for a drink. And even if your team loses again, you will be there the next week, and the week after that, because underpinning this whole experience is the tacit understanding that eventually this team will give you the type of high that you'll find nowhere else. And it was ever thus.
To make this guaranteed misery palatable, a hearty dose of gallows humour is needed. Because really, it’s quite funny, isn’t it? All of us here in the cold and rain watching our team limply lose to a semi-pro team. All of us trudging to our homes and cars grumbling about players or tactics or referees. All of us completely accepting that this has ruined our night and probably our week.
The absolute state of us! Caring so much about a game!
We're supposed to be adults, for goodness sake. We should all grow up and find ourselves a real hobby: classic cars, perhaps. Or stamp collecting. Something that it's impossible to lose at.
Except we can’t do that, can we? And that’s kind of the point.
Fair play to CS Saint-Laurent, because wow…what a performance.
Something you hear a lot from close watchers of both L1O and L1Q is how small the gap is between the upper ends of those leagues and the CPL. Often, players are stuck in this level not through a lack of talent, but rather a lack of connections. Knowing the right people to get your name whispered into the ear of a Bobby Smyrniotis or Patrice Gheisar is half the battle, particularly in a league such as L1Q which doesn’t get the eyeballs on it that L1O does.
So, it shouldn’t be a surprise that they were this good. They had, after all, beaten York and Forge during the off-season. No mugs, clearly. But the ferocity of their players took me off guard. The intensity of their running, the aggression in duals, the utter contempt for any Halifax player looking to take them on. These were players completely convinced that they were the ones who should be playing professionally, and every inch of their performance was a way for them to signpost this.
They attacked in numbers. They determined that sitting in a low-block and letting the professional team prod and probe in front of them wouldn’t work. They gambled on attack being the best form of defence. They filled the exterior of the pitch with sprinters and the center of the pitch with muscle. They picked their moments. They killed momentum with well-timed injuries and cramps. They were the better team, and those wild, delirious celebrations as the home fans poured out the gates were entirely justified.
After Halifax’s twenty-ninth minute penalty had nestled into the corner of the net, and after the crowd had stopped cheering, it felt like we were back.
The swagger of Summer 2023 had returned. The Grounds pulsed. The players had remembered how this was all supposed to go. They pressed and harried. Passes found their man. First touches were sure and true. The energy was palpable.
And then Ryan Telfer was slipped through on goal. As he rushed through one-on-one with the CS Saint-Laurent goalkeeper, it looked for all the world like he was going to score.
Here we go, I said to my friend. 2-0. Come on!
But the low finish – which really needed to be a dink – was saved, and seconds later Halifax had conceded a penalty, and suddenly, inexplicably, a night which had promised so much had turned into a nightmare.
That's the game, isn't it? Full of sliding doors and almost-moments. If that goes in, the narrative takes a sharp turn towards the positive. Cracks papered over. Nothing to see here ladies and gentlemen - move on. But it didn't go in, and here we are.
Something you probably don’t want to hear as you crawl from last night’s wreckage: it’s only been four games.
As far as the story of a season goes, come October this will be little more than an unfortunate footnote. Win the next game and Halifax’s opening to the season looks remarkably like last season, with a small number of points and a Canadian Championship exit.
Of course, this comparison only works if you strip away a thick layer of context. At this point last season the club had an intoxicating sheen of newness. New coach, new players, and, like so many other facets of a late-capitalist society, the sad understanding that the shiny-new-thing-makes-me-happy-until-it-doesn’t.
Fast forward twelve months, and that sheen of newness has been replaced by the fog of expectation. If anything, Halifax is the victim of its own success. Last season was a miracle. From bottom to joint second. No one saw it coming.
But progress isn’t linear.
And something, clearly, is off.
I thought the performance versus Pacific in the first game of the season was very good. Halifax looked like Halifax. The following week versus Vancouver was not good, but Halifax still looked like Halifax, albeit a Halifax that was equally bad in last season’s away games vs. Vancouver… a club with an unexplainable curse over us. Defeat in the home opener can easily be explained away with the 19th minute sending off, and it isn’t bending the truth to say that prior to that Wanderers were the better team. Anecdotally, I remember saying to my friend prior to the red card that I was positive we were going to win, and I’m still positive we would’ve done.
Last night though, how do we explain that? First-touches squirmed away, passes were misplaced, arms were thrown in the air and accusatory glances were directed between players.
At one point an easy pass to a free Lorenzo Callegari was missed and the Parisian screamed a scream so piercing that it threatened to elicit a horse-revolt from the nearby stables.
Perhaps this lack of cohesion is born from the post-season reflection that Halifax needed to be more unpredictable. Maybe, in the quest for this unpredictability, something has been lost. Those internalised patterns and off-hand movements that were so ingrained towards the end of last season have given way to second-guessing. The move between 3-4-2-1 back to a 4-3-3 has added variety, but the players are still adapting. In an ideal world, Halifax would oscillate seamlessly between these two formations with performances remaining high, but they aren’t there yet.
But maybe this also has something to do with the players. Some of last season’s standout performers have dropped a level. Some have been injured. The new additions are yet to fully integrate themselves into the one-brain style of 2023.
It's vital in this moment that the coaching staff and players shut out the noise of OneSoccer, of CPL media, of podcasts (ahem), of bloggers (…), and of criticism on social media. Exist in a bubble, create a siege mentality. Push those frustrations outwards. You’re doubting us, are you? Well fuck-you-very-much. Our chests are out. Take your shots.
Back to Chelsea.
It’s a Saturday morning in early 1993 and there I am, cross-legged in Postman Pat pajamas, watching cartoons with my brother. My dad has a Chelsea scarf around his shoulders. He’s about to walk to the train station to catch an overground into London. He’s listening to my mum. It’s been a long time, but flashes of conversation still percolate.
The gist of which is this: Come on, Paul - it’s raining outside, Chelsea haven’t won in a month, and you’re exhausted from work. Do you really want to go? Do you? Do you really?
Like I said, it's been a long time. I don’t remember my dad’s reply. But I do know that he went.
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I walked past the Wanderers Grounds at 6.45am this morning.
Given it sits snugly between my apartment and my local gym, there’s nothing unusual in that fact.
This morning, while doing so, I mentally drafted this article.
The outline of it arrived quickly: I wanted to talk about the nature of being a supporter and how watching my dad trudge off to Stamford Bridge every other weekend for near-certain disappointment had shaped my reaction to nights like this. How CS Saint-Laurent were very good.
And how maybe we just have to accept that it’s still very early in the season, a season which has lots to offer, and while it's okay to feel angry, cup football can do this to you, and we must retain a degree of equanimity.
With this in mind, as I rounded Summer St. onto Sackville, the last line of the article crystalized in my mind. It would be that old World War II mantra, the one so ubiquitous in tourist traps around London: Keep Calm and Carry On.
Yes! That’s the one, I thought. That really works. Look at you go, Mr. Blogger Man, using empty platitudes to tie a nice little bow around last night’s disappointment. Give yourself a pat on the back, my son.
But now that I’ve reached the point in the article where that hopeful last line was supposed to live, it suddenly seems inadequate. It’s too flimsy. It dismisses people’s visceral reactions too easily.
So, what I’ll say is this:
Feel however you want to feel about last night. Feel as bereft and disappointed as you need to. Curse the team. Pepper group chats with furious declarations. Loudly bemoan the fact that we don’t get to welcome Toronto FC to the Grounds next week. Bitterly shake your head every time you think about it.
Leave it there, though. Don’t post empty threats on social media about how you're going to cease & desist your support, because you don’t mean that. Don’t declare that anyone should lose their job, because it’s only been four games, and also – of course they shouldn’t.
Instead, take that anger, sadness, and disappointment, and internalise it. Weaponise it. Let it live inside you for the next eight days. Let it bubble and stew. And then, on May 11th versus Cavalry, redirect it into something positive. Use it to rally around, shield, and protect our people, because they will be hurting. The players and coaches will be hurting. They are humans. They care deeply.
Pull together, not apart.
Because we are supporters, and that’s what we do.
Gary is an Arsenal supporting, Halifax-based Brit who moved to Canada in 2016 unaware that he was about to fall in love with another football team. He can be found on on Twitter at @FromAwaysHFX. He also guests on the Down the Pub Podcast - a CPL/Halifax Wanderers-focused podcast - alongside Anthony Abbott.
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