It’s been one of those days. At work there have been time-wasting e-mails to answer about things over which I have no control from people who seem to have suddenly flipped from ordinary rational beings into marauding psychos.  There isn’t a full moon, so it must be all the early Christmas decorations sending people potty.   I was going to meet Gary on the train to Ipswich for tonight’s match versus Crystal Palace and a pre-match pint, but he’s cried off to go to the game with his brother because evidently blood is thicker than Lager 43.  Mick is going to be a bit late getting to the Arb he told me in a text, but I blame the trains for not running at the times when I most want them to, which isn’t two an hour but fifty minutes apart.

After a ‘dinner’ with my wife Paulene of roast chicken breast, potatoes, parsnips and carrots at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, there’s time to relax with a small coffee and a Speculoos biscuit before donning my fat coat and gloves, and giving the Ipswich Town branded ‘bronx’ hat a first outing of the season.  It’s cold out, but the train is on-time and warm and busy with folk returning from London.  A small, elderly woman sits opposite me; I have to ask a bloke to shift his feet off the seat opposite him so I can sit down.  On the other side of the gangway a man wearing a T-shirt adorned with pictures of mushrooms has hair like John Peel circa 1971; he’s with a woman with curvy, plump lips and metal rimmed glasses.  Standing by the doors a man has tassels of straggly ginger hair falling down over an unevenly shaved scalp, he’s with a woman who looks like Caroline Aherne, they have a baby and strike me as good castings for an up-dated re-make of “Some mothers do ‘ave’em”; they wouldn’t be Frank, Betty and Jessica though, they’d be Jordan, Shannon and Ava.

At Ipswich railway station the QR code on the ticket on my phone fails to open the automatic barrier as two surly blokes with “Revenue Protection” printed on the backs of their day-glo gilets look on disdainfully.  When I turn I to them for assistance one tells me a woman stood on the other side of the barriers “might” let me through. “Well, I flippin’ well hope she does” I tell them grumpily “seeing as I have paid for a ticket”.   “Unhelpful, ill-mannered bastards” I think to myself, momentarily turning into my late father on a bad day.

Incredibly, given that it is December,  this is the first evening match of the season at Portman Road and the first opportunity to see the back of the Sir Alf Ramsey stand lit up magnificently in blue with huge, white, illuminated letters announcing ‘Ipswich Town Football Club’.  I buy a programme (£3.50) from the blue booth where once stood an office supplies store, the name of which I can no longer remember.  In Portman Road metal barriers form a snaking path to the entrance to the back of the visitors’ section of the Cobbold Stand. Two plastic buckets are labelled “Amenesty Bin”.  “What’s an amenesty bin then?” I ask a passing steward, pronouncing amenesty as it has been printed.  “It’s for cans and bottles and prohibited items” she says informatively.  “Oh, it’s spelt wrong then,” I tell her. “There’s only one ‘e’ in amnesty” and she hurries off like someone with a fear of spelling tests . 

I look at the time and see it’s still only twenty to six.  I doubt if Mick will be at the Arb until gone six, so I take a detour along Westgate Street towards Cornhill. In Westgate Street there is a phone shop called iCrack and I can’t help but wonder if they sell more than just phones.  The town hall and  former Post Office look fantastic, it’s just a shame more people aren’t here to see them.  The Arb looks good too when I get there, and it’s heaving with customers, so I have to wait for my pint of Mauldon’s Suffolk Pride (£4.14 with Camra discount) although I refuse to join what looks like a nascent queue at one end of the bar.

Conveniently, I’ve almost finished my first pint by the time Mick appears, and so he buys me another before we sup together and talk of films, living a useful life, age differences, tonight’s team line-up, political illiteracy, French colonial atrocities and how neither of us ever liked Gregg Wallace. I go to find a third pint of Suffolk Pride, but it’s all gone, so I have to make do with something I can’t remember the name of (£4.41with Camra discount); but it was possibly brewed by Moonraker Brewery. Mick is waiting for a vegetarian burger, which eventually arrives but he has to eat it quickly as typically the match is on some obscure tv channel and therefore kicks off at the now uncommon time of 7.30pm.  Pointlessly nostalgic, I remember when all evening kick-offs were at 7.30pm, but oddly Mick says he doesn’t.

In Portman Road there are long queues to get in the ground and the same is true at the back entrance to ‘Sir Alf’.  I can hear the excitable young puppy of a stadium announcer going through the teams and I hear ‘Hey Jude’ and I’m still queuing, although I can’t hear any crowd noise.  There was a time when missing kick-off would have really irked me, but I don’t really care anymore. I believe I’ve only ever missed one Ipswich goal; away to Northampton Town in the League Cup (7^th October 1987). The supporters’ bus was late.

Tonight, I miss the first five minutes of the game but no goals, and I am in time to witness what turns out to be a rare Ipswich corner.  “Did you come by car?” asks Pat from Clacton, who along with Fiona, ever-present Phil who never misses a game and the man from Stowmarket (Paul) is naturally already here.  Pat no doubt think I have been delayed in traffic.  “No” I tell her brazenly, “I’ve been in the pub” and she looks at me disapprovingly.

I’m still settling in when the bloke behind me says “He looks like a flippin’ albino” of the Crystal Palace number 19, Will Hughes who has bleached hair.  But he reminds me more of Sick Boy in the film of Trainspotting.  Hughes and his Crystal Palace chums are all in primrose this evening and kicking towards Handford Road and the Burlington Road Conservation Area beyond. Of course, Town are in blue and white and kicking the other way. The North Stand sing about Sam Morsy to the tune of an Oasis song as Crystal Palace ‘set out their stall’ by falling over a lot to win free-kicks courtesy of the gullible Mr Craig Pawson, who unusually is all in black, like referees used to be when beer was 25p a pint.

Crystal Palace’s tactic of falling over has blunted the Town because it’s difficult to play when the opposition is having free-kicks all the time and this has allowed Palace to dominate, albeit in a second division sort of a way, which fortunately involves not really threatening to score goals.  And so the crowd becomes quiet.  “Addy, Addy-O” sing the Town fans. “We forgot you were here” reply the visiting suburbanites of Croydon, masquerading as south Londoners.  When Jens Cajuste is fouled and Town are awarded a free-kick, the home crowd cheers ironically.  A booking for Dara O’Shea is quickly evened up by Mr Pawson with one for  Palace’s Doucoure a minute later.  “Is this a library?” sing the Palace fans and it’s like being back in the second division all over again, before they cleverly trick all the home fans by singing “Sit down if you love Norwich”. I look forward to reminiscing about tonight far away in the future, what larks.

Crystal palace win a couple of corners and I notice that it’s possible to still read the word “Pioneer” on the front fascia of the west stand before Pat from Clacton tells me she’s already eaten today, she had dinner down at the Greensward on Marine Parade West, and she won’t have anything when she gets in after the match. It’ll be gone half past ten I tell her,  “and the  rest” she says.  Feeling increasingly disappointed with life I bawl “Come on Town, it’s only Crystal Palace, they’re rubbish” and then “They’re the team of the 80’s, they must all be about sixty-five.”  This is what the Premier League does to people.  But despite three minutes of added on time nothing changes.

I talk to Ray at half time as usual, and bump fists with his grandson Harrison and sense we’re all depressed but hopeful.  At twenty-five to nine the football returns and the same pattern of play as before more or less continues as Crystal Palace close Town down, and we largely do the same to them, but  they have a more precise outlet with their forward Jean-Philippe Mateta seeming to have more of a plan than Liam Delap, I think it’s because Mateta is French.

O’Shea shoots over, Palace win a corner, Sick Boy is booked and then a Town attack falls apart  and Palace quickly move forward through Eze, who places the ball with precision in front of Mateta to run at goal; Greaves is with him but stumbles ,slips and falls over, and Mateta lifts the ball over Muric to give Croydon the lead; it’s a fine finish.  “Who are ya?” chant the visiting pseudo-Londoners as if to say whoever you are you can’t be much good if we scored against you.  All of sudden the Palace supporters seem very loud indeed, and I gain a sense of a release of the pent-up frustrations of their boring suburban lives; this is the sound, the sound of the suburbs I sing to myself, remembering 1978 as I often do.

Sixty-five minutes will never been seen again because time travel is impossible and it would potentially render Rothman’s Football Yearbooks pointless, but substitutions now seem necessary and Burns, Cajuste and Clarke (J) depart, usurped by Taylor, Chaplin and Broadhead But Palace win more corners and Muric saves as Mateta fails to complete the same finish twice in the same match.  Pat asks whether she should bring on the masturbating monkey lucky charm, but decides against it for animal welfare reasons; it is a very cold evening.   Town win possibly only their second corner of the game before the excitable young stadium announcer thanks us for our “incredible support”, which amounts to 29,539, of whom 2,339 could own a privet hedge and greenhouse somewhere in Surrey, but I might have misheard the figure.

“We’re not playing particularly badly, they’re just better than us” says the bloke behind me as straight-forwardly intuitive as ever, and Crystal Palace begin to make substitutions too, probably to ensure they hold on to their slender lead.  We know Keiran Mckenna is making a last roll of the dice as Ali Al Hamadi replaces Liam Delap. A minute later Sam Morsy shoots over the Palace cross bar.  An atmosphere of quiet resignation punctuated by moments of hope and a memory of belief pervades.  The illuminated advertising hoarding between the two tiers of the Sir Bobby Robson stand reads “Home of the XL vent shipping container” and I wonder what it would cost me to have half a dozen random, silly words run around the stadium in lights.

There are four minutes left of ‘normal’ time and a deep cross is headed back onto the far Palace post by Jacob Greaves before predictably deflecting away from the in-coming Nathan Broadhead and out for a goal-kick. Three minutes of not-normal time will be added on, but they don’t prove that unusual, although Jean-Pierre Mateta is booked for ignoring the ball and just looking at his feet when Mr Pawson and the Town players want to get on with the game.   Mateta feigns annoyance but I doubt he really cares because a minute later the game is over.

Pat from Clacton and Fiona bid me farewell as they and the majority of the home crowd make a sharp exit into the cold night, keen to get home and catch the latest news about Gregg Wallace.  A few of us with nothing better to do, because our train doesn’t leave for another twenty minutes hang about forlornly and applaud our beaten heroes much as any remaining Trojans might have done as Hector’s dead body was dragged through the streets of Troy. It’s been one of those days.