Left Magpie: August 2025 The First Match

“Opening day has its own feel to it, it’s different to any other game”, writes Ian Marsden in Putting On A Show his fan’s view account of Notts’ National League promotion season. If the game is at home, it has an air of re-union. Daniel Gray observes how we go through so much with people around us, but then “May arrives and with a ‘See you next season’, that is that.” The close season passes and we return, but some regulars are away, on holiday. The time is out of joint.

Is it possible to be measured, to see this as the first 90 minutes of a very long season? Or are we either going up, heading for the play offs or in a relegation battle? Doesn’t it get earlier and earlier, like the players getting younger? Why is it only halfway through the cricket season? Does anyone ever come away from the first match thinking “solid, mid-table, looks like we can consolidate and then push on next season”?

Based on empirical evidence (against the grain, in these times, I know), Notts’ first game is rarely indicative. Given we are the famously most transient club, our first result is rarely portentous. Even in that most awful of seasons, when we dropped out of the 92, a goalless draw at home on the first day just seemed to suggest that we hadn’t quite clicked. But no matter. The whole lived experience of the football fan is so irrational that we can hardly be expected to turn up with this ‘blank slate’ with clear heads. On this day, in the moment, it’s all or nothing, The full binary. Black and white, even.

On one end of the binary, there was Villa Park. 29th August 1981 (as I was saying, it’s so much earlier now). The hosts paraded the league trophy and then Iain McCulloch headed home the only goal in our first game in the top-flight with Jimmy Sirrel. Villa then won the European Cup. At the far side, in 2023, we felt all the emotion of being back in the football league, before getting battered by Sutton. We finished mid-table in both of those seasons, which is very rare for Notts.

But what about 27 August 1983 (I rest my case) - we went to Filbert Street to beat Leicester 4-0 away with a Trevor Christie hat-trick and then took 2 points (different times) from Birmingham at home on the Tuesday night, which meant for a glorious 24 hours Notts County were top of the First Division. We got relegated that season. 

Occasionally, the template is set on the first day. In the Munto promotion season, Lee Hughes scored a hat-trick as we beat Bradford 5-0.  Likewise, Luke Williams’s glorious only full season started with 3-0 over Maidenhead at the Lane.

In David Clayton’s “Notts County Miscellany”, we are provided with the first game stats up to 2010. At that point we had won 41 and lost 40 and, actually, since we seem to have played away far more often than at home, this is decent. I considered completing the record by adding the 15 since, but since Clayton backs my hunch by observing “the record doesn’t give away many clues to the nature of County’s coming season”, I swerved that task and decided instead to test my hypothesis with the last ten seasons as a ‘pilot study’. In this last decade, Notts won 3, lost 5 and drew 2. Taking a very rough equation between a win on the opening day with play offs or promotion, a defeat with relegation and a draw with mid table, this equation came to fruition in all of those three cases where we won the first match, in consecutive National League play off seasons. In the other seven years, the opening result did not match the outcome ahead.  Therefore, these particular ‘data led metrics’ give us a 30% indication rate.

It’s not only about the result. Before my day, I am reliably informed (by Jim Cooke, my usual source) that the opening games of 71-2 and 73-4 against Rochdale at home (4-0 at half time) and Palace away (a 4-1 win) were all about Masson (and an 18-year-old David McVay at Selhurst Park). Of the latter, in his autobiography, Masson recalls “Of all the games I played in during the course of my career I cannot think of any that produced a more unlikely result.” Fans who were there would have been most animated at the prospect of the season ahead with The Don in a black and white shirt. Nowadays, that would be tempered by transfer window anxiety.

Anyway, here we are. This season’s ‘curtain raiser’ is at Rodney Parade. In the absence of recent form or league positions, the When Saturday Comes season preview is the ‘go to’, where Jon Davies, when asked ‘How will you do?’ does not obfuscate with ‘Badly’. He goes on to describe Newport’s status as “Grubbing around the lower reaches.”  Surely no match for our ‘real time data-led metrics, analysis and insights’.

Both teams have new coaches, perhaps adding to the sense of a double reset. Martin Paterson has spoken well all summer and his pre-match talk is about the cheapness of such talk and the importance of actions on the pitch. He also plays down the notion that Notts’ new technical board is such a new thing and reduces it to a post-match debrief, the like of which has been happening forever, but with more data to work with. Hmm. 

For Newport, David Hughes has moved from Manchester United’s academy and has also ‘spoken well’. On this ‘matchday 1’, The Guardian feature both Hughes and Neil Warnock, reflecting on how taking Notts to the top tier will never be repeated. Puts it all in perspective, at least. Meanwhile, the Newport boss takes a similar stance to Paterson, saying his team will “ignore the outside noise” predicting a struggle, including Jon Davies, we assume.

A lot more perspective is provided when a medical emergency leads to an evacuation for an air ambulance and an hour’s delay to kick off. But then, we go again and it’s a case of different process for the same outcome. Notts are direct, physical, pressing hard, attacking the goal instead of passing in our own half. But we can’t score. And then, a typical defensive ‘switch off’ from a very typical league 2 long throw and yet again, the familiar feeling, We are losing to a team we have completely dominated, and then suddenly Newport are all over us,  hitting the post, missing a couple of good chances. But we equalise. It comes through a soft penalty but it’s deserved, overall. Jodie Jones scores and then goes off as Paterson brings on so many subs it is very difficult for anyone who didn’t go to every pre-season friendly to understand who anyone is or what we are trying to do or what it all means.  

So, ‘early doors’, it is an anti-climax, but in perspective, from the medical emergency, and also from my robust quantitative analysis of first match results, it doesn’t really matter either way.  Nonetheless, the hope is that with Jatta back, or a good replacement, this more pragmatic way of playing in this league will work. But on the other hand, Newport are poor, and we didn’t win. The most pleasing aspect was the coach, after the game, taking a different stance, again. We don’t talk about positives if we don’t win, he says, and this is good to hear. For the fans, us irrational over-thinkers, sometime dreamers but often-times prophets of doom, we must resist the false binary and ‘go again’.