Salisbury 1 - 1 Oxford

(A glimpse of a way through the woods; snow clinging to the ground.)

Reading photographs: Moments in time

A photograph is a moment in time. From the second it is taken it is history. When we look at these images, we read them with the wisdom that comes with the knowledge of what was to come next.

This moment is in the seconds before kick off for the final game of Oxford's 2008-09 season, against Northwich Victoria. Billy Turley hugs his two daughters closer to him as the noise in the ground builds to its crescendo. One tucks her head into his shoulder to hide, the other looks tentatively towards the London Road in full voice. A moment of privacy as Turley kisses the head of one, but his gaze is already turned towards the site of the very public moments to come. He eyes the goal in which he is soon to concede the first goal of the afternoon, puncturing the pressure that has built over the last six months.

Turley's body attempts to trace a sphere of protection, of reassurance, or of privacy around his daughters as he brings them into this very public arena. One of them looks with trepidation around her: it contrasts with Turley's look of grim determination to ensure there is only one result that afternoon. But our knowledge of what is to come is the knowledge of two goals he conceded, that what was always only ever at our fingertips finally slipped from our grasp, and that his opposite number would oust him from his position in the team.

We dwell on moments such as these as tendrils seem to flow from them; they seem somehow more pregnant than other moments. That sense in your stomach as you watched Turley take his daughters out onto the Minchery Farm pitch was the knowledge that the narrative of a season was more obviously in the balance than perhaps it had been all season. On one side lay everything you wanted: everything Billy Turley wanted too, probably.

On another lay a fourth season in the Conference, and an FA trophy first round game for which 1,663 people would turn up to see Billy Turley finally be allowed to return to the Oxford side: a sole remnant of the days when we were a League club.

[The above picture is courtesy of Steve Daniels/Rage Online, and reproduced here with kind permission.]

Dark night of the soul at Barrow

[Fuego de Noche by Goya, courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The sublime followed by the ridiculous at home to Ebbsfleet

Back on the march at Crawley