Our dark material

'This strange hulking presence gnawing its meat was like nothing she had ever imagined, and she felt a profound admiration and pity for the lonely creature.'

- Northern Lights

‘Beast. May I speak to you?

My heart was thumping hard, because something in the Beast’s present made me feel close to coldness, danger, brutal power, but a power controlled by intelligence; and not a human intelligence, nothing like a human. The tattoos that snaked down his arms seemed to wreath his limbs with some organic design. This strange hulking presence pounding the touchline of the pitch was like nothing I had ever imagined, and I felt a profound admiration and pity for the lonely creature.

He ceased his pounding and crouched. Steam rose from his close-cropped head, and his stubble-lined jaw tightened. Then he stood up massively, six feet and more high, as if to show how mighty he was, to remind me of how useless the advertising hoardings would be as a barrier, and he spoke to me from that height.

‘Well? Who are you?’

His voice was so deep it seemed to shake the earth.

‘I’m a supporter of Oxford United.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I want to see you employed.’

‘I am employed.’

It was very hard to detect any expressive tones in his voice, whether of irony or anger, because it was so deep and flat.

‘Employed at what?’

‘I train with the team.’

‘What kind of work is that for a player such as you?’

‘Paid work.’

The beast knelt and began to stretch his mighty legs, heedless of me, it seemed; but then he spoke again.

‘What work are you suggesting?’

‘Fighting, in all probability,’ I said. ‘Soon we have to play Wimbledon at home, and Stevenage away. When that happens, we’ll have to fight to win.’

‘And what will you pay?’

‘I don’t know what to offer you Beast. If honour and glory are desirable to you, I can offer that.’

He was silent.

‘Forgive me for asking, Beast, but you could live a free proud life on the pitch. What ties you to the touchline and the bench?’

I felt my skin shiver all over. The question, which was almost an insult, may have enraged the great creature beyond reason, and I wondered how I’d had the courage to ask it. The Beast stopped his stretch, and came close to the terrace where I stood to peer at my face.

‘I know Stevenage and I know Wimbledon. Now I don’t like these teams, so I shall answer you politely. I stay here and pace this touchline and sit on that bench because they took away my yellow shirt. Without the yellow shirt I can train, but I can’t go to war in matches such as you speak of. I came to Oxford to escape from this league with you, and battles such as these are the air I breathe and the food I eat. They took my shirt from me, and if I knew how to get it back, I should tear that bench from its fixings and hurl it into the stands. If you want my service, I must have this shirt. With that, and I shall serve you in your campaign, either until I am dead or until you have victory.’

With that, I watched the mighty beast turn and resume his ceaseless patrol of the touchline, his eyes focused on something in the distance that before I had not been able to discern. But now I knew that it was a yellow shirt with the Ox's head above the ford on its chest.

[A post in honour of Mark Creighton's service to Oxford this season. Rhys Day and Jake Wright have formed a formidable centre back pairing, and one couldn't argue with that. But in the same way that we wouldn't contest the fox hunting ban, nevertheless the sight of Mark Creighton playing for his place in an FA trophy game seems as sad a sight as a pack of hunting dogs chasing a bag of sand.

Image credits: Image of polar bear adapted from a photograph by douglasperkins courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons; images of Mark Creighton courtesy of Steve Daniels/Rage Online, and reproduced here with kind permission]

Desire brings results at home to Rushden

(Performances are one thing, but it's all about a mindset now)

Victory at home to Histon beneath constantly shifting skies

What we lost in the storm

(A moment: but there are more to come, and they're not to be let slip so easily when we've come this far)

Top again at home to Kidderminster

(But the only celebrations visible are pictures from a week ago)

Grays 0 - 4 Oxford

After the snow, defeat at home to Tamworth

(Oxfordshire had started to look familiarly unfamiliar under its sheet of snow, but the world hasn't changed. There's a campaign to fight.)

Romulus and Remus

'To antiquity we grant the indulgence of making the origins of cities more impressive by commingling the human with the divine, and if any people should be permitted to sanctify its inception and reckon the gods as its founders, surely the glory of the Roman people in war is such that, when it boasts Mars in particular as its parent and the parent of its founders, the nations of the world would as easily acquiesce in this claim as they do in our rule.'

- The Rise of Rome

1. How this new age of Oxford was founded is not agreed amongst observers: for while many great players were present for some time before the dawning of this age, yet they could not then acquit themselves with true honour on the field of play. 2. Perhaps the reason which should be given the widest credence is the meeting of the brothers-in-arms; Clist and Bulman.

3. Some are suspicious of the fictitious and fabulous qualities of this story: how the brothers were found cast out in the wilderness of forests green or reduced to crawling on their belly for scraps. 4. Yet we should not be incredulous when we see what a poet fortune sometimes is, and when we reflect that this new age of Oxford would not have attained to its present power, had it not been of a divine origin, and one which was attended by great marvels. 5. That they were suckled by a she-wolf in the shade of a wild fig tree would scarce be believed, until we reflect on their qualities: the ferocity of Bulman, or the cunning of Clist. For the noble size and beauty of their bodies betokened their natural disposition, and when they achieved adolescence, they were both of them courageous and manly, with spirits which courted apparent danger, and a daring which nothing could terrify. 6. But Clist seemed to exercise his judgement more, and to have political sagacity, while Bulman’s strength and ferocity ruled his nature.

7. Historians have long debated the greater of the two.

8. To the observer first sighting the pair in battle, it is Bulman whose demeanour draws the eye. Tenacious and ferocious in his tackling, harrying his opponents wheresoever they are to be found, his fearsome prowess in the centre of the fight is seared into the mind for friend and foe alike, as when he fought all comers from Stevenage. 9. Yet where Bulman clears the way, it is Clist who prepares the attack for Oxford, his passing drawing his fellow men into the fray, and occasionally joining the raid himself, penetrating his opponents’ defences with his cutting runs, and unleashing volleys from distance to their dismay.

10. Were they to clash, as Romulus and Remus once did to decide the direction of the people they led, who would prevail to lead our new empire? 11. According to one account, Bulman is destined to embody the spirit of the club, the Bull of his name answering to the Ox of ours. 12. But it is impossible to say. Whereas it is known the world over what glory accrued to Rome once Romulus prevailed in his quarrel with Remus over the founding of Rome following his mendacity, the truth is that Clist and Bulman’s glory is entwined in their very partnership in the heat of battle; and to separate the two is to sow the seeds of turmoil for Oxford. To remove Clist would be to lose our guile that undoes the enemy; to remove Bulman would to see this guile smothered by the barbaric hordes of those who would oppose this new age of civilisation.

[Image credits: Images of Romulus and Remus by Giovanni Dall'Orto (photograph of the Fountain in Piazza del Campidoglio (Rome) and Rubens courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons; images of Danny Bulman and Simon Clist courtesy of Steve Daniels/Rage Online, and reproduced here with kind permission]

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.]