It'll do I suppose...

Well what a strange experience yesterday was. So many things that individually were pretty unusual, but put together... actually felt perfectly reasonable, post our summer transformation.

Arriving at the ground an hour early... to join a queue for season tickets... home fans sitting at picnic tables... programmes sold out... kick off delayed due to crowd congestion...

Wow, strange enough already.

Then walking into the ground at last, for the first time not as (it's ok to admit now) envious visitors but still slightly disbelieving tenants. Like getting the keys to the house of someone you always disliked, partly because they didn’t deserve to live somewhere that good whilst our gaff had an outside lavatory and rising damp.

After Rockingham Road and its crude facilities, suddenly we had what most football spectators have come to expect as standard. Soap dispensers and hand dryers in the bogs? You'll be telling us next that the toilets flush. I was straining to identify some of our new players when it was pointed out to me that I needn’t bother, their names were flashing up on the scoreboard. The last time KTFC had a scoreboard, it was a junior cricket affair consisting of a row of numbers in front of the stand, giving the half time scores.

There followed a 45 minute period of calm, in which pre-season optimism appeared to last as long as the balloons swirling at the opposite end. Ingrained pessimism flickered back into life. Then it was back to the barmy present with the guy on the pitch casually introducing our new signing from Real Madrid, with no more of a flourish than if we’d picked him up from Peterborough on a free.

Hey, he seemed to be saying, you think he's good, just wait till our continental scouting network is fully operational.

Then more novelty with instead of the regulation limp home defeat of recent times, a terrific second half, turning 0-1 into what could easily have been 5-2. This was the kind of rollercoaster football only rarely seen since Morell’s first spell in charge, and for all his dubious charge sheet and nutty rhetoric it’s likely to pull in more punters than Cooper tactics, providing they accept the wheels will occasionally come off.

So the acoustics of the New Tin Hat were given a decent test and didn’t disappoint. Whatever the lingering fears about leaving Kettering, and there are a few, at long last we have a proper home end, with a roof, a good view and decent capacity. Better than we ever had at RR. Attacking the old Tin Hat, with a couple of hundred crammed into that little shed, was sometimes worth a goal. If we don’t make at least as good use of the new version it will be a terrible waste.

At some point, of course, the bubble will burst. Until then, these are peculiar and quite exciting days.