Nige Tassell - The Hard Yards: A Season in the Championship, Englands Toughest League

Nige Tassell

The Hard Yards

A Season in the Championship, Footballs Toughest League

A great, authentic read that serves as a timely reminder that there is super to be found in every leagueColin Murray

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To Ma

The hoops and the stripes

The halves and the quarters

HALF MAN HALF BISCUIT

Sometimes the highest view isnt always the best.

Take the Eiffel Tower, for instance. Visitors to the landmark have a range of altitudes from which to admire the Parisian skyline. Those with the sturdiest constitutions will make a beeline for the great glass elevators that take them to the towers peak its summit, its zenith.

Aside from the occasional chink of glasses in its champagne bar and the wind whistling past sightseers ears, the summit is a quiet place. Its detached from the city, distanced from the scramble of the streets far below. Nearly six hundred feet lower down, the second-highest viewing platform is where its at. Its a busier, more popular vantage point; the architectural splendour of Paris can still be gazed upon from a more than decent height, but its one where visitors can also feel closer to the throbbing pulse of the capital.

Now consider the English football pyramid. The rarefied air of the Premier League might always be the ultimate goal for those with a head for heights, but its the second tier, the Championship, that matters most for many. Life here doesnt operate in a bubble. Its raw and real. Down here you can hear the hustle, feel the bustle.

Ever since its inauguration, the Championship has been an extraordinarily competitive league. Its a division so tight that the line between being within a sniff of the Premier League promised land and falling through the trap door into lower-league ignominy is often a perilously thin one.

The Championships formidable nature is almost universally acknowledged by those who have played and managed within it. Gus Poyet once declared it to be the toughest league in England. Neil Warnock went further, believing it to be the tightest division in Europe. That wasnt enough for Norwich boss Daniel Farke, who went further still: The Championship, without any doubt, is the toughest league in the world.

Compared to the predictability of the Premier League and its near-inevitable top-six domination, Englands second tier is a meritocratic free-for-all any team on its day and all that. It redefines the concept of consistency. No Championship team will ever come close to a defeat-free Invincibles-style season. The leagues innate combativeness, its undying competitive nature, are the checks and balances placed on each of its twenty-four teams. The ferocity of each clubs desire to be automatically promoted, to squeeze into the play-offs, to avoid the exit chute down to League One is what keeps its playing field more level than that of any other league.

There has yet to be a Championship season that hasnt offered a full-throttle, blood-and-guts campaign that refuses to draw breath until the very last ball has been kicked. Take Wednesday 22 July 2020, for instance, the final round of matches of an interrupted season. Clubs that looked set for promotion suddenly derailed themselves, while those who had already accepted the near-certain fate of relegation performed barely believable great escapes. All the clubs that had sat in the bottom five places at the start of the month avoided the drop into the third tier just three weeks later.

As gripping as the events of that particular day were, this was no outlier. Fans of the Championship know that high drama is par for the course. Its inescapable with the stakes being so high. Forcing your way to the top table of English football, where the cash supposedly falls like rain, is the ultimate bounty, regardless of the goldfish bowl theyd be forced to swim in.

And its a league that means different things to different people. To the late-in-the-day, former top-flight pros, its an irrefutable signal that theyre coming down the mountain from their career peak. To eager young pups, its a high-profile crucible the proverbial shop window in which to forge reputations and turn heads. To well-seasoned managers, its confirmation that theyve found their level, the madness of the Championship being a strange comfort zone that matches their talents. And to the new breed of bosses, its both baptism and audition.

To meet these people, and to taste the relentless chaos of the Championship, I set nine months aside to dive deep into the molten heart of English football. And the 202021 campaign turned out to be unlike any other in history. Yes, those trademark dramatic moments came fitted as standard, but the ongoing peaks and troughs of a worldwide pandemic and its stadium-emptying abilities produced the kind of season that no one would ever wish to repeat. It was more chaotic, more intense, more relentless than any Championship campaign ever. Not only did it kick off just thirty-nine days after the previous season ended, but it was compressed into eight and a half months, more than a month shorter than normal.

I was fortunate to be able to travel to all four corners of this league from Bournemouth to Middlesbrough, Swansea to Norwich watching games and speaking to the protagonists, be they players, managers, chairmen, backroom staff, broadcasters, journalists and, far from least, fans.

The latter were, of course, largely absent through no fault of their own. This would be the season when their devotion was tested like never before, when they could only watch from a distance, their eye up to the telescope like those Eiffel Tower sightseers.

This nine-month odyssey this inside view of a particular, peculiar season is for them.

The bookies havent got a lot of faith

in us, but they didnt last season either

ALAN PARRY

You can squint all you like. You could even slip on a pair of rose-tinted glasses. But theres no way you could mistake Hillbottom Road for Wembley Way.

Adams Park, residence of Wycombe Wanderers for the past thirty years, is located at the far end of an industrial estate, one thats home to window fitters, biscuit manufacturers and purveyors of part-worn car tyres. Glamorous it aint.

On Saturday afternoons during the football season, when these industrial units are shuttered up for the weekend, the scene is at least enlivened by the snake of Wycombe fans passing through en route towards their field of dreams, each wearing the two-tone blue of their affiliation.

On this particular Saturday, however, the snake is in enforced hibernation. With coronavirus restrictions demanding that all EFL matches continue to be played behind closed doors, this first match of a brand-new, box-fresh season feels eerie. The roads are quiet. The burger van is doing no trade at all. A dribble of journalists and broadcasters have their accreditation checked and their temperatures taken. This is how match days look and sound in a pandemic.

Light industry only dominates one side of the Adams Park perimeter. The remaining three sides boast a bucolic backdrop of hills and woodland. Today the woodlands most conspicuous residents the local red kite population fly high above the pitch, tracing circles in the sky. Theyve got a sense of occasion at least, even if coronavirus has shown scant regard for what is one of the most significant days in the clubs 133-year history if not