AT the end of every single Exeter City home game, most supporters will head for home, the local pub or elsewhere to dissect the last few hours and the rights and wrongs of the day’s football.
Meanwhile, a hardy bunch of volunteers stay behind to pick up discarded rubbish blown throughout the ground to save the ground staff a job and to give something back to their club that they love so dearly. No one wants to be a rubbish collector by choice, let alone one that does it with scant to no reward – and that’s with no disrespect to those that clean our streets and collect our rubbish in all weather.
Meanwhile, other people are doing their bit for the club they love. Hosting guests in hospitality, welcoming and looking after boardroom members, selling 50/50 tickets or whatever else, that volunteer element at St James Park is what makes Exeter City great. A fan-owned club with limited financial resources, but a willing workforce to be envied by so many clubs elsewhere.
The effort that they put in, purely for the love of their club, is humbling, under-appreciated by the majority, even. So when they see a display from their football team as lame and inept as what was served up at Bolton on Saturday, then even the most cold hearted football fan must have some sympathy.
That performance on Saturday smacked of a team that had lost faith and belief in what it was doing and trying to achieve. You only had to watch the club’s video of the players walking out for the warm-up to see a group of players that looked beaten before a ball had even been kicked – and it doesn’t need an expert in body language to determine that.
What hurt more was that it felt Bolton never got out of first or second gear in that first half. Gifted a goal – again, defensive deficiencies so glaringly obvious – cost Exeter any chance of getting anything from what was already a difficult game. Yet the most baffling thing is that this is the same group off players that, just two months ago, were top of the table and playing some of the best football St James Park has seen, probably ever.
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