The Silence of the Stands: Finding the Joy in Football’s Lost Season

The Durham City midfielder wore the resigned look of a man trying to find a jar of harissa in Farmfoods. Up front for Jarrow, a centre-forward darted around frenetically, as if chasing a kite during a hurricane…

When football disappeared in March 2020, Daniel Gray used its absence to reflect on everything the game meant to him. That bred a pledge: whenever and wherever fans were allowed to return, he would be there. The result is this footballing travelogue from a time when boarding a train to Workington suddenly felt impossibly exotic.

Gray’s 2020/21 season quickly became a year when crowd limits, closed doors and league annulments meant that attending football was something of a secretive, Prohibition pursuit. Grounds were speakeasies and Bovril moonshine. It made his travels from Kendal to Kirkcaldy all the more intriguing. Here were scenes that so few were witnessing; a remarkable, alarming and often darkly funny time in British and sporting culture.

The Silence of the Stands is a poignant peek at a surreal age and a slab of social history from the two-metre distanced tea bar queue. It is the moving, heartfelt and surprisingly uplifting story of a unique season that no-one wishes to repeat.