It helps to forget: the excitement of a new season ticket

It’s the week of the summer which proves: a really bad memory only helps you become a better football fan.

Let me explain: the new season may be two months off - the fixture list isn’t even out yet - but the arrival of the new season ticket is an exciting moment. Mine thudded onto the doormat this week.

The close season is not, I suspect, something non-football fans will understand. But an attraction of the sport is that, unlike Real Life, things get reset every summer. No matter how shocking your side was last season, the slate is wiped clean. Forget about the midfield’s abject inability to pass to colleagues, don’t bother thinking about how leaky the defense was against even the lowliest journeymen, and just blank out how appallingly bereft of confidence the strikers were. There, there. It’s all gone. A fresh start is made.

Relegated? No bother. You’re too good for this new, lower league, and will bounce back in a memorable Season Of Glory.

Or was the tale of last season like Swindon Town’s - one of mid-table obscurity? Even better - it’s only a small step to the the playoffs which surely await you next May. Let’s all sing Town Are On Their Way to Wembley.

Better yet, maybe you actually suffered the heartache of a cup final gubbing or playoff defeat? Now is the time to let the scars heal - your team, the stronger for the experience (and never, ever, shattered and demoralised and thinking of getting a transfer somewhere better/wealthier/sunnier) will make sure of it next time.

And there will be a next time.

So, after a few weeks in the Mediterranean (lower leagues) or Dubai (Frank Lampard), the players are back sweating it out in preseason. Let the the players be photographed throwing up with exertion for the benefit of the first home game match programme, while our delusions find new voice.

Euphemisms abound in the local papers (lower leagues) or News of the World (Frank Lampard); strikers talk of the need to find the net only once early on, at which point the floodgates will open. You naturally believe they have 20 a season in them, defying the bitter experience of your own eyes only a few months ago.

Defenders talk up all the work they’re doing as a “unit”, calling to mind a well-drilled military outfit ready to defy even the flying Ronaldo himself. Midfielders talk about workrate and getting-the-basics-right-and-the-rest-will-follow, of dynamism and tempo and width.

And, by God, you lap it up. If we don’t look like a Wiltshire Brazil on that sunny opening day in August I’ll be aghast.

And when the fixtures finally come out you’ll busily scan through the list, earmarking the away trips and forgetting - just as you forgot about the performances themselves - about the assorted dreadful places you chose to go last year, just to see the team lose.

Truly, amnesia is a football fan’s greatest friend. That and a pair of warm gloves.