Goodbye and good riddance to 2020, the most miserable year of a lifetime watching Peterborough United

It was the year when football journalists were more likely to discuss the merits of their favourite sport carrying on or shutting down rather than the advantages of 4-2-3-1 over a midfield diamond (it’s the former obviously), while there were far more words written about a battle against a mystery disease than a battle against relegation.

It’s been the most miserable year in my near 50 years watching Posh when even a superb run of form and performances from the middle of January to the beginning of March was rendered irrelevant by a bug which gave too many influential people the willies, enabling League One opportunists to keep Darren Ferguson’s side out of even the play-offs.

That misery has continued into a new season. I should feel privileged to still be able to watch my favourite team live when that opportunity is denied to so many others, but without fans football is a surreal, phoney experience.

Being able to hear the abusive and banal utterings players and management teams aim at match officials has been dispiriting, being told off for not wearing a mask at a club which didn’t even take a temperature reading before I entered the ground was a sign of a weird and inconsistent time.

How awful this season would be was rammed home late in September when I turned up at the Stadium of Light, an iconic football venue which would normally be abuzz with Sunderland fans moaning about a bad manager and poor owners, to find the place deserted other than a handful of stewards. There would probably have been 30,000 at that game, instead it was played out in silence, which was a shame for referee Scott Oldham who won the game for the home side with a hopeless penalty decision.

That was the most dispiriting moment of 2020, until an excitable Chorley journalist celebrated a shock FA Cup win at the Weston Homes Stadium by apparently trying to smash a hole through his press box worktop.

Even when Posh reached the top of the League One table by winning seven straight games the normal levels of optimism and excitement were missing. It was quite sad to see a fabulous win at Hull devoid of celebrations in the away end.

Posh have had many bad years in the past, but demotion in the 1960s and relegation in the 1970s and the 1990s were self-inflicted wounds.

The ramifications of adopting a points-per-game formula to determine promotions and relegations that was so obviously flawed I doubt Boris and his merry band of Brexiteers would have had the chutzpah to splash it across the side of a bus, are still apparent now.

It is no surprise to see the major beneficiaries of halting the League One season early, Wycombe Wanderers and Rotherham United, will start 2021 propping up the Championship.

Sadly a new year arrives with no coherent EFL or UK Government Covid policy in place nine months after the virus first struck. Clubs have been unsure as to when they can call matches off and it doesn’t look like fans will be back at matches to see if Posh co-owner Darragh MacAnthony’s ‘operation vengeance’ comments come back to haunt him anytime soon, unless the vaccine roll-out becomes the one thing the politicians have managed to make work during the pandemic.

At least the two games when Posh were able to admit fans this season were joyous affairs which featured a glimpse of a bright future as younger players ran amok against West Ham and Rochdale.

We should all feel privileged to have seen Ivan Toney in a Posh shirt though. We realised he was a superstar, but his form in the Championship plus the absence of form from some of the teammates he left behind, suggest he was even better than we all realised.

Toney scored more goals in the last 12 months than any other player in the top four divisions of English football. At least he enjoyed 2020.

Happy New Year everyone!