By Dave Noble - CUOSC

My eight year old son had his first experience of relegation heartbreak on Saturday.

As the second Northampton goal hit the net, he asked if I was ok. I lied in confirmation with a lump the size of a ballcock in my throat, then he burst into tears.

At that moment the sensible me wanted to tell him not to worry. We have new owners who have done and said nothing but positive things and the future looks as bright as it has literally ever done.

We are no longer saddled with crippling debt from a lender who refuses to engage. There is a fantastic new training ground on the horizon. The ‘new’ stand will be finished more than thirty years after the first stone was laid and the areas for fans are going to be as good as any we’ve seen on all our travels.

Facility and accommodation improvements should see us able to entice a higher quality of player so that things are in place to enable the good times to roll.

In that moment however, none of that was remotely relevant. Football is played on grass. 11 v 11. Jumpers for goalposts and all that. No fan has ever chanted about a healthy balance sheet from the terraces. No infrastructure improvement is celebrated like a last minute winner.

A wretched season on the pitch and a paltry points haul that will almost guarantee we hold up the rest of the pack is all that really counts at the end of the day. It is not surprising and quite understandable that the dissenting voices have grown over the last few months in reflection of this.

It’s difficult to believe that it will all be ok myself, let alone convince someone who has only ever seen us be pretty successful. But belief is what is needed at this point. It’s all we’ve got.

Belief that things will get better, that the good times will be so much better having gone through the pain. I’ve done it plenty of times in my forty years following the Blues as many others will have too.

Blind faith is something football fans have to rely on as an occupational hazard. This time I’m convinced that that faith is based on solid foundations. But for now it takes quite a level of faith to believe, especially in the on field performances. But for every few Northampton’s, there is a glorious Peterborough or Bolton. That is after all why we keep turning up in our numbers, even when times are hard.

Did he still want to go to Cheltenham on Tuesday? Damn right he did.

One thing that will be required to make that potential a reality is everyone pulling in the same direction. From a CUOSC perspective we were thankful to all those who filled in our recent survey on our future (results release imminent).

There were however a few respondents who clearly tried to sabotage the result for their own hilarious gain.

They will be pleased to know that we ran the results both with and without the obvious suspect entries and the overall results were almost identical so sitting by your keyboard entering 100+ spurious entries was completely pointless, but thank you for making a very simple process to try and improve our organisation for everyone, just that little bit more difficult!

New members are always welcome. Visit our website www.cuosc.org.uk to join. It currently costs £10 for an adult and £5 for seniors and under-18s