Reality Bites: Doncaster 0-1 West Ham; 13 August

This weekend the papers and the TV sports programmes were full of the first weekend of the Premiership season.  I thought I was inured to all of that.  After all, when West Ham were in the Premiership, the previews were all about how they would struggle, their indebtedness, how their best players would move on because the bigger clubs would snaffle them at will.  Meanwhile, the transfer window only seemed to operate as an escape hatch and an opportunity for owner-bollocks about trying to sign any over-the-hill marquee name in need of a pension top-up you could name.  Including Carlos Kick-a-ball, naturally.  Followed by a free transfer of someone only the most obsessive anorak trawl of released ex-South American internationals or serial loanees could identify.

So the start of the Premiership for us wasn't exactly a time for giddy anticipation of glory.  More, an opportunity for anxiety and bile about the failures of the owners to live up to my unrealistic expectations (as well as their own season-ticket selling hyperbollocks).

And this season we are, after the inevitable relegation that followed the lamentable Avram's appalling demonstration of incompetence (as well as the Pornographers' and Lord Sugar's Suck-up's comprehensive failure of stewardship - to their own massive expense), to compete at a level more in keeping with our capability (if not our sense of our own importance).  A season, I've been looking forward to after the appointment of a Manager with a record beyond what we have any right to expect.  Although, by-the-by, noting that he signs his programme column 'Big Sam' is worrying.  I'm sure his mum and dad didn't register him as an adjective and proper noun, so he's adopted the soubriquet, but left out the other adjective - Fat - obviously for reasons of vanity.

We even had a close season transfer coup (in the context of a relegated severely indebted team) with the signing of Kevin Nolan.  And only one of our England players has left.  Those whom it would be unfair to expect to play in the Championship (according to a Pornographer), even though their performances were in large part responsible for us now being in said Championship - Super Scott honourably excepted.  And the departed Matthew Upson most West Ham fans would have, if asked, contributed to a whip-round for his fare out after his non-performances last-year. As well as that, a healthy amount of dead-wood has gone (goodbye Keiron Dyer, Luis Boa Morte).

So I thought the big-build up would pass me by.

Wrong again.

I felt like the dispossessed outside the opulent restaurant, inside the windows of which the sleek, rich, beautiful people dined on all manners of delights and enjoyed a cornucopia of pleasures.  Meanwhile, in the cold of inattention, the poverty of our fare was driven home by the Championship fixture list.  Doncaster Rovers for the first time in 53 years.  And on the back of the let-down that was last Saturday's failure (ten losses on the trot carrying on from last season), away from home so even the weary trudge was not leavened by the bonhomie (or acid commentaries) of fellow-sufferers.

I tell you, the emotions make it clear why the dispossessed want to smash the windows and pillage what lies within - metaphorically speaking, of course.

But optimism will surface.  We won, after all.  And to add the pleasure that only the suffering of others can, Neil Warnock's promoted QPR got stuffed, Dyer limped off after 7 minutes with yet another injury while Gabbidon scored an own-goal.  As my daughter, Jessica, suggested the covert revenge for Warnock's part in the Tevez Affair seems to be going well.

And as my son, Joel, pointed out, it's the first time for ages we've been out of the bottom three, and it's Watford away on Tuesday.

Now that has really set the pulse racing....