There are fixtures, and then there are little tricks played upon us by the footballing gods.
At three o’clock this afternoon, Carlisle United will emerge from the tunnel at Huish Park for Yeovil Town’s first home league match of the season. And somewhere, beneath the concrete, the steel and twenty-three years of accumulated hope, disappointment, triumph and calamity, an old echo will surely stir.
Because we have been here before.
On 16 August 2003, Carlisle United were the visitors for Yeovil Town’s first ever Football League match at Huish Park.
The Glovers had spent more than a century peering through the windows of the Football League before Gary Johnson’s glorious side finally kicked the door from its hinges. Then, for the first home act of the new adventure, down came Carlisle.
They were barely allowed to unpack.
Kevin Gall scored after four minutes.
He scored again after eighteen.
Kirk Jackson supplied the third and 6,347 people went home contemplating the intoxicating possibility that perhaps Yeovil Town belonged in this strange new world after all.
Yeovil Town 3 Carlisle United 0.
Twenty-three years have passed, almost to the day.
And what years.
Championship football. Wembley. Sheffield United vanquished beneath the Somerset sun. Leicester, Nottingham Forest and Derby arriving at Huish Park. Then the long descent: relegations, ownership sagas, empty seats, locked gates, National League South and the peculiar indignity of discovering places on the football map which even committed groundhoppers had previously regarded as mythical.
Carlisle have travelled their own circuitous road.
And now, rather wonderfully, absurdly, inevitably, we find one another again.
Not in the Football League this time, but beneath it.
That is what makes today rather more interesting than simply the first home game of the season.
Football likes to pretend it travels in straight lines. Promotion is progress. Relegation is decline. Clubs rise and clubs fall.
But anyone who has followed Yeovil for long knows it behaves more like one of those terrifying fairground rides assembled overnight in a field: up we go, down we plunge, somebody loses a shoe and eventually we arrive somewhere remarkably close to where we started.
Last Saturday offered just enough encouragement to begin dreaming again. Mason Obeng’s magnificent volley put Yeovil ahead at Scunthorpe before a late equaliser turned three points into one. The football was composed too: Yeovil completed 84% of their passes and enjoyed an even share of possession.
Carlisle, meanwhile, received a rather less gentle introduction to 2026/27. They led newly-promoted Worthing at Brunton Park but were eventually beaten 3–2. Georgie Kelly scored both Carlisle goals, including one late on, but Worthing departed Cumbria carrying all three points.
So neither side arrives today entirely comfortable.
Comfort has rarely produced Yeovil Town’s more memorable afternoons.
At three o’clock the talking stops. The new signings become Yeovil players at Huish Park rather than names on a website. The pitch is green, the terraces fill, somebody complains about the queue for a pasty, the tickets aren’t at the bottom of the stairs for those in hospitality and across South Somerset thousands of people begin the ancient Saturday ritual of believing, against all available evidence and accumulated experience, that this might be our year.
And perhaps, just for a moment before kick-off, it is worth looking across at those blue shirts from Cumbria and remembering another August afternoon.
Gall after four.
Gall after eighteen.
Jackson after seventy-nine.
A young Adam Stansfield coming from the bench.
A club stepping into the Football League for the first time.
Huish Park roaring.
We cannot recreate 2003. Nor should we try.
But football occasionally leaves little breadcrumbs from the past, and today it has left us a particularly delicious one.
Carlisle at home. First home league game. August.
Twenty-three years ago it felt like the beginning of something.
Perhaps that is not a bad way to approach this afternoon either.
Come on you Glovers. 💚