The Football League fixtures are out!

The new Championship season starts in 37 days. For goodness sake will someone please STOP FOOTBALL. They’re not going to, though, are they, and to belabour the point, The Man has now released the fixture list for it. Running to 74,391 pages, it’s quite the screed, those poor burned-out packhorse players, no holiday for them, surely at some point somebody’s got to listen to Jürgen Klopp. But such a sizeable document will inevitably contain one or two nuggets of interest, and we’re pretty sure we can get two more paragraphs out of it. If we brazenly vamp.

The opening game is a biggie between two old-school powerhouses. Huddersfield Town will still be smarting as a result of their promotion play-off experience, in which they won two penalties but were not permitted to take either of them. Not allowed. They go again against Burnley, who are now managed by Not Sean Dyche, a fact that will be mentioned in every match report until the turn of the calendar year at the very least, February or March if things go badly for Vincent Kompany. We’re pretty sure the new guy will breeze it, though, on account of his record at Anderlecht, who he took to a couple of third-place finishes in the historical two-horse race of the Belgian league, once a mere 13 points behind a club playing in the top flight for the first time in 48 years. All hail Not Sean Dyche!

Burnley have a tough start, because after that chastening opening-day defeat, they host another defeated play-off outfit in Luton, then travel to Watford the week after. But newly-relegated teams usually bounce back immediately these days. Norwich, past masters of this increasingly tedious state of affairs, begin their latest utterly futile title-winning campaign at Cardiff City, who