No matter what the score between Aston Villa and champions Manchester United today, I and hundreds of other home fans shall leave Villa Park this evening with heavy hearts. For despite a creditable League placing and, next week, our first Cup Final since 1957, today the final curtain falls for the 76-year-old Trinity Road Stand.
'How can they pull this building down,' demands Hans van Eijden, a disbelieving Dutchman, one of many visitors who regularly come to feast upon the stand's unique red-brick frontage.
Quite easily, is the answer. Frustratingly, the stand has never been listed, despite its apparent pedigree alongside those other listed stands at Arsenal, Fulham and Rangers. (English Heritage claim that there have been too many alterations to justify preservation.) Nor until February, after nearly three years of wrangling between the club, planners and local residents, did most fans realise that the stand would be demolished, rather than extended. Since the penny dropped, other than a few diatribes in fanzines and on the internet, there has been no meaningful protest.
'We're an apathetic lot, us Brummies,' a club official tells me, by way of an explanation.
'The first I heard of the stand being knocked down was when Doug Ellis [the Villa chairman] was interviewed on radio,' says Ian Robathan, a call-centre analyst who launched a belated preservation campaign via his website (www.dougout.ukweb.nu).
'First I was angry,' Robathan explains, 'then resentful, because the club did so little to inform fans exactly what was happening. I was angry not only at the club but angry at myself and the other fans for not doing more to save this final link with our Victorian past.'
Actually the stand is not that old. But before Villa Park was opened in 1897 the site was home to the Aston Lower Grounds, a sort of Victorian theme park with boating lakes, a theatre and gardens. Until 1981 Villa's offices were partly housed in the former aquarium; until 1966 there was even a bowling green in front of the Trinity Road Stand.
Bit by bit, building by building, all traces of that once grand complex have disappeared. Yet amid all this, most fans always assumed that the jewel in the crown - the one Victorian-style feature that made Villa Park so special - would remain sacrosanct.
The Trinity Road Stand and I go back a long way. I first sat there in 1962, aged seven, watching Villa trounce Leicester 8-3. In 1985 I bought my first season ticket on the upper tier, in Block E, Row D, where I have remained ever since, halfway between the centre line and the Holte End. Apart from home, no other place in the world has ever felt so much like home.
But I have other reasons for feeling bereft, as the author who first brought to the public's attention the identity of the stand's designer. I refer to one Archibald Leitch, the now posthumously celebrated Glaswegian engineer whose firm was involved in the design of 27 grounds in Britain between 1900 and 1939.
As I came to realise when writing Villa Park's centenary history, however, the real architect of the stand was the club chairman, Fred Rinder. Rinder masterminded Villa's greatest ever run of success between 1893 and 1914, at the same time as organising the purchase and layout of Villa Park. The Trinity Road Stand was the first phase of his grand scheme to create a final capacity of 104,000.
Unfortunately, by the time the stand was opened by the Duke of York in 1924, its costs had spiralled to nearly £65,000 (at a time when the country's costliest player cost £5,000). Moreover, the 'architectural agitator' as Rinder was dubbed, got rather carried away. To Leitch's original, quite modest design, he added the Oak Room (the first restaurant at a British ground), steam rooms and an X-ray machine. Other Rinder touches, still visible today (if not tomorrow), included leaded windows, curved panelling on the upper tier balcony, gold-leaf mosaics and pavilion-style towers flanking a central stairway. Each would become instantly recognisable hallmarks, rivalled subsequently only by stands at Rangers and then Arsenal in the early Thirties.
Yet other than the stand, not a single memorial to Rinder exists at Villa Park, largely, I assume, because the costs nearly bankrupted the club, leading Rinder to be ousted by angry shareholders only a year after the stand's inauguration (though he was later forgiven and rejoined the board).
Some might say that I deserve scant sympathy in the circumstances. Since the Taylor Report I have expended thousands of words in attempting to soothe the fears of fans at other clubs as their charming but rickety old stands and gloomy terraces have been torn down. Don't fear the future, I have trilled. Modern architecture can be fun!
So now comes my turn to be counselled. 'We have to move on,' I am assured by Mark Ansell, Villa's financial director. 'You can't expect a business, particularly in the service industry, to offer the sort of facilities that are required today in a 76-year-old building.'
I do not doubt him. After a decade of being immersed in such issues, I might have scripted his comments myself. For I concede that the toilets are inadequate, as are the catering outlets. The nine roof columns are an undoubted irritant. By contrast, the new stand (costing £10.5 million) will offer 4,000 more seats, have no restricted views, and will accommodate between 80 and 120 wheelchair users and their helpers, in prime positions, compared with only 39 as at present, all confined to the corners.
Dennis Swain, the new stand's architect, insists that Villa will salvage as much as they can from the old building; the mosaics and the distinctive roof gable in particular, and, I hope, two turnstiles dating back to 1895. Swain knows he's on a hiding to nothing with the new stand, all the same. Too modern and he'll anger traditionalists. Not modern enough and he'll be accused of a loss of nerve. It is a burdensome responsibility, made harder by the club's well-known insistence on value for money.
Naturally I would prefer to hear an altogether different message; that the club will splash out whatever it takes in order to deliver a stand as outstanding for its time as was the Trinity Road Stand in the early Twenties. Instead, I can't help feeling as if a solid old Bentley with leather seats and a walnut dashboard is being sacrificed for a new hatchback. Certainly more comfortable, certainly not unattractive. But hardly distinctive nevertheless.
Of course the Trinity Road Stand is not alone in succumbing to the modernisers. Of the twentieth century's other fine grounds, it will soon be the turn of Wembley's twin towers, two other Leitch landmarks, Craven Cottage and Goodison Park, and almost certainly Highbury too.
Which is why there are possibly hundreds of fans reading this who will sense exactly my unease, and understand why, at three o'clock this afternoon, I will join Ian Robathan in placing a wreath on the Trinity Road Stand's grand central staircase. We expect to be moved on by some jobsworth, but I know we will not be alone in our brooding. After today, Villa Park, and the landscape of English football, will never be the same again.
Simon Inglis's new book, Sightlines - A Stadium Odyssey (Yellow Jersey Press, £18) is published on 25 May