Here’s my column from last week’s Leader. It forms part of the paper’s comprehensive pre-match coverage every Friday, featuring interviews, an in-depth look at the opposition and lots of statistical analysis. All content in the column (c) www.leaderlive.co.uk.

I must admit that I anticipate tomorrow’s derby with some trepidation.

It’s not caused by the game. I felt that way about our prospects about two weeks ago but consecutive wins have brightened my mood.

Kevin Wilkin has begun to fashion a unit which can operate and, more importantly, give him a basis to build from for next season. As a consequence we ought to be more competitive than we were at the Racecourse earlier this season, when our capitulation to our cross-border rivals was embarrassing.

No, my concerns are about what will happen off the pitch. I ought to emphasise here that I actually don’t anticipate there being any trouble to speak of. Like the match in September, I expect the game to pass off with far fewer incidents than usual.

I’d be happy for my lad to be in the away end with his mates because there’s no obvious way that the two sets of fans will be able to come into contact. But please don’t mistake all of that for an endorsement of the risible “bubble match” concept.

I don’t subscribe to the argument that treating the fans as animals will make them behave as animals. The reason I draw back from that facile conclusion is that football fans are human beings who deserve to be treated with the dignity they’d be extended in any other area of their lives. For heaven’s sake, if ever that message ought to be writ large across the collective consciousness of the nation it should be this week, after the moving commemorations for the victims of the Hillsborough disaster and the continuing search for justice.

The behaviour of the Chester fans in the first bubble derby of the season support my argument. It was people in the Wrexham stands who disgraced themselves with the display of a banner so appalling it’s hard to find the words to express my disgust and contempt for it. I heard many suggestions afterwards that they were a group of trouble-makers unknown to regular fans who had come to the match purely to spread such vile sentiments: I sincerely hope that is the case as I have no wish to see them as sharing my values or interests in any respect.

However, that wasn’t the only cause of what was the most poisonous atmosphere I’ve ever experienced in a football match – and before you wonder if I’m a small-town yokel with limited experience of such things, I’ve been to more than one Merseyside and Milan derby and a Barcelona-Real Madrid clash. It was horrible, and for me the cause was the dismal bubble. It might not make the contained fans behave like animals, but it sends out the message that they can be treated as such by others.

I can’t understand, post-Hillsborough, why we fans accept this sort of treatment. Whatever happened to our democratic rights? Thatcher failed to bring in ID Cards, yet three decades on we’ll have the civil rights of the average citizen of North Korea this Saturday.