Pigeons are tormenting me, in ever weirder ways. Last year I wrote about how much I hated them when they got into a drainage channel on my roof. They’ve been looking at me funny ever since. OK, I might be imagining that, but what I didn’t imagine was the incident I also wrote about involving a peregrine falcon dropping half a dead pigeon on the pitch in the middle of a match at West Brom. I apologise for getting into the same subject area for a third time, but needs must. Things have taken an even darker turn.

That “pigeon stops play” incident came in our match against Derby County in September. Until that moment we’d been all over Derby, but thereafter we went to pot, and lost 1-0. The dropping of the falcon’s dinner felt to me like a portent of doom, and so it turned out. What I didn’t know then was that this was only the start of it.

From that day onwards, honestly, nothing went right. Every game we seemed to play a little bit worse. We kept drawing matches and then losing them. Even when we played well, we found a way of not winning. We gave up hope of promotion. The manager got sacked. A new manager got appointed, and things got worse. Without a single win this year, relegation now looked a possibility. The new manager became another ex-manager. An interim coach was appointed, a much-loved former player, and things looked up. I felt the curse of the pigeon lifting. And then on Saturday, the unthinkable happened. We won!

Relieved, even a little tearful, I went back to my mum’s. She was shocked at the news. And then, I kid you not, she told me that she’d just had another shock. There’d been a commotion beneath her kitchen window. She looked out to see “some kind of bird of prey” astride a headless pigeon. It was feasting on it, obviously working its way from the head down.

As the falcon flies, it’s 7.4 miles from West Brom’s ground to my mum’s, so I don’t think this can have been the same peregrine – but who knows? And who knows what this turn of events means? But it can’t be good. For my sake, my team’s sake, and even for pigeons’ sakes, I pray that it stops.

Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist

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