Most Manchester United fans could probably relate to Frank Ilett in the early weeks of last season.
The club were sitting 13th in the Premier League and Erik ten Hag was under pressure but most, including Ilett, assumed the form would correct itself eventually.
“I thought it was just a blip,” he tells The i Paper.
But after consecutive 3-0 defeats at Old Trafford in the top flight, the fanbase were glum and Ilett, now 29, decided to do something that might give a few of them a laugh.
He shaved his head in October last year and said he wouldn’t cut his hair again until United won five games in a row.
Now, almost a year later, and with nearly 400,000 followers on his Instagram page “The United Strand”, he still hasn’t been to the barbers.
“I never expected it to go on as long as it has,” Ilett says.
“I thought it would be a few months. I never expected it to actually get worse, either! I thought it was just a bit of a blip at the start of the season and we’d find our way to winning again. But it has not turned out like that.
“I almost did do it as three in a row and funnily enough, at the time, I thought that was a bit too easy.
“Because it’s all competitions as well and at the time, we were in four different competitions. It felt like that could even end in a month or something, and then it’s not even worth it.
“So I thought I’d do five: it’s still a challenge, but I thought it was still realistic. And apparently it’s not.”
As the anniversary of Ilett’s last trim approaches, his vigil has become a totem for the club’s struggles.
But for the man behind the haircut, it has turned into a job.
Ilett and his partner had just moved out to her native Spain from Didcot in Oxfordshire with the plan of spending as much time as possible with their newborn daughter – and helpfully he stumbled into content creation.
“But at the start it was literally just a bit of fun,” says Ilett, who now posts daily and says it’s more than just United fines living the journey with him.
“I just thought it would be a funny thing to do to spread some humour.”
He admits that if he were still living in the UK and working for the council like he used to, he probably wouldn’t be able to keep it up.
But his friends and family are laughing along for the ride and his partner apparently “likes the King’s Guard look”.
The barnet is now so large, it really does resemble one of the famous bearskins.
And it takes just as much maintenance too, if not more.
“The time to wash it, time to dry it – that is the biggest thing – and then brushing it out a bit to make it look slightly presentable,” he says.
“Some people have sent me some curl creams and oils and things like that to try out, but this is how my hair is naturally, and even with those products and stuff, they do help, but they also take time [to apply] as well.
“That’s been one of the biggest challenges so far, just the amount of extra time it takes, the upkeep of it.”
The dream is that when United finally do win five games in a row, he gets his next haircut at Old Trafford, perhaps with one of the players in charge.
It seems unlikely: he says he knows the players are aware of him, but “they probably can’t be seen to be kind of interacting with me too much, because when you look at my hair, you can see that they haven’t really been doing what they should be!”
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He is determined that some good can come of it, though – besides the Liverpool-supporting half of his family enjoying the suffering.
Ilett has started fundraising for the Little Princess Trust, a charity which provides real hair wigs to children and young people who have lost their own hair through cancer treatment or to other conditions.
He hopes to donate his hair at the end of his challenge, however far off that might be.
“There are some games at the end of November into the middle of December that I think look winnable.”
Hair today, gone tomorrow? So far, tomorrow never comes.
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