The empty football ground

Source A: an original contemporary non-fiction-style account.

I visited the football ground on a weekday morning, when the gates were open for maintenance. Without the crowd, the stands looked larger and less certain of their purpose. Rows of seats climbed towards the roof, thousands of small coloured mouths with nothing to say. A groundskeeper crossed the pitch behind a mower, drawing a patient line through the grass.

On match days, I knew this place through noise: the sudden roar, the argument behind my shoulder, the shared intake of breath. Now I could hear a loose panel tapping under the stand. A discarded programme stirred beside a drain. The pitch seemed almost too green, exposed without the movement of players to divide it into urgent pieces. I had thought the ground contained excitement. In the quiet, it appeared to be waiting for people to bring that excitement back.

The groundskeeper turned at the far touchline and began another stripe. His work belonged to a different timetable from ours. We measured the place in goals and results; he had to notice worn patches, weather and the slow recovery of grass. I left with the tapping panel still audible behind me, newly aware of how much ordinary care stood underneath an extraordinary afternoon.

Refer to the whole of Source A. Analyse how the writer uses language to convey the contrast between the empty ground and match-day experience. Explain the effects of specific words, phrases and language choices, using evidence from the passage.