As FourFourTwo strolls up the peninsula from the docks to the stadium, Southampton is quiet in that way cities can only ever be on Sunday mornings.
This is no time for a football match but thats the whole point. This meeting of maritime rivals is a bubble match. Portsmouth supporters will be bussed in from three alighting points just along the coast whether they want to be or not.
Long before they arrive, the very particular silence of a sleeping port is broken first by a wagon dragging a burger van and then by the trotting of eight horses carrying a fraction of a police presence thats well into the hundreds more than three hours before kick-off.
Neighbouring cities a world apart
The sky is darkening overhead and soon punctured by the hum of a police drone. The Pompey bubble has been warned of heavy rain but the authorities have thrown all their resources into an attempt to evade the storm.
Portsmouth havent travelled to St Marys Stadium since April 2012, the last time this fixture was played in the league.
They drew that day but Portsmouth were relegated from the Championship, Southampton promoted to the Premier League to complete a whiplash-inducing reversal of fortunes. In the space of three seasons, the rivals swapped places two divisions apart. Worse was to come for Pompey.
Its important for football folk to acknowledge that most people are just getting on with their lives around us, but within the broad context of football and its echoes this is a rivalry between cities as much as clubs.
20 miles might as well be a world apart on the Hampshire coast. Southampton and Portsmouth are close enough to have built a history of enmity but far enough apart to avoid each other in day-to-day life.
Before derby day, FourFourTwo spoke to Jack, a Portsmouth supporter who was in attendance the last time this fixture was played without the rigid itinerary and brutal separation of the bubble.
It was freezing cold and in Southampton you have to get off the train at Southampton Central and then walk basically a mile through the centre of the city, Jack recalled.
We were getting stuff lobbed at us out of houses and all that but I still prefer that to the idea of the coaches.
Its the perfect derby
The rivalry is about the two cities as much as its about the two clubs. Theres lots of people who are born, were raised and will die in these cities. I think people who arent from the area underrate this as a derby. They dont understand why its so big.
What outside observers sometimes miss about the south coast derby is that Southampton and Portsmouth just dont really mix.
A lot of people I know in Portsmouth would never go to Southampton other than to watch Pompey. Its like an alien world to them even though its just down the motorway, added Jack.
Portsmouths very presence at St Marys is enough to turn the atmosphere febrile. Nobody here is playing it cool. Nobody is pretending this is just another game.
Southampton manager Will Still and John Mousinho, his Portsmouth counterpart, are at it within 30 seconds of kick-off. Theyre still going at the end, when Mousinhos post-match handshake is delivered with a side of sauce.
There are incidents throughout the match. One or two tackles have that extra derby edge but the players, for the most part, stick to their instincts and training in the eye of the tempest.
But the tension in the stands is so thick you can taste it. Goalless draws between rivals are stifling affairs; at least theres release in victory and defeat.
Its all too much for one supporter whose plan to run along the pitch to the front of the away end is best described as extremely ambitious.
Somewhere in the stand from which footballs newest banning order recipient emerged is Alex, a Saints supporter who told FourFourTwo before the game what this rivalry is all about.
Pure hatred, he said. Jack used the same phrase in the very same context.
Its the perfect derby in that were far enough apart that people arent really mingling too much. I know a handful of Pompey fans. I feel like everyone I know might know one or two.
Other derbies, they might be quite intense on the pitch, but the thing is those people live next-door to each other. They go to work together. Its an office banter thing. Its not really the same here but were close enough for it to still feel very local.
The first league derby in 13 years is ferociously noisy, hard-fought and, in the end, largely uneventful.
By the time the Portsmouth supporters are led out of the ground to their coaches, the rain is falling with a vengeance and the city of Southampton is under a leaden sky.
Theyll do it all again in reverse in late January.
The coaches will snake from Southampton to the narrow city streets around Fratton Park. Steel fencing and the patchwork constabulary hired in for the occasion will prevent them from meeting another soul.
Another industrial port city, slowly blinking its Sunday into being, will be roared awake by its football clubs visceral need to establish superiority over neighbours who will be seen and heard but never met.
