Twenty years ago this month, the future of the oldest professional football club in the world was at stake. Notts County were two-thirds of the way through what was then the longest period of administration in English football history. The collapse of ITV Digital, failed takeover by American businessman Albert Scardino and a refusal from councils to guarantee loans had nudged Notts closer to the brink.
Deadlines followed deadlines followed deadlines and nothing ever seemed to change. Notts County became stuck in an eternal winter and the metaphorical became literal. I remember going armed with a garden fork in January 2003 to join dozens of supporters in trying to budge a frozen pitch at Meadow Lane because Notts desperately needed the match revenue. It was eventually postponed.
Every supporter of every football club believes theirs is the most cursed; the level doesn’t matter. Spursy, typical City, same old Notts – rather than being haunted by those reputations, we own and wear them as a badge of honour. The unspoken truth: we don’t have a choice. These are our clubs and we are stuck with them for life.
But Notts County have had more cause than most. How far do we go back? Missing out on the Premier League by one season and dropping to the fourth tier within five years? That 18-month administration period, full of penny-pinching, austerity and fund-raising by supporters and community when the club had no reason to believe other than the knowledge that belief was the only option? Perhaps, but there is too much to cover. In 2007, a national newspaper reported a manufactured list of the worst football clubs to follow in the country – “Yes duck, that sounds about right”.
For reasons of infamy, we must stop and dwell upon 2009 for a while. In that year, a self-styled businessman named Russell King founded Swiss Commodity Holding, a company that claimed to have assets of $2 trillion and all the gold, iron and coal in North Korea. King negotiated the sale of Notts to Munto Finance for £1, recruited Sven-Goran Eriksson as manager and funded the purchase of several higher-profile players including Kasper Schmeichel and Sol Campbell.
The only catch? None of it was real. There were no trillions, no gold and nobody in control other than King, who had used the nickname L. Voldemort in dealings. Five months later the club was sold with debts of £7m and King is now a convicted fraudster. As if to sum up the club’s inadvertent historic dance with chaos perfectly, that was also Notts’ only promotion season in the last 24 years. As the famous song goes, that rings around Meadow Lane on matchday: “I had a wheelbarrow – the wheel fell off”.
Still, we must push on. Past the run of eight managers in under three years. Past John Sheridan being sacked as manager for an astonishingly foul-mouthed tirade against match officials. Past the run of 10 consecutive defeats, a club record. Past their previous owner inadvertently tweeting a picture of his penis. Past, even, Notts County falling out of the Football League after a 157-year stay, the mistakes and the misery finally catching them up and pulling them down. The young and the old weeped in the Derek Pavis Stand in May 2019. However bad it got, this had always been unthinkable, but there is always a trapdoor in English football.
Instead let’s settle in the more recent past, where the negligence has evaporated under two Danish brothers who bought Notts in 2019. Alexander and Christoffer Reedtz are the founders of Football Radar, a football statistical analysis firm and committed to taking Notts County back into the Football League.
The club have hung onto their predisposition towards an unhappy ending. Notts have suffered play-off defeat in four of the last five years, the only exception being when they were relegated into non-league. In the first of those seasons, Notts were in the play-offs with Coventry, who will shortly start their own campaign to get in the Premier League along with Luton, who went up automatically. It was always someone else’s dream.
Notts County’s National League season was astonishing by every measure. They received the ultimate hospital pass, a race with Wrexham for a single automatic promotion spot. They lost three times in 46 league games and ended on 107 points, likely the most of any professional football team in history not to have earned automatic promotion. They have unearthed a jewel in striker Macaulay Langstaff and an excellent coach in Luke Williams. They have spent their money wisely, but there isn’t much money to go around in the National League. At the last count, County were losing £1.4m a year.
In stories such as these, there usually isn’t a moment when everything clicks, when the fears rush away and overdue optimism rushes in like a cooling, calming breeze. That is not how things work. Bad people make bad decisions until the point that the good people have no pleasant decisions to make. Only hard work, expertise, patience, community spirit and stability changes that sustainably; everything else is just a house built on sand.
How to watch the National League play-off final
- Date: Saturday 13 May
- Kick-off: 3.30pm
- TV Channel: BT Sport
- Stream: BT Sport App
But Notts County supporters might have found their line in that sand. Last year, they lost a play-off game at Meadow Lane thanks to an equalising goal in the seventh minute of injury time and then a winner in the 119th minute during extra time. Last week, they won a play-off game at Meadow Lane thanks to an equalising goal in the seventh minute of injury time and then a winner in the 119th minute during extra time.
Which – if you hang around football supporters for long enough – suggests that the inevitable fall will come at Wembley on Saturday, against their local rivals, with every one of the club’s match-going fans there to witness it. There will be an own goal, a calamitous mistake, an ill-timed injury or just another cruel face pointed in their direction.
But maybe not. Maybe the run can finally be over. No club that has ever been promoted back to the Football League has gone the following season; Saturday really could be the continuation of something, not another sorry end. The great truth of following a sports team is that, eventually, you have to risk the worst day of your year for a shot at the best. That day might as well be at Wembley, surrounded by those who have seen it all before with you. This time for Notts County, the wheel might not come off.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/BV7agY6
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