Falling at the last hurdle

With about 4 weeks left of the season and writing this after a loss at home to Chorley – I can safely say that the play off dream is now over.

If you want to look at positives (if you can find some?) we may finish at a higher league position than the previous season for the first time since we got promotion in 2008.

Every cloud eh…

Also for the record, my player of the season is Danny Hurst – he has been outstanding.

If you follow county gossip – a few people have got together to form a ‘little group` (not a consortium) who want to buy the ground back, this group consists of people including Steve Mottershead, Dave Espley and Phil Brennan to name but a few.

Now I don`t know nor have I ever heard of Steve Mottershead, but Dave wrote The Tea Party fanzine back in the 90`s and wrote a brilliant book called Saturday night and Thursday morning talking about the 1996/97 season.

With regards to Phil I consider him a friend and have bought numerous things from him privately in the past and first met him when he worked in the club shop at EP.

He is county through and through.

I am not going to give my personal opinion on this idea they have put together but I hope that everything is planned out properly and no one rushes into anything.

Steve Bellis, Steve Cree and everyone else involved in the club so far are doing an excellent job and I wouldn`t want to see anything fall short too soon when its not needed.

Regarding teams next season it`s looking like we will be playing FC Utd and (if they manage the play offs) both Ashton teams are fighting it out to come up. Stalybridge look like they are to go down and Hyde are already relegated, so we will have a lack of local teams to play.

I don`t tend to look at the Conference table anymore as it depresses me but I want to play Nuneaton next season away as I never got to that game a few years ago and believe it was a decent day out.

Our new friends FC Utd are a funny team aren`t they?

They were set up because they wanted to distance themselves from Manchester Utd.

I had the misfortune of watching them one game last season when County was cancelled due to weather.

I didn`t know anything about FC Utd in the lead up to the game only that we beat them 2-0 in a pre-season friendly and they are a fan owned club that were put together about 10 years ago after the Glazers bought out Man Utd.

Maybe I was being naïve but I really hoped they had made the club their own and separated from the UTD stigma to try to get a more personal fan base secured for the future, and not just one ridden from the back of another successful Manchester team.

When we arrived at the ground I was approached by a man trying to sell me a Man Utd fanzine, outside they were selling old programs for Man Utd, inside they were singing Man Utd songs about the busby babes, “dirty” Leeds and Man City (which I thought was laughable since the teams involved had never ever met).

The football top they wear is a Man Utd 1970`s throwback and the badge is only missing the devil to make it into a Man Utd clone.

Oh and their nickname is “the rebels” rather than “the red devils”…very original I must say.

On the plus side they are doing well for themselves financially but have more backers than us and have civil servants building them stadiums, the hierarchy at Manchester City Council must all be reds I guess.

Anyway as the season draws to a close we have fans already lining up Jim (or should that be James) Gannon to take the reigns after Lord, in what would be his 3rd spell at the club.

What strikes me as strange is that he manages a team about 2 or 3 leagues below us and hasn`t done anything that I feel is worthy of his god like status.

I have nothing personal against Gannon – I`ve never even met him – but I think his time at County is over and we shouldn`t live in the past.

If Lord was to go we need a manager who is better than an Evo-Stik first division north level for a start.

With a handful of games left I will bid you all farewell for now
and report back in a few weeks, lets try to end this season on a high and take maximum points from what`s left.



Steve Davies