Mad As A Hatter

Just two and a half years ago, Luton Town were playing for a place in the Premier League. Just outside the play-off places and having given Liverpool an almighty scare in the FA Cup, it looked as if a bright future might just be within their grasp. What has happened since then has been well documented elsewhere (suffice to say that this success was built upon a house of cards), but it culminated this week in the club, which has already been relegated into League Two having been docked ten points last year for going into administration, being docked another ten points for the financial irregularities that were in no small part to blame for them being in the predicament in which they ended up. If that isn't bad enough, they could yet be docked a further fifteen points if they fail to exit administration before the start of next season. Such a points deduction would be almost unprecedented in the entire history of English football (only Port Vale, who were temporarily expelled by the Football League in 1968 over financial irregularities, and Leeds City, who were permanently expelled in 1919 for the same offence, come close), and would almost certainly mean the end of league football in the county of Bedfordshire.

At this point, I do have to declare an interest. At school in neighbouring Hertfordshire in the early 1980s, we would regularly receive free tickets to matches at Kenilworth Road. Also, in an era in which much of the football shown on the television in England was shown on a regional basis, Luton fell between two different television regions. Their matches were covered for ITV by London Weekend Television and Anglia Television, meaning that they were (or seemed to be) featured on the weekly TV highlights programmes every single week. They were promoted into the First Division in 1982 with a team (managed by David Pleat) that played attacking, attractive football, and their first season in the top flight ended with an escape from relegation that was sealed with a 1-0 win at Maine Road on the last day of the season that sent Manchester City down in their place and provided, in the sight of David Pleat running across the pitch in a beige suit and brown brogues, one of the defining football images of the 1980s. Their relative popularity amongst neutrals, however, was soon undermined by the actions of their odiously reptilian chairman, David Evans. A Conservative MP and acolyte of Margaret Thatcher, Evans almost seemed driven by desire to make Luton the most hated club in England. He installed a plastic pitch at Kenilworth Road and replaced The Bobbers Stand, which ran the length of one side of the ground, with executive boxes and nothing else (these are still in place at Kenilworth Road), and then introduced a membership scheme which effectively banned away supporters from the ground. They were relegated from the First Division on the eve of the formation of the Premier League, in 1992, and few neutral tears were shed.

Twenty years on from the worst excesses of Evans' regime, the club's reputation still suffers from the worst excesses of his legacy, even though Luton have spent much of the last ten years as one of football's perennial "crisis clubs". This has been further exacerbated by the activities of a minority of their support, who have further sullied the club's reputation over the last few years. There aren't many people that have a great deal of sympathy for Luton's current plight. To take this attitude, however, seems to me to be missing the point of the FA's judgement. Evans is long gone from Kenilworth Road, and Luton Town aren't the only club to have troublemakers that have latched themselves onto their local club. More concerning still is that the FA have chosen to issue a draconian sanction against a group of people that are nothing to do with the mismanagement that took place at Kenilworth Road during the reign of former chairman Bill Tomlins. Tomlins himself (who, in addition to the charges brought by the FA, was the man that took them into administration in the first place) has been banned from football for five years and fined £15,000, and three co-defendants were also found guilty of misconduct. In addition to this, six agents were also warned about their future behaviour. None of those concerned, however, have been at the club since last year. Luton have been in administration since last November, with a new consortium (LTFC2020) being very close to completing a take-over of the club. There is no link between anyone from LTFC2020 and those that have been damned by the FA's verdict.

The decision reached by the FA could have far reaching and unwanted implications for the game as a whole. LTFC2020 have been transparent in all of their dealings since they became involved at Kenilworth Road. We would that this were always the case. Any decision to impose sanctions against, effectively, the new owners of a football club for the misdemeanours of the previous owners will surely only serve to persuade people (and in particular people with nothing to hide) to shy away from getting involved in digging clubs out of the holes that they have created for themselves in the first place. If one is wavering over whether to get involved at a football club that is in trouble, the thought that one could end up paying (in many respects, both literal and metaphorical) for something that was nothing to do with them may prove to be the tipping point in driving them away from involvement and investment. Also, the FA would never even have known about what was going on at Luton had it not been for whistle-blowing from former manager Mike Newell and former club secretary Cherry Newbery. Such a judgement will surely only have the effect of deterring the likes of Newell and Newbery from calling attention to mismanagement within football clubs. This judgement has removed part of the incentive for people within football clubs to act honestly and report suspected misconduct.

One could almost be forgiven for thinking that this is what the FA wants - that it would be more expedient for them to be able to silence people from telling the truth and revealing more of the rotten core of the game than it would be for them to actually do anything about it that might cause them (or "The Game") further bad publicity. I don't believe this to be the case, but the FA certainly make it easy for us to interpret their actions in this way. They would be better advised to channel their efforts into setting a proper definition for the "Fit & Proper" test, which is supposed to determine whether someone is capable of holding a directorial position within a football club, but actually seems to merely have the effect of allowing the shysters and hucksters to carry on doign whatever they like with impunity. As it stands, only one man - Denis Coleman of Rotherham United - doesn't pass the FA's Fit & Proper test, because he inherited a financial mess at Millmoor which meant that he had to put the club into administration twice. Meanwhile, anyone else can carry on doing exactly what they like, secure in the knowledge that the worst that will happen to them is likely to be a slap on the wrist and a fine. I'm all in favour of on the pitch sanctions for off the pitch behaviour - they are, in many ways, the only way to beat football into cleaning up its act - but there comes a point at which sparing the rod and spoiling the child becomes something that looks like nothing so much as vindictiveness and, while I cannot believe that it was the intention of the FA for this to happen, that line appears to have been crossed on this occasion.

A Home Away From Home

Sad and troubling news from South Yorkshire, where Rotherham United have conceded defeat in their attempts to stay at Millmoor, and will play for next season at least at the Don Valley Stadium in Sheffield. The club had been in negotiations with the Booth family (who own Millmoor) for the last few weeks, but have been unable to agree terms with the owners and will, therefore, be leaving their home for the last 101 years with immediate effect. There are plans in place with the local council to build a new community stadium within the town itself, but it will take a minimum of two or three years for the new stadium to be ready for use, so relocation seems to be the only option for them for the time being.


Don Valley Stadium is five miles from Rotherham, in Sheffield. It is fortunate in some respects for the club that such a facility is relatively nearby. It is the biggest athletics stadium in England (with a capacity of 25,000), and is regularly used as a concert venue by rock bands. Whether it is suitable for League Two football is, however, a somewhat different question. Rotherham attracted crowds of in the region of 3-4,000 people for lehague matches last season, and the prospect of them rattling around Don Valley like peas in a tin can is a far from enthralling one. In addition to this, the presence of an athletics track around the pitch is likely to further affect the atmosphere at home matches. Finally, although five miles doesn't sound like very far, there is also the concern that travelling such a distance may be enough people off travelling to see them play. People in the immediate surroundings of the new stadium could reasonably be expected to already have allegiances to Sheffield United and Sheffield Wednesday that will not be broken because a new, less successful club from out of town have moved into the area.


The club's new owner, Tony Stewart, has had a lot on his plate over the last few weeks, having already saved the club from extinction when such an outcome appeared to be likely to the point of being inevitable. He is, unsurprisingly, putting a positive spin on the move, talking up the "opportunity" aspect of it. If Rotherham were to make a success of moving to an athletics stadium, though, it would put them in a minority of one amongst the clubs that have tried it. The highest profile club in England to use an athletics stadium are Brighton & Hove Albion, who moved to The Withdean Stadium in 1999 after two seasons of playing their home matches at Gillingham. To say that the conditions of their lease are onerous would be one of the biggest understatements that I could manage. They're not allowed to play any music over the PA until the teams come onto the pitch and then a further fifteen minutes at half-time. No parking is allowed within a mile of the stadium (which has meant that the club has had to launch a park & ride scheme from Brighton railway station), and the residents of the area have blocked any attempts from the club to make the area more football friendly. In 2005, when they renegotiated the terms of the lease with Brighton & Hove Council, a local resident spotted a loophole in agreement signed and, presumably hoping to get them evicted, made the council and club go through the whole application process again. The lease on Withdean is financially crippling for Brighton & Hove Albion, and goes ninety per cent of the way towards explaining why the move to a new stadium in Falmer was so critical to the club's survival. All of this doesn't even take into account the terrible atmosphere there on matchdays, when any attempts at creating an atmosphere seem to catch the wind and blow away over the South Downs. Ultimately, Withdean is an athletics stadium, and is ill-suited to hosting League football.

A different yet similar situation has arisen in Manchester, where FC United of Manchester have been groundsharing with League Two club Bury. The cost of renting Gigg Lane is high and the additional limitations on what the club can earn from additional revenues (food within the ground, for example, is controlled by Bury) mean that every home match is a struggle for them to break even. The fighting fund that they have set up to try and secure a ground that they can call their own, therefore, is reliant on donations and not much else. It's a catch-22 situation which suits no-one apart from, one suspects, Bury FC (and whilst I wouldn't wish ill on them given their recent financial difficulties, a smaller club is suffering because of the circumstances in which it finds itself).

The long term future of Rotherham United, therefore, depends on their being able to return back to the town of Rotherham as soon as possible. It is, therefore, critical that the council and club act quickly and decisively to secure a site for a new stadium and begin work on it as quickly as possible. Five miles may not seem like a great distance, but when that five miles takes you over the boundary and into a neighbouring (and considerably bigger) city, one fears that the identity of the club could be in danger. Lack of atmosphere and the feeling that "this isn't Rotherham any more", when twinned with the additional distance, could have a serious effect on attendances. It is true to say that Don Valley Stadium is council-owned and one would hope that the council would intend to help Rotherham United by limiting the cost of renting it and allowing them to make money from merchandising and refreshments on match days, but this is far from guaranteed. The last few weeks have seen Rotherham United fight against all the odds to secure their very existence and now, and now, not long after it looked as if they had done enough to pull through, a new and potentially graver threat to the club's existence has chosen to rear its head. I just hope that the Booths enjoy the money that they will get from the sale of the Millmoor - they're making a lot of people suffer for it.

Rising From The Ashes

During the mid to late 1990s, while the Premier League reaped the almost ridiculously ostentatious rewards of the Sky TV boom, supporters of many smaller clubs found themselves having to mobilise against a rash of asset stripping new club owners. Each protest brought its own stark images, be they the collecting tins outside Bootham Crescent as York City were run into the ground by Douglas Craig, the desperate pitch invasion at The Goldstone Ground after David Bellotti and Bill Archer sold Brighton's stadium to developers and pocketed the money, or the black card protests at Selhurst Park after Wimbledon announced their move to Milton Keynes. Perhaps the most vivid and poignant images of the era, however, came from Doncaster Rovers' Belle Vue. As the club tumbled out of the Football League in 1998, Doncaster's supporters marched a coffin from the town centre to the stadium and, as The Last Post played, they performed the last rites for a club that seemed to be at death's door itself.

The key player in the collapse of Doncaster Rovers was businessman Ken Richardson. Richardson had previous - he had been at the centre of the "Flockton Grey" betting scandal of 1982, when an average racehorse running in a nondescript race at Leicester was swapped for what was, effectively, a "ringer". Richardson and his trainer, Stephen Wiles, bet £20,000 on the fake horse, but he was charged with conspiracy to defraud after bookmakers became suspicious and was banned from ownership by The Jockey Club for twenty-five years and sentenced to a nine month suspended prison sentence. Having pitched up at Belle Vue (and it's worth pointing out that, while there was no such thing as a "Fit & Proper" test for club owners at the time, Richardson would have passed the one currently used by the FA), the club suddenly lost their main stand to fire in 1995. This time it was an insurance company that became (perhaps unsurprisingly) suspicious and involved South Yorkshire police. By the time Doncaster fell out of the Football League, fifteen points adrift at the bottom of Division Three and with a goal difference of -83, Richardson was awaiting trial for conspiracy to defraud and conspiracy to commit arson. Richardson, it transpired, had paid a former SAS man £10,000 to start the fire. Worryingly for the SAS, he hadn't been difficult to track down, having left his mobile phone at the scene of the crime. Richardson was jailed for four years in 1999.

Rovers, penniless and facing almost certain closure, then finally got lucky. John Ryan, a local businessman said to be worth £20m, stepped in a bought the club for £50,000. He promised a new stadium and a return to the Football League, but first the club had to arrest its slide. Under former Rovers player Ian Snodin, they narrowly avoided relegation and stabilised to sixteenth place. The following season, they rose to mid-table, and continued their year-on-year improvement until, in 2003, they were promoted back into the League in the Conference's first play-off final, after a 3-2 win against Dagenham & Redbridge at The Britannia Stadium. In their first season back in the Football League, they won the Third Division championship, and in December 2006 they left Belle Vue, as Ryan had promised eight years earlier, for a new stadium, the 15,000 capacity Keepmoat Stadium. After four years in League One, they were promoted last weekend when a goal early in the second half from James Hayter was enough to beat Leeds United at Wembley.

For all the continuing perceived injustice coming from Elland Road over the last few months (which culminated in a fairly unbecoming display of petulance from Leeds' supporters before the play-off final last weekend), one gets the feeling that maybe they just haven't quite suffered enough. The Football League bent over backwards to help Leeds United, creating an arbitrary points deduction that prevented them having to relegate them still further because of the way that the club handled its affairs last summer. The supporters, who should have been hurling their invective at the people that had got the club in that mess in the first place, missed this point spectacularly, choosing instead to swallow Bates' frankly ludicrous story about them being forced "under duress" to sign an agreement to not take the matter to court. Leeds' supporters chose to ignore the truth and throw their lot in with Ken Bates instead. The independent arbitrators brought in by the Football League, however, saw through the smokescreen, and Leeds ended up hoisted by their own petard of hubris and self-inflicted victimhood, and their defeat at Wembley was a morally uplifting way for last season to end. Leeds United, as I have mentioned here before, benefited considerably from the way in which they exited administration, spending heavily on players (by League One standards), and will start next season as the favourites to get promotion back into the Championship. Doncaster Rovers, by contrast, have earned their season in the sun in the hardest way possible and deserve our congratulations.

All Played Off

And with that, the season was over. That's your lot - or, at least, it is until the start of the European Championships. The final weekend of the domestic season was, perhaps surprisingly, not quite as dramatic as one might have expected. Because of Euro 2008, the play-offs for the Football League were played in reverse order this year (something to do with the Championship players being more likely to be taking part in it, apparently), so on Saturday it was Bristol City against Hull City at Wembley and, surprise surprise, it was Hull that won the match thanks to an absolutely belting goal from the 63 year-old Dean Windass. With it, of course, comes at least a year in the Premier League and the opportunity to pit their wits against the best. Now whether either they or the automatically promoted Stoke City will be capable of doing any better than Derby County did last year is open to question, but it is a sign of the ever-widening gulf between the Premier League and the rest that many commentators aren't even talking about their chances of survival, but of their chances of getting more than the feeble tally of eleven points that Derby managed this season. Such considerations are, however, for another day. For now, Hull is no longer the biggest British city to have never hosted top division football - that dubious honour now belongs to Plymouth. Argyle need to buck their ideas up.

In League One on Sunday, a lesson was given in how to overcome massive adversity. It wasn't, unsurprisingly, given by Leeds United, whose supporters chose to boo the chief executive of the Football League, Brian Mawhinney, at Wembley instead. So it was that Doncaster Rovers took their place in the Championship, ten years after they fell out of the League altogether with one of the worst playing records that the bottom division has ever seen, with a main stand that mysteriously burned down and a stack of debts that weren't satisfied by the insurance claim that resulted from this after it became apparent that the fire was an act of arson carried out by their very own chairman. More on that later in the week. As it turned out, Doncaster were the better of the two teams on the day and thoroughly deserved their 1-0 victory. They will take their place in the Championship with South Yorkshire rivals Sheffield United and Sheffield Wednesday next season. For Leeds, well, look on the bright side. At least they'll be the biggest team in the division for another year. Finally, in League Two, Stockport County beat Rochdale 3-2 yesterday to earn their promotion. On paper, it could have been a "fairytale" for Rochdale, who have been inhabitants of the bottom division since 1974 without ever seriously threatening to get promoted. In their centenary season, they won't have had a better chance than when they went 1-0 up yesterday, but Stockport fought back to a 3-1 lead that they didn't lose. It's worth remembering that these have also been testing times for Stockport, who sold their ground on a leaseback basis, so severe were their financial troubles. They are now owned by their Supporters Trust, who are trying desperately to raise the money to buy Edgeley Park back, and their victory marked the completion of a quartet of promotions by Trust-owned clubs this season.

More to follow this evening on the end of the English season.

Football League Play-Off Preview

It's that time of year again, when Wembley fills with expectant supporters for the play-off finals. Over the course of Saturday, Sunday and Monday, three matches will be played that decide who will be in what division next season, and it's time to have a look forward to those three matches, starting with Monday's match between Stockport County and Rochdale. Stockport and Rochdale may well be comparatively near neighbours geographically, but whilst one of them has never been promoted, the other has had a tumultuous fifteen years or so, which resulted in the near closure of the club and an eventual take-over by the club's own supporters. They're now trying to undo the damage that was wreaked upon them by the previous owners, and their place in the play-offs is no small surprise in itself.

Stockport County vs Rochdale: If you're under the age of about 40, you won't be able to remember Rochdale playing in any division other than the basement of the Football League, though whether you call it Division Four, Division Three or League Two probably depends upon your age. Since being relegated into Division Four in 1973, they have barely troubled either end of the table (although they did have a close brush with the drop in 2004, and managed a play-off place in 2003. Celebrating their centenary appears to have had a beneficial effect upon them. They changed their kit from blue to their original kit of black & white stripes, and the new colours have been lucky for them, taking them up to a final position of fifth place in the league. In the play-off semi-finals, they beat Darlington on penalties after drawing 3-3 on aggregate. Stockport County's glory days, such as they were, began in 1997 when they won promotion into what is now the Championship. They stayed there for five years before being relegated back, but the financial cost to a club that has always struggled for crowds in the shadow of the two Manchester giants almost sent them to the wall. Now owned by their Supporters Trust, promotion would be a bonus in a season in which the main aim has been to secure the long term future of the club. Stockport had to sell Edgeley Park to stay alive, and have this season launched an ambitious project to buy the stadium back. Their finish in fourth place in League Two was this season's biggest surprise in a division in which, perhaps unsurprisingly, money talked very loudly. They beat Wycombe Wanderers 2-1 on aggregate to book their place at Wembley.

Prediction: The momentum appears to be with Rochdale going into Monday's match, but Stockport have the players and did the double over Dale, so I'm going for Stockport.

Doncaster Rovers vs Leeds United: In League One, there's another local derby displaced to north-west London between two clubs that have sailed close to the brink in recent years, though the ways in which they did this couldn't be much more different. Doncaster Rovers have always been strugglers, with the town's close proximity to Sheffield having a negative effect on their home crowds. Indeed, the very fact that they are here at all is little short of miraculous. They were relegated from the Football League in 1998, and shortly afterwards the main stand at their old stadium, Belle Vue, mysteriously caught fire. The club's chairman, Ken Richardson, would later be imprisoned for setting it on fire himself in the hope of claiming the insurance money, but the fire almost did for Doncaster Rovers. It took them five years to get back into the Football League (through the Conference play-offs), and were promoted again in 2004. In 2006, they beat Manchester City and Aston Villa on the way to the quarter-finals of the League Cup, and moved to a new stadium, the Keepmoat Stadium, in January 2007. They finished in third place in League One this season, missing out on the second automatic promotion place with a defeat at Cheltenham Town on the last day of the season. This didn't seem to bother them in the play-offs, however, as a 5-1 win against Southend United sent them to Wembley. Leeds United could have fallen a lot further than they have in the six years since their Champions League semi-final against Milan. Last summer, they were lucky to not be demoted to League Two or expelled from the Football League altogether, and the fifteen point deduction that they suffered was a compromise to keep them where they were rather than the arbitrary punishment that they have claimed. Had they kept the fifteen points, they would have been automatically promoted this season and, as it was, their strange exit from administration allowed them to spend heavily on new players this season, at least by League Two standards. They scored injury time goals in both legs of their play-off semi-finals against Carlisle United, and with the boat successfully steadied by Gary McAllister after the sudden departure of Dennis Wise to Newcastle in the new year, their position in the play-offs was comfortably obtained.

Prediction: It's difficult to see past Leeds winning this. They still carry sufficient arrogance to believe that promotion is somehow their automatic right, and Doncaster have already shown their capability of blowing it when the pressure's on in failing to go up automatically.

Bristol City vs Hull City: Or, the battle to see who will finish bottom of next year's Premier League. Bristol City's achievement this season has been exceptional. Promoted from League One last season, they have consistently confounded their critics in holding onto their place in the play-off positions and then refusing to be cowed by the obduracy of Neil Warnock and Crystal Palace, beating them home and away in the play-off semi-finals. Like many of the other teams involved in this year's play-offs, Bristol City's happiest days and saddest days have often not been too far apart. They were promoted into the First Division in 1976 and stayed there until 1980, having the temerity to finish in thirteenth place in 1979. They then, however, collapsed spectacularly, managing to get themselves relegated to the Fourth Division in record time and declaring themselves bankrupt in 1982. They then spent much of the 1980s struggling to get back on their feet, before promotion to the Second Division in 1990. Bristol City have always found themselves in a strange situation, with aspirations of greater things and a feeling of under-achievement that has been emphasised by their inability to break free from their local rivals, Bristol Rovers. Victory tomorrow would open up a little breathing space, at least. For Hull City, a few seasons in the top division would be a start. Kingston-upon-Hull remains the biggest British city never to have hosted top division football, and Hull may never have a better chance than tomorrow to achieve it. The club has had a largely anonymous history, rattling around somewhere between the Second and Fourth Divisions, but it was a financial crisis that gave them the impetus to improve their fortunes. In 1999 in looked likely that they would drop out of the Football League altogether, but an escape masterminded by Warren Joyce saw them safe, and in 2002 they left their dilapidated Boothferry Park stadium for the 25,000 capacty Kingston Communications Stadium. They were promoted from Division Three in 2004 and then from League One the following season and, although they narrowly avoided relegation last season, and this season they have been exceptional, climbing into the play-off places and threatening to snatch an automatic promotion place. In the semi-finals of the play-offs, they demolished Watford 6-1 over two legs.

Prediction: Bristol City only scored one more goal than they conceded this season and Hull have been the form team in the Championship over the last few weeks, leading me to believe that Hull will prove to be too strong for Bristol City this season.

Leicester Blows

It probably won't help them much but, for the purposes of clarification, here is a list of just some of the teams that have spent at least some time in the bottom two divisions of the Football League: Sheffield Wednesday, Sheffield United, Nottingham Forest, Bristol City, Watford, Sunderland, Leeds United, Bolton Wanderers, Aston Villa, Middlesbrough, Manchester City, Portsmouth, Birmingham City, Stoke City, Wolverhampton Wanderers, West Bromwich Albion, Queens Park Rangers & Burnley. I could go on. In other words, Leicester City's relegation from the Championship on Sunday afternoon was not the greatest tragedy in the history of football. In fact, considering the size of the club and the fact that that they have never won the championship or the FA Cup, it is something of a statistical anomaly that Leicester City, who were elected into the Football League in 1894, have never played below the second division before.

It was a tense weekend across most of the Football League. Considering what an undignified chase the race to beg for the scraps from the Premier League trough had been, results over the last week or two hadn't left the final day of the Championship as as ridiculous as it might have been, with Stoke City only needing a draw from their match against Leicester to guarantee second place behind West Bromwich Albion, who sewed up their first league title of any sort since they became the English champions in 1920. Stoke scrambled their way to a goalless draw, but it was irrelevant for Stoke in any case, since Hull City were in the process of losing at Ipswich. The race for play-off places was much more interesting, with Watford and Crystal Palace holding onto the last two positions, though Watford were left sweating through eight minutes of second half injury time at Molineux, where Wolves were leading Plymouth Argyle 1-0 and needed a second goal to usurp the Hertfordshire club. They didn't manage it, so Watford will Hull City, while Palace take on Bristol City. At the bottom of the table, Leicester's fate was sealed by their failure to score at Stoke, while Southampton crawled out of the drop zone with a 3-2 win against Sheffield United and Sheffield Wednesday leapt up to sixteenth place with a 4-1 win against Norwich City.

At the top of League One, the situation was just as tense. Swansea were already up, but an automatic promotion place was still up for grabs for one of Doncaster Rovers, Nottingham Forest or Carlisle United. Doncaster, with a trip to struggling Cheltenham, should really have tied things up with a win, but contrived to lose 2-1, allowing Forest to slip in by the back door with a 3-2 win against Yeovil Town at The City Ground. At the bottom of the table, AFC Bournemouth had showed extraordinary tenacity by winning six in a row when all seemed lost, but they couldn't manage the final hurdle of the race, drawing 1-1 at Carlisle United - a result that did neither team any favours. They will be joined in League Town next season by Gillingham, who went down 2-1 at Leeds.

Finally, a couple of other bits and pieces to tie up. In the Premier League, the title will go to the final day of the season after Manchester United and Chelsea unsurprisingly won at the weekend, but the important matches were played at the bottom of the table. Fulham's remarkable climb out of the bottom three continued with a 2-0 win against Birmingham City at Craven Cottage, while Reading's 1-0 home defeat by Tottenham Hotspur drops them into the bottom three with one match left to play. Yes, that would be the same Reading that were too big for the FA Cup in January (excuse my sniggering at this). Any two of Birmingham, Reading or Fulham could yet avoid the drop - more on this later in the week. Last of all, there was a contender for the comeback of the season at Plainmoor on Monday lunchtime. Torquay United had beaten local rivals Exeter City 2-1 in the first leg of the Conference semi-finals at Exeter's St James Park last week, and extended their aggregate lead to 3-1 just before the hour mark in the second leg through a goal from Kevin Hill. Exeter, however, summoned up extraordinary reserves of fight, and scored four times in the last twenty-one minutes to win the match 4-1, and the tie 5-3 on aggregate to book a place at Wembley for the final against Burton Albion or Cambridge United. Burton and Cambridge play their second leg at Cambridge tonight with the scores tied at 2-2. Too close to call, that one.

The Hype Factory

Such, it would appear, is the level of antipathy between Manchester United and Chelsea at the moment that the Manchester United players are now incapable of warming down on the pitch after a match at Stamford Bridge without some sort of fight breaking out. The arguments over who did what to whom and who threw the first punch aren't particularly edifying, and took the gloss off what was otherwise a Good Day At The Office for Chelsea, who are continuing to chip away at Manchester United's lead at the top of the Premier League Table. On the pitch, it was all surprisingly entertaining stuff (although the BBC's Jonathan Pearce did himself and the journalistic reputation of the corporation no harm by claiming that a global audience of a billion people were watching - a claim that seems far fetched to say the least), with Chelsea deserving to win the match in spite of not playing terribly well. It was a bad day for United, and in particular for their reputation for being terrible, terrible losers. Alex Ferguson's claim that the absolute stonewall penalty that won the match shouldn't have been awarded (it's hardly as if United concede a penalty every week now, is it?) and Rio Ferdinand apparently accidentally kicking a female steward in the tunnel after the match were, if nothing else, symbolic of the way that the modern game is played.

The Football League is beginning to reach its conclusion, but the weekend's results did little to confirm who will be making up the numbers in the Premier League next season. Stoke City won 1-0 at Colchester United in the last ever league match to be played at Layer Road, whilst Hull City beat Crystal Palace (their likely play-off opponents) 2-1 to ensure that it will all go down to the last day of the season. Bristol City are now finally out of the race after they lost 2-1 at Sheffield United, which is all good news for West Bromwich Albion, whose inevitable promotion will be confirmed if they beat Southampton at The Hawthorns. It was a bad weekend for The Saints, who dropped into the bottom three after Sheffield Wednesday beat Leicester City 3-1 in the big match at the bottom of the table. Southampton follow up their trip to The Hawthorns with a home match against Sheffield United (who can still squeeze into the last play-off place if they win next Sunday and the teams above them lose) next Sunday.

The bottom two divisions have a greater deal of finality about the look of them. Swansea City are already up, and one of Doncaster Rovers, Nottingham Forest and Carlisle United (who have imploded since I talked them up on here) will be joining them, with just a point between them. At the bottom of the table, the greatest escape story of all time is still on. AFC Bournemouth were dead and buried a couple of months ago, but six wins on the trot - the latest being 1-0 against Crewe Alexandra on Saturday have left them knowing that a seventh next Saturday might just secure their safety. In League Two, there was only one more promotion place left to play for, and that was sewn up by Hereford United, who won 3-0 at Brentford. At the bottom of the table, football traditionalists will have heaved a sigh of relief after Notts County won to secure their place in the League next season, whilst Dagenham secured a second season of League football with a 3-2 win at Darlington. It's now a straight fight at the bottom to avoid the drop between Chester City and Mansfield Town, though Chester (who need a single point from their last two matches) will be the hot favourites to stay up. The pressure's on, though.

Almost There Now

Somehow or other, it's the end of the season already. Chelsea, for reasons best known to the Premier League, played on Thursday night, and their 1-0 win cranked up a little more pressure on Manchester United, who were reliant on a late goal from Carlos Tevez to get a point from their trip to Blackburn Rovers. High excitement, then, ahead of the match between Chelsea and Manchester United at Stamford Bridge on Saturday lunchtime. I'm trying to contain my excitement but, as you can probably imagine, I'm more or less at bursting point. Saturday's result does at least mean that the championship can't be definitively won or lost this weekend. Far more interesting are events at the bottom of the table, where even now anyone from Wigan Athletic in thirteenth place could get dragged back into a relegation battle. The current prognosis is bleakest for Birmingham City, who lost 5-1 at Aston Villa and dropped into the bottom three for the first time in few weeks, whilst Bolton's win at Middlesbrough looks likely now to be enough to save them. The football news at the weekend, however, was overshadowed by the death of an Aston Villa after the match at Villa Park on Sunday afternoon. The Sun somehow contrived to decide that the driver of the car was a Birmingham City supporter. Nothing changes, does it? Nineteen years on from Hillsborough, they're still doing the same thing.

The big match of the weekend was in the Championship, where Stoke City played Bristol City at The Britannia Stadium. Stoke won the match 2-1 with goals from Mamady Sidibe and Ricardo Fuller to finally open up a little bit of daylight between second and Hull City, who lost 2-0 at in form Sheffield United, in third place. If they win at already relegated Colchester United on Saturday and Hull fail to beat Crystal Palace, they'll be promoted with a match to spare. Given the way that the Championship has unfolded throughout the season, it almost seems like something of a travesty that it might not go to the last game of the season. West Bromwich Albion are more or less home and dry after a 2-1 win at Norwich City. A win against struggling Southampton on Saturday will take them up. At the bottom of the table, it was all change again. This time last week, it looked like it was the curiously unpopular Leicester City who would be going down. They, however, eased their worries with a 1-0 win at Barnsley, whilst Coventry City won 5-1 at Colchester to ease their own fears and drop Sheffield Wednesday back into the bottom three. It's still any one from six to go down with two matches to go, though.

League One is also as clear as mud with two matches to play. Swansea City are promoted as champions, even though they lost at home to Yeovil Town on Saturday, but the race for second place and the other automatic promotion place is still wide open. Carlisle United's recent wobble continued with a 2-1 home defeat by Southend United, but Doncaster Rovers could only reduce their advantage to two points after they drew 1-1 at Leyton Orient. Nottingham Forest are still looming ominously in third place after a 1-0 win against relegated Luton Town. The play-off places are more or less decided, with Southend United already there and four points between Leeds United and Brighton & Hove Albion, although Brighton managed to maintain the illusion of still being in with a chance after beating Hartlepool United 2-1 on Saturday. One more win from their remaining two matches will be enough for Leeds, though. At the bottom, Bournemouth's extraordinary revival continues. They were dead and buried two or three weeks ago, but they won 3-1 at Walsall to leave themselves four points adrift with two matches to go, but they have won five successive matches to get themselves into a position of being close to safety - if they were to get two more wins and clamber to safety, it would surely be the most remarkable such run in the history of the game.

At the bottom of League Two (out of deference to my already fragile blood pressure, we'll quietly ignore what happened at the top), a little bit of life was breathed into the corpse of Mansfield Town and Wrexham's seasons last weekend. Mansfield beat Shrewsbury Town 3-1 at Field Mill, whilst Wrexham beat Notts County 1-0. There is a chance that one or both of these clubs could haul themselves out of trouble, with County (the oldest club in the Football League) and Dagenham & Redbridge (at the time of writing, the youngest club in the Football League, having been a merger between Dagenham and Redbridge Forest in 1992) possibly on hand to join them. Wrexham have a game win hand on the rest away to Hereford United tonight, but even if they lose that, they wouldn't be mathematically relegated until the end of Saturday at the earliest. A win or draw tonight, and two wins in their remaining two matches might be enough. Mansfield have closed the gap on Dagenham to just a single point.

Most of the non-league trophies have now been handed out. Aldershot celebrated their Conference championship with a 0-0 draw at Halifax Town (a result which mean more to the hosts that it did to the visitors), whilst the play-offs are now likely to be between Torquay United, Burton Albion, Cambridge United and Exeter City, though Stevenage Borough could yet catch Exeter with two matches to play. There are a round of matches being played in the Conference tonight, with just two points separating Northwich Victoria, Altrincham, Halifax Town and Farsley Celtic at the bottom of the table. Perhaps surprisingly, none of those four are playing each other tonight - in fact, Altrincham don't even have a match, whilst the other three all take on potentially disinterested mid-table sides. Northwich are at Stevenage, whose faint play-off hopes will be extinguished if they don't win, Halifax travel to Crawley and Farsley Celtic travel to York City. It's too close to call at the moment, and likely will still be tomorrow morning, as well. Kettering Town and Lewes will be playing Conference football next season, and we'll be taking a closer look at the candidates in the Conference North and South play-offs next week.

Falling

By five o'clock on Saturday afternoon, the Football League could have only two Welsh members left. For many, many years, there were four, but Newport County fell through the trapdoor an into the Conference in 1988 (and folded not too long afterwards), and it now looks likely that Wrexham will follow them after a wretched period in the club's history, which has seen them tossed from pillar to post and took them perilously close to closure. In the overall scheme of things, relegation into the Conference might not necessarily look like such a disaster, but many Wrexham fans are now concerned that this could be a point of no return for them - the tipping point of a downward spiral from which they my never be able to return.

Founded in 1872, Wrexham are one of the oldest clubs in Britain, and are the oldest professional football club in Wales. The likes of Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea and Spurs are mere striplings by comparison. They were voted into the Football League in 1921, when it expanded in size to add the Third Divisions North & South. The first few decades were, to say the least, uneventful. Wrexham had a couple of brushes with promotion (fleeting and consummated just the once - very briefly, in 1960), entertained the Busby Babes in the FA Cup (and lost 5-0) and finished bottom of Division Four in 1966, but largely it was an existence in which they didn't really trouble anyone, and no-one really troubled them. Things started to get more exciting in the 1970s. In 1972 they play Hajduk Split in the European Cup Winners Cup, and in 1974 they made the quarter-finals of the FA Cup before losing to Burnley. In 1977 they were nailed on for promotion before failing in their last few matches and missing out. In the 1980s, after a brief flirtation with bankruptcy in 1982, they continued with the occasional foray into Europe (Roma and Porto both visited The Racecourse Ground in Europe during the 1984/85 season) whilst continuing to trade in the bottom two divisions, but things would become suddenly more exciting for them at the start of the 1990s.

In 1991, they were knocked out of the European Cup Winners Cup by Manchester United and, with the Football League having already confirmed that the no-one would be relegated from Division Four, they finished bottom of the pile again. The following season, they drew Arsenal in the Third Round of the FA Cup. Arsenal took an early lead through Alan Smith, but looked largely off-key, and Wrexham drew level with eight minutes left with a thunderous free kick from the veteran midfielder Mickey Thomas. Two minutes later, with Arsenal (the reigning League champions at the time) still shell-shocked, Steve Watkins scuffed home the winning goal in for one of the greatest FA Cup shocks of all time. The following round saw them knocked out after a replay by West Ham United. In 1997, they made the FA Cup quarter-finals again (beaten this time by Chesterfield), but this was all a prelude to a tale of attempted sabotage that would drive them to the edge of extinction.

When the club's previous chairman sold out to Mark Guterman and Alex Hamilton, their supporters had cause to be concerned. Guterman, after all, had been in charge of a disastrous spell in charge of their local rivals, Chester City, and had nearly sent them to extinction. Moreover, both Guterman and Hamilton were property developers - the natural enemy of the small football club. What happened next was an extraordinary story of attempted asset stripping that ended up in court and a critical landmark victory for clubs seeking to keep control of their assets. Hamilton bought the club in 2002 and immediately transferred the leasehold of The Racehorse Ground (which had been bought from previous owners, a brewery). Immediately the rent jumped up from a peppercorn amount of £1 to £30,000 per year, and gave the club a year's notice to move out of the ground. Fortunately for them, there was an unwitting hero waiting in the wings. The club had fallen into severe financial difficulties, and administrators Begbie Taylor were appointed to oversee the club's affairs. David Acland, the administrator, smelt a rat immediately and took Hamilton to court, claiming that the ground had been acquired by the holding company. In October 2005, the court found against Hamilton's company, and in March 2006 they ruled that the ground was to stay in the hands of the club, who the administrators sold to Neville Dickens, a local car dealer.

Dickens himself has been and continues to be widely criticised by the club's supporters, but the club is in a slightly more stable situation off the pitch than it was three or four years. On the pitch, though, it has been meltdown. They avoided relegation on the last day of last season with a 3-1 win against Boston United that sent The Pilgrims down and kept them up for another season. Brian Little (who was in the Premier League with Aston Villa as recently as 1998) took over the job in November of last year, but he has been unable to do anything to halt the slide. Support within the club is decided over the extent to which Little is to blame. Some say that he couldn't have done any worse than he has done, whilst others have sought to defend him to a degree, saying that he couldn't have done any more than he has wih the meagre resources at his disposal. As it stands, they are nine points adrift of safety with four matches to play. Defeat against Notts County on Saturday will almost certainly condemn them to non-league football for the first time in eighty-seven years.

At this point in the season, there is no point in trying to point out to Wrexham supporters that relegation from League Two isn't anything like the disaster that it was thirty years ago, that they can get to enjoy being big fish in a small pool and might win a few matches for the first time in a couple of years, that the Conference has got more in common with the Football League than it has with the Conference South or that visiting new grounds with lower prices and slightly laxer security regulations, where you might occasionally find a social club at the ground might be more fun than Rochdale for the eighth year in a row. For now, it probably feels like an emasculation - the status of their club's is going to be diminished status and, if you've had Football League status for your entire lifetime, I guess you get used to. I retain the opinion, however, that whether Wrexham's supporters find Conference football a soul-destroying experience or an enjoyable one is down to them to make. I would suggest that, based on the experience of other clubs that have been relegated from the Football League in recent years, they're bound for disappointment if they don't bear up to their new reality with good humour and acceptance of their new, reduced circumstances.

Shots In The Light

It has taken them sixteen long, hard years, but last night Aldershot Town were welcomed back into the fold of the Football League. Since the original club folded in 1992, the club has fought tooth and nail to win its place back amongst the top 92, and last night it became reality at last by virtue of a nervy 1-1 draw at Exeter City. As it turned out, they took 900 supporters down to Devon - not a bad number by any stretch of the imagination, considering that it's quite a distance to travel, especially on a Tuesday night - and the result means that their match on Saturday against Weymouth now takes on the air of a party. They're expected to sell all 6,000 tickets well in advance, and Weymouth, still in danger of relegation from the Conference, will be quietly hoping that the Aldershot players have already started to mentally plan their summer holidays.

We've done Aldershot on here before, so there's little point in going over that ground again, but their eventual success does provide something of a cautionary tale for supporters of the likes of AFC Wimbledon, who may have been expecting their team to rise swiftly through the non-league ranks. Wimbledon are likely to finish in second or third place in this year's Ryman League Premier Division, and there has been an element of dissatisfaction emanating from Kingsmeadow this season. The fact of the matter, however, is that Chelmsford City have been outstanding champions of that division this season, and the play-offs are, of course, something of a lottery. I commented on here before that is critical that they continue to battle away and do everything that they can in order to secure second place in the table and home matches for as long as they are in the play-offs. There are no guarantees of promotion, and their supporters would be better advised to mentally prepare themselves for another season in the Ryman League and treat the play-offs as an end of season bonus. Damage limitation for the brain, if you like.

The picture at the top of the Championship looks even more confused than ever. West Bromwich Albion won last night's big Black Country derby match at Wolves last night. They're top of the table and two points clear now with two matches left to play, but dropping points in either of their three remaining matches could yet cost them dear. Hull City have moved into second place after a 3-1 win at Barnsley last night, but with just three points separating Hull, Bristol City (who are just starting to fade), Stoke City and Watford, it's still anyone's guess who will go up. I'm sticking with West Bromwich Albion and Hull City (Albion have the best players, whilst Hull are the only team in the top five in anything like decent form) as my predictions to go up. The bottom of the table is no clearer. Leicester City are still in the bottom three, but anybody from them up to Norwich City in sixteenth place should still be nervously looking over their shoulders.

Finally, the Premier League. The game is surely now up for Chelsea, after Emile Heskey's inexplicable last minute equalizer for Wigan Athletic at Stamford Bridge more or less gifted the title to Manchester United. It's now looking likely that they will win the title at Stamford Bridge on the 26th of April. At the foot of the table, Bolton's win against West Ham United on Saturday threw the cat back amongst the pigeons again. Fulham are four points clear of safety, which is probably a little bit too much to claw back with just four matches to play, but I honestly couldn't tell you who from Reading, Birmingham or Bolton will join them. Just thinking about it is giving me a bit of a headache, to be honest.

Border City Blue

The 8th of May 1999 was a big day for Carlisle United Football Club. Members of the Football League for just over seventy years, they were the only surviving club of the three Cumbrian clubs that had once been members of the Football League (Workington and Barrow having lost their places in the 1970s), but now their place in the League was on the line and they had to beat Plymouth Argyle at Brunton Park on the last day of the season to stay up. Into injury time, they won a corner and threw everybody, including on loan goalkeeper Jimmy Glass, forward. The corner fell to Glass who, from six yards out, slammed the ball into the bottom corner of the net and sent Scarborough down instead.

It was in some respects the ultimate football fairytale, but the truth was somewhat more complex than that. For one thing, Carlisle had been run into the ground by the maladministration of Michael Knighton over a period of the previous three or four years or so. Knighton had famously attempted to wrest control of Manchester United for £20m in 1989 to the extent of running onto the pitch at Old Trafford in a full United kit to demonstrate his "skills". The deal fell through (and just think how different modern football might have been had it not done so), and Knighton's spell at Brunton Park proved to be a ruinous one. Also, the respite for Carlisle that was provided by Glass's goal was a short-lived one. They were relegated into the Conference in 2004, but were promoted back through the first Conference play-offs a year later, and it could be argued that it was the shock of this was the impetus behind their subsequent revival - fast forward four years and they are five points clear (with a game) of Doncaster Rovers in an automatic promotion place in League One, and are looking at playing in the top two divisions of English football for the first time since 1986.

Prior to Knighton's period in control of the club, they had led a largely assuming life inhabiting all three of the "lower" divisions of the League for significant periods of time. Their moment in the sun came in 1974, when they were promoted into the First Division for the only time in their history. Led on the pitch by Chris Balderstone (who was simultaneously a professional footballer in the winter and a cricketer in the the summer), they made headlines at the start of the 1974/75 season with a televised win at Stamford Bridge that, because of the old practice of not publishing league tables until three matches of the season had been played, sent them briefly to the top of the first published league table of the season. Such excitement couldn't last, however, and they were relegated in bottom place the following spring.

Monday's win against Northampton Town, which was watched by a bumper crowd of over 9,000 (their biggest of the season - an astonishing 16,668 - saw them beat Leeds United 3-1 in November) allowed them to open a little daylight between themselves and Doncaster Rovers, who had a similarly wretched 1990s and also fell into the Conference, and the second automatic promotion place is now theirs to lose. The current squad is thin on big names (former Nottingham Forest and West Bromwich Albion player Scott Dobie, who started his career at Brunton Park during that traumatic 1998/99 season is probably their best known player outside of Cumbria), which would indicate, on the surface at least, that their success is being achieved in a relatively sustainable fashion, and with nine wins and two draws from their last eleven matches, it is difficult to see them losing momentum to the extent that they would drop enough points to miss out on promotion. All Cumbria needs now is for Workington and Barrow to get their acts together and the circle will be complete.

Spring Cleaning

In previous years, the Easter weekend was the time of year when everything suddenly became clear. This year, however, many things seem just as unresolved as they did last week. Partly it's because Easter is so damn early this year, and partly it's because many of English football's more pressing tête à têtes this year seem unlikely to be resolved before the very last day of the season. Still, there was always time for Sky Sports to broadcast "Sooper Dooper Sunday - The Most Masculine Easter In The History Of Mankind", in which Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea came together to prove once and for all that the Premier League is considerably more important than Jesus. This, of course, followed "Irrelevant Saturday", in which the teams that don't matter stood around, picking their noses and occasionally kicking a football about.

This weekend's football was notable for even more over the top masculinity than usual. Whether it was coming from Cristiano Ronaldo (top left), Javier Mascherano, who looked like a drunk spoiling for a fight outside a kebab shop after his (thoroughly deserved) sending off for Liverpool at Old Trafford yesterday, or Didier Drogba busting out of his Chelsea shirt like The Incredible Hulk after scoring against Arsenal, there was a lot of testosterone on display yesterday, although whether there was much of anything else on display is open to question. It's probably fair enough to say that results yesterday meant that the championship trophy is on its way to Old Trafford. Manchester United didn't play particularly well yesterday, but Liverpool were shocking enough to not make 3-0 seem like a flattering scoreline. That result cranked the pressure up on Arsenal, but things seemed to be going reasonably well for them with twenty minutes to play at Stamford Bridge and with a one goal lead, but then Avram Grant revealed himself to be not quite as tactically incompetent as many people had thought and brought on Anelka and Belletti for Ballack and Makalele. Within two minutes Chelsea were level, and within ten minutes they had a lead which they managed to hold onto. A bad day at the office for Arsenal, then - Chelsea have leapfrogged over them and into second place, and United now need to lose two of their remaining matches to give Arsenal or Chelsea a chance to catch them, which doesn't look very likely.

Even in defeat Liverpool were fortunate at the weekend, as Everton failed to make up much ground with a nervy 1-1 draw against Nothing To Play For West Ham. All of the chasing pack seem to have started playing badly since they started to realise that they had a chance of actually achieving something this season. Aston Villa were beaten at home by Sunderland, and Portsmouth lost at the alarmingly schizophrenic Spurs. The bottom of the table remains very much as you were. Reading took a giant step towards safety with a 2-1 win against Birmingham City, whilst Kevin Keegan, who has "gone from being a Messiah to being a very naughty boy" (as Gary Lineker succinctly put it at the end of "Match Of The Day"), finally got his first win at the weekend as Newcastle beat Fulham 2-0 at St James Park. Theoretically, anyone from Newcastle down in the current Premier League table could yet get sucked back into the battle against relegation, but it now looks like being Derby, Fulham and one from Bolton, Birmingham or Sunderland to join them.

End of season nerves also seem to be kicking in at the top of the Championship, where Bristol City lost at Cardiff and Stoke City were held at home by Blackpool. Few of the chasing pack were able to make up that much headway on them - West Bromwich Albion and Charlton played out a 1-1 draw on Friday night and Watford made it a nosebleed-inducing seven draws in a row at Plymouth on Saturday. The big beneficiaries at the top of the Championship were Hull City, whose surprising run from the bottom of the table to the top continued with them moving into third place in the table with a 2-0 win at Leicester. It still seems likely that another set of supporters will spend next season whining about how they're too big for League One, with Sheffield Wednesday, Leicester City, Coventry City and Southampton likely to be fighting it out to avoid joining Scunthorpe United and Colchester United through the trapdoor next season.

The bottom two divisions of the Football League play a round of matches this afternoon, with Nottingham Forest playing Brighton & Hove Albion at The City Ground in a match between two of the eight teams within five points of a play-off place. Leeds United seem to be moving ominously back into form - their 2-0 win against Walsall on Saturday saw them move back up into eighth place - whilst Tranmere Rovers came from nowhere into sixth place with a win against Port Vale on Thursday night. The top two in League Two played out a 1-1 draw on Friday night, but there were more nerves on display on Saturday afternoon as the chasing pair of Hereford United and Darlington failed to make up any ground on them. At the bottom of the table, it now looks likely that Wrexham and Mansfield Town will be visiting the likes of Forest Green Rovers and Grays Athletic next season, with Aldershot Town and one from Cambridge United, Burton Albion, Stevenage Borough, Torquay United or Exeter City to replace them. There will be plenty more shredded nerves before this season is done.

Crossing Swords At Upton Park

In the football anthology "My Favourite Year", Nick Hornby ruminates upon the subject of generation gap in football and the irony of seeing Peter Lorimer (in his final season at Leeds United) playing against Andy Sinton (in his first season as a seventeen year-old for Cambridge United). An icon of the 1970s lining up against a star of the 1990s. I was reminded of that this morning, whilst watching "The Big Match Revisited".

For those of you that have been living under a rock for the last few weeks, ITV4 have been showing the corresponding week's football action on Thursday afternoons for the last couple of months, and this week the featured match was a match between West Ham United and Stoke City. Quite what was going through the mind of the planner is beyond me. It was a nothing match between two mid-table clubs and it was, unsurprisingly, a poor match that ended in a 1-1 draw. The undoubted highlight of the afternoon, however, was a stunning own goal by a very young Steve Bould, who managed to loop a back-pass over goalkeeper Peter Fox from twenty yards out.

It is, I suspect, a testimony to Bould's abilities as a defender that he was able to recover his career and go on to play almost three hundred matches for Arsenal and pick up a couple of Premier League championship and FA Cup winners medals. Such was the scarcity of football coverage on the television at the time that one televised mistake could prove to be almost fatal to a player. In 1979, Burnley goalkeeper Billy O'Rourke made his debut for his club in an away match against Queens Park Rangers. O'Rourke left the pitch in tears after Burnley's 7-0 defeat and the mark that it left went on to scar the rest of his career. Sadly, he died in 2002 at the age of just forty-one. The Everton-Liverpool derby match played at Goodison Park in November is best remembered for Ian Rush's four goals in a 5-0 Liverpool win, but it was an even more significant afternoon for Everton's Glenn Keeley, who, making his debut, was sent off after thirty-seven minutes and he never played for Everton again.

For all the talk of how we have reached some sort of zenith in terms of footballing excellence, players make just an mistakes as they ever did. Tottenham Hotspur's defence, for example, has conceded four goals at home on three occasions now this season, but it almost feels as if the fact that they get paid vastly more than they ever used to leaves them immune from as much criticism as they should surely get. Perhaps we're just too familiar with them all. Glenn Keeley and Billy O'Rourke certainly wouldn't have looked out of place in white shirts at White Hart Lane on Wednesday night.

Championship Contenders

You have to, in some senses, wonder what they have to do in order to win any praise. With an extraordinarily close league table and three out of four of the places in the FA Cup semi-finals, you'd think that the media might just take the opportunity to reappraise the Championship, but no. On one of the very few occasions that The Guardian takes its eyes of the Usual Suspects, they hire someone to take a pop at it. The fact of the matter is that, in most matters, the media is very conservative. They don't like the status quo being upset, and this year they're starting the sledging early. At the top of the Premier League, everything is going on very much as normal. The Top Four are in the right place, Derby County are ripe to be laughed at by everyone else and everything is going on as per normal.

In the Championship, though, things aren't going according to plan for the self-styled "bigger clubs". The openness of the table this season has meant that clubs such as Southampton and Leicester City, who might quite conceivably have thought of themselves as being amongst the favourites for promotion before the start of the season, are instead in the middle of a thoroughly undignified battle against relegation. Meanwhile, the teams that have organised themselves properly have fought their way to the top of the table, and at this stage in the season it is churlish to suggest that they don't deserve to be there. Stoke City and in particular Bristol City have done exceptionally well to still be in contention with seven or eight matches of the season left to play, but equally notable are the achievements of Plymouth Argyle and Hull City, both of whom sit in the play-off places. Neither of these clubs have ever played in the top division before.

It is a curious situation that the knives are already for these clubs when the evidence is that the clubs that get into the Premier League simply don't get relegated straight back as a rite of passage. At the time of writing, Birmingham City and Sunderland are sitting just above the relegation places with every chance of staying up. To say that there is some sort of foregone conclusion about their going down is nonsense. Derby County are floundering at the bottom of the table because they have invested more or less none of the extra money that they got for being promoted on their team. It's difficult to say whether this is a "good" decision or not. Their relegation is imminent, but they're likely to be £40m better off for it, and their season in the sun has brought in investors from abroad. This being a good idea or not is dependent entirely on how the money is used. If it's thrown away on players or making someone, somewhere rich, it will all have been a waste of time. If it's spent sensibly, however, it could provide a springboard to a stable stay in Premier League in a couple of years time.

The suggestion has been put forward a couple of times that it is only a matter of time before a Championship club refuses to take promotion on account of the humiliation that a season in the Premier League. Ha! Fat chance! They don't call the Championship play-off match "The £50m Match" for no reason, you know. You could argue that clubs are already refusing promotion. Derby could have had a go this season, but almost chose not to. The likelihood is that this will continue to happen. It will always be more difficult to get players year-long contracts, and newly-promoted clubs won't want to take the gamble. They'll settle for a year of humiliation and a nice big, fat pay cheque instead. It may yet be that West Bromwich Albion and Watford pull through and go up, with Charlton streaking back into the play-off places. On the other hand, we've seen in recent weeks that West Bromwich Albion are capable of imploding, whilst Watford's six draws in a row hardly look like promotion form at this stage in the season. It's not very often that three promoted teams all get relegated, but there would plenty of people betting on it if Stoke City, Bristol City and Plymouth Argyle were to go up. You never know, though.

Brighton & Hove Albion 1-1 Leyton Orient

Such is the nature of this season's League One table that this afternoon's match between Brighton & Leyton Orient matters. Albion have had a most peculiar season. After a reasonable start, they fell away alarmingly at the start of the winter and it looked for a while as if they might even get sucked into a fight against relegation. The January transfer window, however, proved to be the salvation that they needed. It says something for the financial state that the club has been in for much of the last three decades that the £300,000 that they spent in Glen Murray is the most that they have spent on a player since 1983, but Murray has proved to be the missing piece in manager Dean Wilkins' jigsaw. They have won their last two games and, with games in hand on the clubs above them, are still in with a shout of a play-off place. Leyton Orient were many people's pre-season favourites for relegation, but have surpassed all expectations and, in spite of a recent dip in their form, they remain in ninth place in the table. Two clubs that many would have picked before the start of the season for the drop are still in with half a chance of getting promoted.

The weather this afternoon is more forgiving than the last time I ventured up to the Withdean, but this can't mask the fact that it is one of the worst places in England to watch football at. There are no pubs within a mile of the place, and the onerous conditions of their tenancy mean that they're not even allowed to serve booze in the ground or even switch the PA on until fifteen minutes before kick-off. There is, however, something of a buzz around the place this afternoon. The club recently made public their plans for the new stadium at Falmer, and there is an eight page pull-out in the middle of today's programme outlining them all. It all looks, I have to say, very impressive. The added frisson in the air is brought about by something of a rivalry with Orient. Both clubs' traditional rivals (Crystal Palace for Brighton, Spurs and West Ham) play at a higher level than they do, and the two clubs have built up a healthy rivalry which seems to prove that there is something in the old saying that familiarity breeds contempt. The truth of the matter is that all of these factors have combined to bring in a decent crowd of over 6,000.

The pre-match is hurriedly shooed into the fifteen minutes that the lease allows. The blasting out of a Fatboy Slim original in which DJ shouts "Let's hear it for Brighton!" several times and in a rather too urgent a voice for my liking, which then stops for the teams to come out onto the pitch to the altogether jauntier and more calming "Sussex By The Sea". The first half is a tale of considerable energy being expended with very little net result. Brighton look calmer and more assured on the ball, but Murray, who is already taking on talismanic proportions for them, is having an off day. Three times he gets round the goalkeeper with the ball, but each time manages to over-run and finds himself halfway between the goal post and the corner flag and with his back to everyone else. The layout of the Withdean doesn't exactly encourage a big match atmosphere, and the crowd (even the several hundred Leyton Orient supporters, tucked away in the corner of the ground and so far away from the pitch that they might even be in a different county to it) goes very quiet, very quickly. Half-time comes around rather too quickly, with the score still goalless and the crowd subdued.

Unable to get so much as a glass of shandy at half-time, the crowd lacks its normal start of the second half raucousness as things get back under way. Brighton still look the stronger of the two teams, but are failing to capitalise appreciably on the possession that they are having. It feels as if the game is starting to peter out, when things suddenly come to life. Orient, having not really threatened for much of the second half, are suddenly and out the blue handed a golden opportunity when the ball falls to Jabo Ibehre, six yards out. His shot over the crossbar when he should have scored to hoots of amusement from the crowd, but their laughter is short-lived. A few minutes later, a long, deep cross finds him completely unmarked and his header loops wide of the Brighton goalkeeper Michel Kuipers and into into the corner of the net. Such is the distance between them and the pitch that there is a groan from the home supporters, a couple of seconds of silence, and then a roar the far corner of the pitch. The goal seems to wake the Albion up, but they still seem to lack the incisive movement from midfield required to dig out an equaliser. In the last seconds of the ninety minutes and with the fourth official programming four minutes of stoppage time into the LED board that they show to the crowd, Brighton are handed a ridiculous lifeline, when Adam Chambers needlessly handles an aimless throughball that would have been comfortably gathered by the goalkeeper. After an extensive delay, Nicky Forster shows the value of experience by stepping up and stroking the ball in to level things up.

For the remainder of injury time the traffic is completely one way and Albion manage to have a header cleared through the line and a shot through a crowd of players that brings a decent save from the Orient goalkeeper Morris. When it comes, the final whistle is five or ten minutes early for most Brighton fans - a little more time and the Seagulls would surely have won. It has been a most curious afternoon. On the one hand, Albion should probably have won had they taken one or two of the chances that they created earlier on in the match. On the other hand, though, they were rescued by an unnecessarily conceded penalty and, as such, a draw was a reasonably fair result. So, they contrived to deserve to win, lose and draw this match. On this evidence, either of these two sides could yet scramble into the play-offs, though whether they would be equipped to stay in the Championship should they get there is a different question altogether. Their continuing success at this level is, however, proof that, at least at this level, money isn't quite everything. Yet.

The plans for Falmer Stadium

The Epicentre Of English Football

If there is one division that provides a snapshot of English football, it's League One. It is the league that shows all of the pitfalls of the modern game, but at the same time it has often provided a springboard to greater things. There are former Premier League clubs in there, playing as equals against teams that were playing Isthmian League football a little over ten years ago. It's a bewildering mixture of success and failure. Its clubs can go to the Premier League or the Conference in two short years, and it has provided FA Cup semi-finallists in the form of Wycombe Wanderers, Plymouth Argyle and Chesterfield. Indeed, it may yet provide an FA Cup semi-finallist in Bristol Rovers this year. It is, I think, the epicentre of the English game.

At one end of the spectrum you have Nottingham Forest and Leeds United. These are two clubs that considering themselves to be slumming it by playing in this division. Forest, for whom the memories of being twice European champions are getting more and more distant with each passing year, have been struggling to get out of League One for a couple of years now, and there is no guarantee that they will go up this season yet. Leeds' history is similarly glorious, but they look even less likely to go up than Forest. At the other end of the scale, you have Cheltenham Town and Yeovil Town. Both of these clubs were Conference clubs in the 1990s, but have hauled themselves out of the primoridial gloop of non-league football and are established clubs. Both are sitting just above the relegation places, but are more likely to avoid the drop this season than Forest and Leeds are to get promoted this season.

It is the transotory nature of League One that makes it compelling, but also exposes its member clubs to significant risk. It seems to me to be no coincidence that three of this year's biggest financial meltdowns (Luton, Swindon and Bournemouth) have all come in a division which is, to an extent, neither fish nor fowl. League Two and non-league clubs have to cut their cloth according to their circumstances. Premier League and Championship clubs can depend on significantly bigger pots of TV and sponsorship money. League One clubs, though, are stuck in the middle. Many of them carry huge wage budgets which they feel that they have to sustain in order to remain competitive in that division, but whether they are sustainable on the limited funds available to them is open to question.

Even in facilities, the range on offer is astonishing. The City Ground and Elland Road both hosted matches at Euro 96, whilst the likes of Brighton's Withdean Stadium offer amongst the worst facilities in the Football League. Some clubs, such as Swansea City, have moved into sparkling new stadia, whilst others, like Chesterfield still have terracing behind the goals.

A look at the league table confirms just how tight everything is. Brighton & Hove Albion are in eleventh place in the league, but if they win their games in hand they will be propelled into the play-off places, with a chance of Championship football next season. Their opponents tomorrow, Leyton Orient, were in League One in 1995 when the infamous "Club For A Fiver" documentary was recorded. This film (which is availaible, I think, on YouTube) documented their collapse into financial chaos, a collapse which it took them the best part of five years to recover from. Both of these clubs could be playing the likes of West Bromwich Albion, Wolverhampton Wanderers and Derby County as equals next season, which is all part of the joy of this division. We'll be at The Withdean tomorrow - expect a write up on here on Sunday or Monday.

He's At it Again

It looks like Leeds United's Ken Bates started legal action against his team's fifteen point deduction for not following Football League rules on administration just in time because, on the pitch, his team is falling to pieces. They haven't won a single match in their last seven games, and have collapsed from being being contenders for automatic promotion from League One to being in ninth place in the table and five points off so much as a play-off place. Yesterday, they were reliant on a late Tresor Kandol goal to salvage a 1-1 draw at home to struggling Crewe Alexandra.

Bates' campaign reeks of his own trademark brand of self preservation, and it runs the risk of dragging the name of Leeds United even further into the mud. The circumstances surrounding Leeds entering into administration and their subsequent sale back to Bates last summer was highly suspect, and the League's decision to dock them fifteen points would seem to indicate that they felt the same. Bates, you may remember, had initially offered the insulting amount of one penny in the pound to his club's creditors, and the final offer agreed by the administrators still only offered their creditors a small percentage of what they were owed back. As soon as Leeds were released from what they seemed to think of as being some sort of unfairly applied straitjacket, they started spending again, and pretty heavily by League One standards.

The story took a turn for the strange last week, when the Football League's Brian Mawhinney announced that Barnsley had decided to publicly to back Leeds in their fight. This was news to the Barnsley chairman Gordon Shepherd, who had been away from his post for a few weeks with health problems. "I have nothing against Leeds United but this is their fight, not ours", said Shepherd, which leads one to wonder where where this particular piece of information came from. Whatever the situation with Barnsley, other clubs in the Football League have been most conspicuous in not supporting Leeds in their legal action.

What sticks in the craw is that Bates is back-tracking on an arrangement that his club signed in the summer when, desperate to get their "golden share" back in time for the start of the new season (and without this, they wouldn't have been able to start the season and would almost certainly have closed), they signed an agreement promising that they wouldn't enter into any legal action against the Football League over this matter. Bates, with his trademark habit of being utterly self-centred in his pursuit of anything whatsoever, is arguing that this should now be voided and rendered unenforceable. They're trying to spin it that they are somehow the victims of a miscarriage of justice here, to the extent of starting a petition about it, which, with wearying predictability, 8,000 Leeds supporters (all of whom are presumably so desperate for promotion that they are happy to concede any moral misgivings about this) have signed.

Should they lose the legal case (and, without wishing to put a hex on it, I can't see them losing it), the Football League should seriously consider playing hard-ball with Leeds. They should consider removing the "golden share" from them, and if that means dire consequences, then so be it. Everybody knows the circumstances of what happened at Leeds United last summer, and a fifteen point deduction was, considering what Bates got away with, an exceptionally light punishment in many ways. Football clubs may need to learn the hard way that there should be no easy ways out of financial mismanagement.