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Post by hatter_in_macc on May 17, 2024 12:24:37 GMT
The Stockport Express has brought out a 'Promotion Special' this week.
Will post a link separately for exiles about how to go about ordering a copy - but, for any Heaveners who don't end up getting one, here is a piece I have written for it about 10 years of travel-reporting...
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Hatter in Macc looks back over a decade of life on the road as County’s Match Reporter.
“Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.”
When globetrotting author Paul Theroux penned those words, he would not have had in mind following the Hatters away from home.
And for all the truisms they contain about remembering delightful experiences over difficult ones after returning home from trips, let me tell you that I still have vivid recollections of some very unglamorous assignments with my laptop - which, from time to time, were rather more like travails than travels! - to write up County’s adventures on the road.
Ten years ago this August, I swapped the life of a long-standing season ticket holder on the Pop Side for a seat in the Edgeley Park press box to cover matches for my club. At the time, the Hatters, having begun the 21st century in the equivalent of today’s Championship, found themselves embarking - four tiers further down, and following a fall from grace previously unmatched in combined speed and scale throughout senior English football - on their second campaign as a part-time non-league outfit playing at a regional level.
One minor saving grace of what is now the National League North was the relatively modest travelling involved (at least generally speaking… nothing quite prepared me for a trip, seven months after taking up my new voluntary role, to Lowestoft in the Far, Faraway East). And so it was that, on 16 August 2014, I drove the sub-50 mile journey from my Macclesfield home down to Tamworth for the first reporting assignment.
Relying on an old-school map in the absence of Sat Nav, and in the face of signposting around Tamworth that highlighted the SnowDome’s location at every opportunity but not that of the Staffordshire town’s football ground, I eventually, after a couple of wrong turns, found my destination - to receive from the club’s officials a genuinely warm welcome that, for me, would come to typify County’s many and varied non-league hosts over the next eight years.
(The only exception to this general bonhomie I can recall was at Oxford City a couple of months later, when a cantankerous turnstile operator initially refused me admission, on the basis that, so far as he was concerned, and despite my name being on the list of media attendees, too many reporters had already been let in through the Marsh Lane gates for his liking that evening!)
The game against Tamworth at The Lamb ground, played out in front of 795 paying spectators, was far from a classic - but, with the Hatters yet to get their season up and running after two defeats, I nursed a hope for any semblance of an improved result, however scrappily gained. And that, in the event, is precisely what I, and County, got.
With a largely forgettable, and scoreless, tussle in its closing stages, Preston North End loanee Jack Ryan won what looked to be the softest of penalties, and County skipper Jamie Milligan converted the winning spot-kick past home goalkeeper James Belshaw - who these days plies his trade in League Two, and, by way of a neat historical loop in my journo-journey, turned out only three months ago against the Hatters for Harrogate.
County finished 11th that season. Hardly what passed for mid-table respectability, so far as a club with 110 proud years of Football League membership to its name was concerned - but nonetheless an improvement of three positions on the Hatters’ previous campaign.
And steadily but surely, fortunes continued to revive for the club - with each and every year between then and now resulting in a better finishing place than that of the immediately-preceding season. In the Hatters’ nine campaigns since 2015, six have seen them reach NLN, National League and League Two play-offs (in 2018, 2021 and last year, respectively) or, of course, go on the very next season in each instance to win titles at those levels.
The 2019 NLN championship - County’s first in 52 years - brings to mind, and probably without too much argument, one of the greatest away-days from this or indeed any period, when, on a gusty afternoon in Warwickshire, the Hatters stormed to a three-goal victory at already-relegated Nuneaton Borough.
Despite a disappointing season of their own, the alas-currently-defunct ‘Boro’ had pulled out all the stops for the hordes of visiting County fans - allocating them all available space except one corner-terrace in a packed Liberty Way, and converting a ground outbuilding into a ‘Hatters’ Bar’ (complete with banner wrapped around its frontage). Nuneaton’s then-home enjoyed a new attendance record that day of over 4,000 - some 85 per cent of whom were travelling Hatters.
Heady, happy days - and long-awaited ones, after six years in non-league’s second tier. And, if truth be told, there had been some unexpected pleasures to cherish back then, even during our early seasons that had quietly petered away without troubling the business-end of the table.
The generally invariable friendliness of hosts I have already mentioned, but it bears repeating, given that so many clubs - as was the case with County at the time - rely on the efforts of unpaid individuals who selflessly devote their time and efforts on and outside of match days. One of the best examples of this for me was only a couple of years ago, at Needham Market in Suffolk - to where the Hatters, in their National League champions’ campaign, were sent in the FA Trophy draw for a Quarter-final tie.
In the event, County prevailed in Suffolk with a routine three-goal win. But my abiding memories of the day were the many acts of niceness from which I benefited as a guest there. When I seriously over-estimated the time my drive across would take and rocked up at the ground mid-morning, ‘Marketmen’ officials had let me in, made me coffee and engaged me in great conversation about the magic of cup-days. With some imaginative arrangement of extension leads, they rigged up some power especially for our media team - and, during the match, I met a couple of their former players from the early 1970s, who had turned out for the club in local football on an open field the other side of town. Everyone wished us well after the game, too.
In short, a lovely club. And one whose results I have kept an eye on ever since. Like County, the Marketmen this season enjoyed a title-winning campaign - by topping the Southern League Premier Division Central.
Back in the darker NLN days for County on the field, there were the odd few joys to be found off it at venues such as Leamington’s New Windmill Ground, where the club sold its own ‘Brakes Fluid’ bitter to consume on the premises or, for us drivers, to take away. The as-yet-undeveloped stadia of Harrogate and Salford, meanwhile, were back then already serving up the bistro-standard food and deliciously eclectic pre-match music playlists for which the clubs, now both in League Two, are still respectively praised today.
But for the avoidance of any doubt, these were, in the great scheme of things, just occasional reasons to be cheerful amid times of dismay and often disbelief.
Playing regional non-league football meant going toe-to-toe with Altrincham and Stalybridge, local clubs with whom County (or, more often than not, County Reserves) had been used to meeting in friendlies or the Cheshire Senior Cup; the under-Lyne duo, just up the M60, of Ashton United and Curzon Ashton; and more recently-formed outfits like AFC Fylde - managed by one Dave Challinor, and at whose middle-of-nowhere Kellamergh Park ground County suffered an ignominiously early September FA Cup exit in 2015 - as well as supporter-owned FC United of Manchester, both of whom, only a few seasons earlier, had been in the Second Division of the North West Counties League, half a dozen levels or more below the Football League Hatters.
There were other up-and-coming forces in the shape of Brackley, Guiseley, Hednesford, North Ferriby and Solihull - none of whom County managed to beat, either home or away, during 2013/14 - while the reformed AFC Telford United, who had come down from the Conference Premier (as was) with, and 15 points behind, the Hatters, proved good enough to bounce back at the first attempt. It would take County an additional five years to do so.
Now and again, nostalgic visits beckoned to former Football League stadia such as those of the phoenix clubs in Chester, Halifax and Hereford that had replaced defunct professional outfits - but in the NLN, they were the exception rather than the norm.
Bradford (Park Avenue), another ex-FL club, now played at a modest athletics arena where my late mother-in-law used to go for her school sports days. Colwyn Bay’s ground was set into a hillside on which fans could (and some travelling Hatters did) gather to watch proceedings for nothing. And Grange Lane, in North Ferriby village, backed on to gardening plots that prompted my pre-Christmas 2014 match-day tweet of bathos for the club - which still makes occasional, lest-we-forget reappearances on the channel now rebranded as ‘X’ - about County kicking towards the allotments in the second half.
Words on Twitter (as was) covered the bizarre, as well as the embarrassingly tragic, in those days. During February 2015, at Kidderminster, Worcester’s Shab Khan responded to Charlie Russell’s rash challenge by gathering and lifting the young County midfielder and throwing him to the ground in what amounted either to a body slam or a back suplex. And nine months later, former Leeds and Swansea winger Andy Robinson was shown a red card after 32 seconds, reportedly for foul language on being introduced as a substitute for the Hatters at Solihull.
My live tweets of those, and one or two other, incidents made it on to the BBC’s weekly round-ups of footballing social media highlights - but we Hatters lived in hope of once again enjoying days when our team could make the news for good reason, rather than on account of the bad or the ridiculous.
Promotion back to the National League was the first step in that direction - seeing County visit rather bigger grounds, and renew acquaintance with more clubs, like Barnet, Chesterfield, Dagenham & Redbridge, Hartlepool and Notts County, whom the Hatters had not faced since the club’s Football League days. Torquay and Yeovil were another two in that bracket, highlighting, courtesy of the long, tortuous, but perversely welcome schleps to their stadia, that County were back in 2019/20 to plying their trade on a nationwide basis.
Probably the oddest away-assignment of that campaign was at Maidenhead on 14 March 2020, which felt likely, and indeed proved, to be the Hatters’ last competitive appearance for some time due to the coronavirus pandemic. And even when football resumed seven months later, government restrictions imposed on travelling, as well as those by other clubs, limited media attendance at matches behind closed doors for most of the 2020/21 season.
Since then, of course, the Hatters have bagged two further titles within as many years - as well as earning, this time last year, a play-offs trip to Wembley, which, despite the agony of losing to Carlisle on penalties, did come with a not-too-shabby reporting office for the afternoon.
And now thoughts will now be turning to regular domestic third-tier fixtures at the likes of Bolton (subject to the outcome of the League One play-offs), Charlton, Rotherham and Wigan - all of whom the Hatters have visited within the last three years for cup-ties but not hitherto on an equal standing, league-wise. There will also be first visits in 20 years or more to Birmingham, Blackpool and Reading (as well as a first-ever taste of the latter’s Madejski Stadium) and, doubtless, many other memorable days out in prospect.
I was reminded back in February of the glamours or otherwise of my travelling after what was undeniably County’s worst performance of an otherwise near-perfect season. Having seen the Hatters concede four without reply at Tranmere, I hit the M53 out of Birkenhead feeling, inevitably, pretty fed up about what I had just watched. We had been, as is said, lucky to get nil that afternoon.
But I then passed, three junctions along, the turning near Ellesmere Port I had had to take as a fan just over a decade previously to watch the Hatters play Vauxhall Motors in, what was for our freshly-relegated sixth-tier club, a scheduled league meeting with hosts who had been founded as a works team in the 1960s and turned out to be too good for us half a century later. That grim Tuesday-nighter, let it not be forgotten, saw County defeated by the odd goal in three before a crowd of 404.
The performance and result at Tranmere’s Prenton Park three months ago might have fallen below what was wanted or expected - but we had come a long, long way from the Rivacre Park home of the ‘Motormen’!
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Post by gazz on May 17, 2024 14:31:47 GMT
Excellent, Maccy, cheers for posting.
I got my folks to pick me a copy up after you messaged me, but hopefully this will help everyone get one for themselves.
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