Football League in crisis
Bury fans and players are left to sift through the rubble of a once great club now deceased
The first removal vans had been and gone from Gigg Lane by lunchtime, leaving those for whom Bury Football Club is a way of life to clutch at straws in bleak and unremitting rain.
The team’s new home kit was still being promoted as ‘The Fabric of Bury’ on the exterior of the club ‘superstore’, where the shutters were down. Talk was rife of the supposed £7million to buy the club on offer from a consortium based in Brazil or Sweden, depending on which version of the rumour you happened to hear.
But the game has gone and the scribbled messages taped to the stadium railings acknowledge as much.
‘No price on memories’, reads one. ‘here are some of the people you ripped off,’ declares another, beneath an image of a supporter’s five Bury-mad grandchildren.
Margaret Smith, 86, who has been following the club for the best part of eight decades, reels off the names of the players she’s seen in all the time she’s been tea provider for match- day St John’s Ambulance staff — Colin Todd, Terry McDermott and Alec Lindsay, to name a few.
her husband is apparently too devastated by the club’s demise to be here with her. ‘It’s broken his heart,’ she confides. ‘I’ve had to leave him on the couch at home.’
It was not so much the despair as the hope which brought such devastation to these people when the eFL announced, shortly before 11.30pm on Tuesday night, that the club would be expunged from League One, bringing inevitable liquidation.
Just 12 hours earlier, supporters had been inside the ground, scrubbing it clean in anticipation of a Saturday home game against Doncaster Rovers. But at 3pm — two hours before the eFL’s deadline for the sale of the club — the ticket office curiously stopped selling tickets for the game.
At 4.40pm the cleaning firm supervising the work unexpectedly indicated that volunteers should collect their tools and leave. It was left to journalists to break news to fans that the eFL had tired of Steve Dale, whose empty promises about finding a buyer were entirely in keeping with his sham ownership of this 134-year-old club.
There are many targets of anger beneath the slate grey skies. The eFL, whose definitions of a ‘ fit and proper’ football club owner would be laughable had the consequences not proved so devastating. There is Stewart Day, who arguably did the club even greater harm before selling it to the current incumbent, Steve Dale. But it is Dale who epitomises the Wild West world of lower league football, where clubs are at the mercy of the latest passing pariah.
Needless to say, the individual in question is nowhere to be seen, be it at Gigg Lane, a stadium set among redbrick back-to-backs, or the club’s Carrington training base. his hot air about legally challenging the eFL’s decision is issued from his luxury home in Cheshire.
It is left to midfielder Neil Danns to let supporters know they have not gathered here for nothing. The 36-year- old stands in the rain for an hour or so, fielding their questions and demonstrating that the game at this level has not lost touch with reality.
‘You’ve meant so much to me,’ he tells the 30 or more people clustered around him. ‘I’ve heard you cheer me from the terrace and I’ve heard you jeer me. It’s meant a lot to win your respect.’
he tells them that he wonders why he allowed Dale to fool him with his big talk about the future which evaporated with each of the seven passing months in which he and team-mates have gone unpaid.
‘he was at the training ground a week and a half ago, jumping around in the canteen saying, “It’s done! It’s done! We’ve got a buyer”,’ says Danns. ‘It never happened. It was empty talk, just like all the rest we’d heard from him.’
Danns will be looking for work on Monday in the knowledge, he says, that ‘only a struggling side will probably want a player like me at this time of the season.’
But he says he has some money put aside from a career which has taken him from Crystal Palace and Leicester City to Bolton Wanderers and Birmingham City.
The uncertainty is worse for the 16-year-old Academy player, leaving Carrington yesterday, who wondered aloud if this sport holds a career for him after all. Bury’s players, like the fans, are clinging to hopes of that Brazilian consortium, said to have links to a local businessman.
But just an hour’s drive north, Morecambe fans were shaking their heads at that notion. It’s three years since 35- year- old Brazilian Diego Lemos swanned into the place — basking in adulation before a home game against Carlisle United — and claimed he would be the saviour.
Lemos, another deemed fit by the eFL to run a club, has barely been seen since and Morecambe are another on the at-risk list.
It’s the same story the length and breadth of football. When the Venky’s Indian poultry business starts to look iffy, they turn off the tap at Blackburn Rovers, who’ve flirted with Bury’s endgame in a way which has not been fully appreciated.
These indifferent, often assetstripping owners are just passing through, not remotely aware of the pride a football club like Bury fosters in a town like this, which has seen better days. They claim the Gigg Lane turf, once the best in england, was imitated by the old Wembley; that the stadium once drew 20,000 for a reserveteam game.
These are the stories of the generations, told and re-told endlessly in the Staff of Life pub on the Manchester Road, where they’ve always gathered before home games. A group of six were huddled around the Sky Sports News feed there early yesterday evening, hoping against hope for a salvation which never came.
‘My husband is devastated. I’ve had to leave him at home’