Neal’s crazy task of preparing for vital play-off game after County’s 133 days in deep sleep
FOR Neal Ardley, football’s hibernation lasted so long it feels like everyone was wearing flares and platforms when the music stopped.
But when Notts County, the oldest professional club in the world and the last to bank three points before lockdown (below), emerge from 133 days of suspended animation today, they will have to hit the grind running.
County’s big sleep is believed to be domestic football’s longest-ever gap between competitive games in the same season during peacetime.
Even the big freeze of 196263, when blizzards and biblical snowfall wiped out fixtures from Boxing Day to late March, was a bumper winter for woolly jumpers.
This year, with a deadly plague at large, for three months we weren’t even allowed to use jumpers for goalposts.
Manager Ardley, trying to steer County back into English football’s mainstream at the first time of asking, admits the National League’s bump-start – straight into a home play-off semi-final against Barnet – has left a season’s work “in the lap of the gods.”
Whatever happens at Meadow Lane around teatime, on the pitch Ardley has repaired much of the damage from the Magpies’ traumatic fall through the drayman’s hatch.
Staff went unpaid for two months in the summer of 2019 and County were hauled before High Court judges three times to answer a winding-up order from the taxman.
Then Danish businessmen Alexander and Christoffer Reedtz, the club’s new owners, rode to the rescue and wrote off £8million debts, drawing a line under former chairman
Alan Hardy’s bonfire of good intentions.
But after the big sleep comes the rude awakening – and Ardley, 47, knows the score.
“We haven’t played for four months and now we have a game which will define our season – we’re in the lap of the gods,” he said.
“It’s a bit surreal, after 16 weeks, to hope some of the momentum we had before lockdown is still there. You can’t just flick a switch and turn it on.
“As a one-off game, it’s something I hope I never have to prepare for again.
“But on the other hand, 12 months ago we had just been relegated, we were not getting paid, we only had 12 players, and our new owners only took over in the week leading up to the first game of the season.
“The club was broken by relegation, the atmosphere was quite toxic – it wasn’t particularly pleasant. But I’m not going to make excuses. Although I only came in halfway through the season, if you are the manager you have to take the responsibility.
“I want to lead them back into the League.
“But I think only one club (Bristol Rovers) in the last 15 years has bounced straight back after dropping out of League Two, so history isn’t on our side.”
Ardley’s upbringing in Wimbledon’s Crazy Gang – the original model, not the franchise or the reborn phoenix club he led into League One – has prepared him for most things in football.
But if County make it to Wembley and back through the skylight, their season will have lasted one day short of a full calendar year.
Ordinarily, 12 months of non-stop grind would surely take their toll on any manager but Ardley scoffed: “I’ll tell you about pressure. At Wimbledon, in my first job as a manager, we were bottom of the League and managed to stay up on the last day against Fleetwood.
“I might have lost my first job, and never got a second one, if I hadn’t got it right that day.
“The pressure that day was as great as it could be, so nothing will probably match that for tension.
“But I won’t be putting unnecessary pressure on the players to deliver a happy ending because I think Notts County are in the best place they have been for about 20 years.
“The owners are very intelligent guys and they would not have been planning for promotion in the first year – although we are potentially two games away from making it happen.”
Wakey, wakey, County fans. The Big Sleep is over – unless you’re watching Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall’s film version in black and white.