86
(^) Daily Mail, Thursday, August 29, 2019
Football League Crisis
BROKEN PROMISES
Bury fans and players are left to sift through the
T
he 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 Fab-
ric of Bury’ on the exterior of the
club ‘superstore’, where the shut-
ters were down. Talk was rife of
the supposed £7million to buy the
club on offer from a consortium
based in Brazil or Sweden, depend-
ing 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, scrub-
bing it clean in anticipation of a
Saturday home game against Don-
caster 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 unexpect-
edly 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 dev-
astating. 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 hap-
pened. 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 Wander-
ers and Birmingham City.
The uncertainty is worse for the
16-year-old Academy player, leav-
ing 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 consor-
tium, 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 adula-
tion 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 asset-
stripping 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 reserve-
team game.
These are the stories of the gen-
erations, 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 hud-
dled around the Sky Sports News
feed there early yesterday evening,
hoping against hope for a salva-
tion which never came.
SPECIAL
REPORT
by IAN
HERBERT
at Gigg Lane
‘My husband is
devastated.
I’ve had to
leave him at
home’
Eight decades: Margaret Smith