1. DREAMLAND
Meadow Lane, May 2009
It was early May 2009, and to everyone's relief another dismal season at Notts County was winding down. The Magpies had mustered just eleven wins as they limped to a nineteenth-place finish in League Two - England's fourth and final professional league - accumulating an impressive goal difference of minus twenty along the way. With an instantly forgettable season behind them, the club went into a brief period of semi-shutdown, as many of the backroom staff, coaches and players disappeared off on holidays or to seek alternative employment.
Among the few people who had remained in situ, however, was lifelong Magpies fanatic Matt Lawson. Whether it was sweeping the car park, shovelling sand onto the pitch, serving pints in the bar or helping his mum Lynn run the club shop, the 21 year old was just the sort of person County - and every lower-league club - relies upon for their survival.
Matt was one of only a handful of people in the office at Meadow Lane, and that suited him fine. What he really needed was to get his head down and focus without any distractions, because when he wasn't sweeping the car park or selling shirts, he'd been making the most of his access-all-areas status at the club to study the players' diets as part of his master's degree in dietetics and nutrition. The deadline for his dissertation was looming and Matt really needed a good run at it.
Then the phone rang. The caller introduced himself as Peter Trembling and got straight to the point, asking 'if the club was for sale and could I speak to someone about it?'1 Matt was, understandably, thrown by the call. The very few people who rang the office at this time of year were usually enquiring about season tickets or maybe looking to buy a shirt - not the club. This was above Matt's pay grade.
'I said, "Oh look, just give me a moment." And then I'm just sort of running round the bowels of the club trying to find someone high up but they weren't at the club that day.'
Matt took Peter Trembling's details, and with any hope of tackling his dissertation quickly forgotten, he promised that someone more senior than him would be in touch to discuss the sale of the club, just as soon as they could be located. Matt had never heard of Peter Trembling and he had no idea whether the caller was serious, but it had brightened up his day. There hadn't been any cause for cheer at Notts County for almost as long as he could remember.
Notts County are a club rich in history, but in 2009 it had been many years since they had seen anything resembling success. Founded in 1862, they held the honour of being the world's oldest football league club, a title that was theirs as long as they were able to avoid relegation.
Nicknamed the Magpies on account of their black-and-white shirts, they made occasional appearances as pub quiz tie-breakers, after lending Italian side Juventus one of their black-and-white striped kits in 1903. So taken were they with the strip, the Serie A giants permanently ditched their fetching ensemble of pink shirts matched with a black tie in favour of the Magpies' more understated strip.2
On the pitch the late 1800s were very much the golden era for Notts County. It was a decade that saw them lose to Blackburn Rovers in the FA Cup final of 1891, before reaching the final again just three years later, where Second Division Notts hammered Bolton Wanders 4-1, making them the first team from outside the top flight to win the FA Cup. That win remains the club's only major honour - unless you count beating Ascoli in the final of the (now defunct) Anglo-Italian Cup in 1995.
The club did enjoy three successive seasons in the top flight in the early 1980s led by their greatest ever managerial duo of Jimmy Sirrel and Howard Wilkinson, but soon afterwards they began slipping rapidly back down the pyramid. Things had been very different just a few hundred yards away, on the other side of the River Trent, where neighbours Nottingham Forest had amassed a somewhat more extensive trophy collection, which included two European Cups, the European Super Cup, the First Division league title, two FA Cups and four League Cups (but notably no Anglo-Italian Cup).
Fast-forward to 1989, and Notts were once more languishing in the old Third Division, when they appointed a go-getting young manager with a spring in his step called Neil Warnock, who set about waking the sleeping Magpies from their slumber. After years of stagnation, Warnock led Notts to two successive promotions into the old First Division in 1991. It was a pivotal season in the club's history: stay up and Notts County would have a place in the inaugural Premier League season and benefit from the vast sums of money the new league would belch out. But despite valiantly avoiding the clutches of the relegation zone until late March 1992, Notts couldn't hold on. That failure to stay up set in motion an improbably fast descent, which saw them sink from the first to the fourth tier of English football by the 1997-98 season.
It did briefly appear as if the Magpies' fortunes were changing for the better again when another straight-talking manager, this time Sam Allardyce, arrived with a point to prove and led Notts to the old Third Division title with an impressive haul of 99 points in 1997-98.
But for Big Sam, who would fleetingly manage England, Notts County were but a brief stop-off on his own charge to the summit of English football. He left the following season to join Bolton Wanderers - despite Notts having hammered the Trotters in that famous FA Cup final of 1894.
In 2000 an American journalist called Albert Scardino bought the club and set about signing players on exorbitant six-figure salaries. As an investigative journalist Scardino had an exemplary track record of exposing fraud and corruption, which saw him win the Pulitzer Prize in 1984. His credentials for running a struggling lower-league football club were less clear, and within two years Scardino was defaulting on payments to former owner Derek Pavis, the club was borrowing from the Professional Footballers' Association to pay the players and the Football League banned Notts from making new signings.
Scardino turned to the fans to try to bale the club out of trouble by launching a so-called 'Great Escape Fund'. But despite the supporters' efforts to pay the bills, the club had accrued too much debt and collapsed into administration in June 2002. There they remained for 534 days, which saw them play a full season while insolvent and finish a respectable fifteenth in what is now League One.
Deadlines for takeovers came and went until time ran out and the club was being readied for liquidation. Their only hope of survival was a fan-led supporters' trust. Armies of desperate supporters took to the streets on match days with buckets. The response was something that would not be quickly forgotten. Away fans set aside their rivalries and gave as generously as home fans. People passing in the streets with no interest in football realised how important it was that the club was saved. Even Nottingham Forest helped out with a fundraising friendly.
Iris Smith, who chairs the original Notts County Supporters' Club and has missed just one game in more than a quarter of a century (for her daughter's wedding), was among the army of supporters spending their every waking hour either trying to scrape together donations or worrying it was all too late. Among the many thousands of people who threw money in Iris's bucket on the very first day she took to the streets was one man who caused her to stop in her tracks: 'We'd hardly got the bucket out of the car when a very elderly gentleman on a Zimmer frame came over and gave us an envelope. And he said, "I've saved my pension for this week and I want this to go to Notts."'
This moment more than any other brought home to Iris both the burden of what they were asking of their fellow fans and also just how much it meant. She was loath to take it off him but he was insistent. 'I can manage,' he said. 'I want my club to have this money.'
The old man's pension slid into Iris's bucket. Evidence, if any were needed, of just why football clubs must always be cherished.
Notts County did survive, just, thanks in no small part to a wealthy season-ticket holder called Haydn Green, who stepped in at the eleventh hour and bought a 49 per cent stake in the club and the lease on Meadow Lane.3 It enabled the supporters' trust to complete a takeover of Notts County and lead them out of administration in December 2003, punch-drunk but alive and ready for a fresh start.
Five years on, as that miserable 2008-09 season came to an end, the fanbase was still waiting for signs of that fresh start to emerge. The supporters' trust was keeping the club alive and that was still cause for some cheer, but there really hadn't been anything else to shout about for a long time. Younger supporters like Matt Lawson, who was twelve the last time Notts even managed a top-half finish, were desperate for something to happen - just anything to get excited about. So when he answered Peter Trembling's call, it couldn't have come at a better moment.
'The club's survived but only just, and it's a shadow of what it could be. So everybody was desperate for something,' he said. 'You kind of straightaway want to believe that something might happen. You know,...
