Calling time

See you next year? Oldham players applaud the fans after a rare victory

It has long been my contention that the legendary Jack Sprat was and is an Oldham Athletic supporter. Now it turns out that he is related to Old Mother Hubbard, and the cupboard is finally bare.

Would Jack have been among the pitch invaders on Saturday? I suspect not. I see Jack as a philosophical fellow, accustomed to long years of decline at the club he has followed for decades. He is too old and too phlegmatic to be crossing any lines. Also there were a few minutes left to play… Athletic might have snuck a couple of goals past a tiring Salford.

Jack would have looked with regret at the online fans’ forum afterwards. Here, the people to whom Oldham Athletic’s fortunes really mattered were in an unforgiving mood. They vented their anger not only on the club’s owners and directors (past and present) but also at each other. Later, some apologised (though not to the club’s owners and directors).

Jack might have tried to get an optimistic thread going, to offset the sorrow and occasional ferocity. Rather than apportion blame, how about acknowledging those individuals who emerge from the wreckage with any credit? The efforts of manager John Sheridan, above all, deserved recognition, but also those of club captain Carl Piergianni and a number of other players (though fatally somewhat fewer than 11). And the supporters who responded vocally and in huge numbers to Sheridan’s return… they deserved better.

Or he might have looked for silver linings. Fans of the other relegated team, Scunthorpe United, had no top-tier success to look back on, no League Cup final nor FA Cup semi-finals. In fact Oldham may be the most distinguished team ever to appear in the National League – Notts County have more history, but not much within living memory.

But Jack did not. His heart would not have been in it. The tone of the majority of deeply disappointed supporters struck a sympathetic chord. If Jack felt it less acutely, regarded it as a matter of regret rather than of any real importance, to have said so would have been to give gratuitous offence.

Besides, there was the question of whether the club would actually survive to begin the next season in the National League. Relegation from League Two stripped away any lingering sense of the club being special. Why, then, might it not stumble down the same ill-lit path as Bury and Macclesfield Town? It was hardly in rude health financially. Supporters might look at the National League table and contemplate visits to Eastleigh, Wealdstone and Bromley with dismay, but that was better than nothing.

Phlegmatic but occasionally prone to sentimentality, Jack would have let his mind wander back to October 1961, when his dad had first taken him to Boundary Park. Playing in the old Fourth Division, now League 2, Oldham had beaten Accrington Stanley 5-0 that day. The result was later declared void as Stanley went out of business. It was an unhappy augury.

Jack would have felt sorry for the younger fans in particular. He, at least, could look back on good days; he’d had his money’s worth. For a period of a few months in 1990 Oldham were the Team of the Nineties. But there had been no promotions since 1991, little to savour apart from an odd result here and there. A generation of fans below the age of 20 had known only mediocrity, decline and, now, fall.

Jack Sprat would have gone home on Saturday knowing that Oldham Athletic offered him even less to look forward to than usual. As he tucked into his dinner – the top off his father’s egg – he would have reflected on the perverse satisfaction he derived from that, the curious fit of the club’s fate with his own character. Mrs Sprat, who had abandoned Manchester United for Manchester City some years earlier, had the usual 5-1 win to celebrate.

TV or not TV

television, live football, supporters, jigsaw puzzle, missing pieces, 2020/21 season, covid-19, coronavirus, social distancing

The pandemic has accelerated a regrettable trend. For the time being, football is a game played exclusively for a television audience.

At the top level the game has been heading that way for a number of years. The tinkering with kick-off times and even dates is only one aspect of the extent to which broadcasters call the tune. The interests of fans inside the stadium are neglected in many other respects: VAR is a particularly good recent example, having been devised apparently so that only TV viewers can know what is going on.

As the new season approaches, subscription TV or streaming is going to be the only way to watch live football for a while. All being well, fans may be allowed back into lower division grounds in carefully controlled numbers from October. It will be interesting to see how enthusiastic the take-up is.

Some parts of a club’s fan-base may choose not to return. The old boys who’ve been going for decades may decide it isn’t worth the risk. Another, younger cohort will have discovered during lockdown that they’ve saved a fortune not following a bunch of honest (or barely honest, as the case may be) triers around the country.

But the greatest risk to clubs lower down the leagues, where match-day revenue is proportionally more important, is that the collective experience depends on the dynamics of a crowd. It’s hard to imagine that experience not being deeply diluted by social distancing. It might compare unfavourably with the atmosphere in your lounge, where beer and pizza are easily available.

In many a ground, stewards turn a blind eye to some supposedly banned behaviour – fans standing throughout a match in all-seater stadiums is a particularly good example. But it’s hard to imagine that being applied to transgressions relating to Covid-19.

Tolerance of almost any kind of gathering is diminishing, if the rising penalties imposed on organisers and participants are any guide. And the most obvious penalty that a football club might face – to be obliged to return to the closed-doors policy – is easy to implement. For fans, sitting on egg-shells, socially distanced and on their best behaviour does not sound like much of a day out.

Chesterfield

‘Someone in a distant marketing department thought Chesterfield was the epitome of glamour’

‘Its careful drawing of riverside minarets and domes suggested yashmaks, houris and the dripping head of John the Baptist. It stopped just short of camels’

Chesterfield museum and art gallery www.chesterfield.gov.uk/museum

Chesterfield Parish Church crookedspire.org

Holmbrooke Valley Park Facebook holmebrook valley park

Queens Park www.chesterfield.gov.uk

Sutton Scarsdale Hall www.english-heritage.org.uk

I have a soft spot for Chesterfield. During my many years as a smoker Chesterfield was my cancer-stick of choice.
It may have been the endorsements by Sugar Ray Robinson, Willie Mays, Bob Hope, Tyrone Power, Ronald Reagan, Rita Hayworth, Lucille Ball, Frank Sinatra and many more. It may have been the enticing promises of ‘No unpleasant after-taste’, ‘Cooler smoking’, ‘Man-size satisfaction’ and the astonishing assurance from the American medical fraternity – or, at least, that section of it represented by someone looking discouragingly like cub reporter Jimmy Olsen – that ‘Chesterfield is best for you’.
Or it may simply have been delight at the idea that someone in a distant marketing department thought Chesterfield was the epitome of glamour. Of all the brands competing for my addict’s mite, from the glittering yet cheap Embassy Gold to the vaguely patriotic Winston, this was the name that caught my eye and held my loyalty.
I don’t know whether Liggett & Myers still produce Chesterfields in packs of 20 (or, as I discovered in Australia, 30, where my daily consumption, attuned to a pack a day, effortlessly adjusted itself to a 50% increase in supply). If they do, the glamour of the modest Derbyshire town’s name will be offset today by a blank package embellished only by menacing warnings and pictures either of diseased body parts or a psychologically broken man trying to come to terms with erectile dysfunction. These anti-marketing devices would probably have increased my consumption as well. Anxiety is a powerful trigger where the committed smoker is concerned.
Besides, the packaging of the Chesterfields I smoked was risible. Its careful drawing of riverside minarets and domes suggested yashmaks, houris and the dripping head of John the Baptist. It stopped just short of camels. The general explanation for the name of the brand is that it has nothing to do with Derbyshire but derives from Chesterfield County, Virginia. Chesterfield County must have taken its name from somewhere not a million miles from the A61. It may have arrived in Virginia via an English milord (Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield actually), but he would have traced the title back to Derbyshire.
When I couldn’t find Chesterfields – as happened occasionally, since Chesterfields were a lower-league, minority-interest cigarette – I fell back on Winstons, but only Camels in an emergency. In a Sheffield newsagent’s once I drew blanks with both Chesterfield and Winston and, with a sigh, asked for a box of matches and a copy of The Guardian. “Aye,” said the shopkeeper, “tha’ll get a good smoke off that.”
The other reason for Chesterfield’s continuing appeal to my sense of nostalgia is that the Recreation Ground, Chesterfield, was where I became an Oldham Athletic supporter. This was the form teenage rebellion took in me with the 60s still a recent memory. Having supported my dad’s club, West Bromwich Albion, I decided it was time I found one of my own.
A home-town club was a slightly complicated option: I was born in a north Manchester mill town close to Oldham but not far from Rochdale or Bury either, and one branch of the family came from the Bolton area. After a process akin to holding auditions, I made the short journey from Sheffield to Chesterfield and watched a rather dreary 1-0 win for the home side.
It was the worst football match I had watched in some time and the Oldham team looked inept. But the crowd was great fun and the warmth of the famously dry northern sense of humour was cheering. Most important, perhaps, that Oldham team contained one or two obvious and authentic characters, especially a tricky winger called Alan Groves.
Groves was the kind of player who was never content merely to beat a full-back if he could humiliate him as well. Passing to the full-back and then taking the ball off him, stopping as if to tie his bootlaces, explaining to the crowd what he was about to do, all these were part of Groves’ repertoire.
Around Oldham he apparently became a familiar sight in a flashy car, sporting an afro and working his way through 80 cigarettes a day. Beyond football, he had the distinction – rare in any footballer, much less a Third Division one – of having featured in The Observer’s Quotes of the Week. Groves had married a 16-year-old girl who promptly left school to become his homemaker. The local education authority insisted she should still have been at school. Groves apparently replied to the effect that he didn’t care if she knew the date of the Battle of Hastings as long as she had his dinner on the table when he got home. Her father (her father! It was another era, just 45 years ago) was eventually fined £5.
Groves’ own story ended sadly: a very fit player, he died of heart failure at the age of 29.
What to do in Chesterfield, then? Gawp at the crooked spire, of course, and look round the museum and gallery. There are lovely parks and, in Sutton Scarsdale Hall, a fine old country seat to admire. But beware: a visit to Chesterfield might change your life.

Chesterfield 1 Oldham Athletic 0
Recreation Ground, 16 March 1974