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Thread: Tin-pot League?

  1. #11
    Join Date
    Feb 2010
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    [QUOTE=Big Bob;39305096]
    Quote Originally Posted by TSANHO View Post
    "Non-league Football", it's the dreaded three words that every (league) football fan dreads and ridicules. It is seen as the abyss, the footballing scrapyard, where teams are shunned away like the proverbial 'runt of the litter' that is not worthy of a place amongst the pack.

    Once a club drops through the trapdoor into the National League (NL) they are then out of sight and out of mind, left to fight amongst themselves for the scraps from the footballing pyramid....unless they happen to fight their way into the FA cup first round draw anyway.

    In our minds, or definitely to the uninitiated, Non-League football conjures up mental images of 22 fat, 7ft tall, over the hill thugs booting 7 barrels of the smelly brown stuff out of each other. We see 'football' being played on a muddy, ploughed farmers field of a pitch interspersed with the occasional inconvenience when someone shows some skill or scores a goal!

    When league teams come up against their Non-League counterparts we...oops...they, think it will be a walk in the park, a turn up and win scenario, and it is an utter embarrassment to become unstuck in such a fixture . I mean, how bad must a team be to lose against a Non-League side?

    In short, our views on Non-League football are, to put it lightly, contemptuous. But are our views and opinions in this regard somewhat (maybe understandably) blinkered? By no means is it desirable to drop down a division, wherever that may be from and to, but I am starting to realise that falling through the trap door into the NL isn't the God forsaken abyss I once thought it to be.

    I am a firm believer in thinking that more often than not the thought of something bad happening is always worse than the actual reality of the event and falling into the NL is no different. In fact it has reinvigorated my own personal interest in the club and football in general.

    For too many years now we have flirted with the unthinkable but somehow always managed to survive and stumble along blindly into the next catastrophe, patching ourselves up as best we can until invariably we hit the next rough patch. But now the plaster has been brutally pulled off we have this great opportunity to heal the wounds of the past and rebuild the club of the ground up.

    Our relegation into the NL can benefit us like it has so many other clubs that have dropped down before us and come back stronger. We can see this as the proverbial reset, a footballing version of 'Control-Alt-Delete. The NL forces clubs to reassess and cut their cloth accordingly to their new circumstances. This in itself, through necessity, brings about better management and more realistic expectations.

    Below is a list of the teams who have dropped down front the NL, sorted their problems out and come back stronger and benefitted from the experience. The second list shows clubs who weren't able, for whatever reason, to learn their lesson and dropped further down the pyramid but are now back on the up having rebuilt over time. I hope this illustrates that we can come back much stronger than we would have been if we had just muddled along in the football league:

    Lincoln City
    Oxford It's
    Bristol Rovers
    Tranmere Rovers
    Accrington Stanley
    Mansfield
    Wycombe
    Burton
    Fleetwood
    Forest Green
    Leyton Orient
    Macclesfield
    Salford

    (Obviously some teams there have only ever been promoted from the NL, but they still perform strongly)

    Stockport
    Wrexham
    Barnet
    Yeovil
    Torquay
    Dag + Red.
    Hartlepool
    Chesterfield
    Notts

    We are quite fortunate really in that we were able to offload a lot of players at the same time we were being taken over. Sure, it was hard to start with but it has given us a clean slate to work with and a debt free club. We are masters of our own destiny once more and whilst it would be nice to still be a football League club it does feel rather like a rebirth for us.

    I'm as guilty as anyone in admitting that I thought watching football in the NL would be like pulling teeth in terms of the actual spectacle put on show every Saturday afternoon but it has been anything but in my opinion.

    I was expecting a barrage of long balls being torpedoed up and down the pitch for 90 minutes, games being fractured and tedious with big lumps of players displaying as much skill as a monkey trying to paint a picasso with a banana. However, every team I have seen us play so far have tried to get the ball down and play through the ranks but also use the direct approach when the need arises.

    I think Barnet inparticular managed to play the ball around really well, though Stockport and Wrexham also showed a willingness to get the ball down and play on the deck. In fact, up until Sunday it was Notts who looked decidedly like the stereotypical Non-League team!

    When you think about it it makes sense that the quality in the NL is higher than what you may expect. Every year the Premier League and The Championship gets more and more saturated with foreign talent, meaning that the best home grown talent gets pushed further and further down the pyramid year upon year.

    Realistically I think we can say that a lot of the players in the NL are of at least League One standard, they have just been forced to drop lower down to get game time this improving the standard of the lower leagues. This is supported by the fact that when NL teams get promoted they have the quality required to not only survive but regularly get promotion to League One.

    We have seen an example of the quality available at this level ourselves recently with the signing of Reagan Booty, how has he been allowed to drop so far down the league's? The NL isn't a football graveyard full of 7ft monsters, it's a hive of hungry, passionate, you g British players who have been displaced by their foreign counterparts.

    We must be very careful not to underestimate this league otherwise we will be out fought and out played with considerable ease.

    We are only in our infancy I. Our dealings with the NL but I do feel that there is much more soul 'down here'. Football has become disgustingly obsessed with with money and success, so far so that I feel a complete lack of identity with top level football anymore. Perhaps this is why I fell out of love with the game for so long.

    In place of well managed clubs earning their way is now a success at any cost inflating bubble that in the not too distant future could well catastrophically burst like we are already seeing with Bolton and Bury. This year ING for quick gained success reveals itself in the 'hire em - fire em' mentality that now plagues the game.

    The same yearning for success also deprives a lot of our young players the chance of getting game time as managers know they don't have time to blood them in game conditions before they are sacked. This leads to a revolving door of managers and players constantly coming and going this resulting in a lack of affinity between fans and the players...the soul of the club is somehow lost.

    The drop down into the NL is a wake up call, a slap in the face to the collective ego of the club. Any side dropping into the NL must realise that fans are the lifeblood of the club. This is where the divide is in the Premier League and, increasingly, throughout the football league.

    The fans are the soul of any football club and this is being ignored more and more, but not, I feel, in the NL.. There is a sense of pride amongst the fans of the teams in Non-League. They are real football fans, not taken in by by the plastic reality of the upper echelons of the game. It is invigorating and gives a real sense of what the sport used to be like before all the money started to roll in.

    Every Pyramid needs solid foundations and the footballing equivalent is no different. The National League is looked down upon with contempt but down here I can see everything that is good in the game....

    Tin-Pot it

    Bloody hell fire! Talk about long winded drivel. I got bored after the 1st sentence
    Bloody hell fire! I had to re-read this post 3 times to work out what had been added!!

  2. #12
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    Jan 2019
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    I'm making a complaint to the MAD CEO about a post being this long and not mentioning our friends at luton, i shall also be wearing and orange ribbon to all home games this season in solidarity for their ignored acheivements.

  3. #13
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    Quote Originally Posted by JoePass View Post
    McParland....he was a good manager.
    [QUOTE=Old_pie;39305160]
    Quote Originally Posted by Big Bob View Post

    Bloody hell fire! I had to re-read this post 3 times to work out what had been added!!
    I (pugwash) could have circum navigated the globe (and put out a few fires along the way) in the time it took for you to read that post 3 times.

  4. #14
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    Quote Originally Posted by JoePass View Post
    McParland....he was a good manager.
    Quote Originally Posted by bridpie78 View Post
    I'm making a complaint to the MAD CEO about a post being this long and not mentioning our friends at luton, i shall also be wearing and orange ribbon to all home games this season in solidarity for their ignored acheivements.
    Here here apart from the orange. Never been a colour that agrees with me.

  5. #15
    Join Date
    Feb 2010
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    7,758
    Quote Originally Posted by navypie View Post

    I (pugwash) could have circum navigated the globe (and put out a few fires along the way) in the time it took for you to read that post 3 times.
    If you're ability to sail matches your ability to quote you'd have met the Titanic en-route.

  6. #16
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    Quote Originally Posted by Old_pie View Post
    If you're ability to sail matches your ability to quote you'd have met the Titanic en-route.
    'your'

  7. #17
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    Nov 2004
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    Quote Originally Posted by MagicBoots View Post
    Think you can include Donny Rovers in that list too, since going down they now have a spanking new stadium, reached Quarter Finals of the FA Cup, and spent a few seasons in the championship.

    Remember that game at Belle Vue well when their fate was sealed. We were riding high at top of league with Alladyce, and won 2-1 but place was like a morgue and celebrations in away end were reduced to a hand clap. Just checked, and they had a goal difference of -83, and we thought we had a bad season last year.
    https://youtu.be/NSbaViblems

    Watch that and you'll understand why.

  8. #18
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    Quote Originally Posted by JoePass View Post
    McParland....he was a good manager.
    Quote Originally Posted by bridpie78 View Post
    'your'
    I always knew grammar was high on the list with the Army. Pity firing a gun wasn't.

  9. #19
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    Jun 2017
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    Untick!! Well, I am half cut ( Balti as well chrolisised my "alcohol issues " ) in Zante and the wife isn't speaking to me.

  10. #20
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    Nov 2004
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    34,377
    Quote Originally Posted by navypie View Post
    Untick!! Well, I am half cut ( Balti as well chrolisised my "alcohol issues " ) in Zante and the wife isn't speaking to me.
    Is chrolisised a cheap version of ouzo?

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