Geordiesaddler wrote:The realisation is starting to hit home is that football supporters don't demand success, they demand, quite simply, a football club posessing some integrity, and an old fashioned philosophy of a team representing a community. Success and failure will ebb and flow, but so long as the club is run properly with football at the forefront nobody will care. Bye bye Bonser and Whalley your time is over.
Damien, its about £4 in at Billingham, but if you want to see a real hum-dinger just get yourself down the road to Spennymoor on October 24th. My bus is almost sold out already and I havn't even arranged it or advertised it yet! We had 547 yeatsrday, more than mighty Blyth Spartans!! There could be 1000 at Spenny, but I can guarantee a great day of meaningful football and a good atmosphere.
I think you're right about what a true football supporter's expectations are based upon and integrity has a deep and meaningful resonance in that respect.
At all levels when something gets it in the way of that integrity it can sometimes lead to a dramatic arrest in the club's fortunes or conversely can actually lift the club on the playing front whilst ransacking the club of its soul and its tradition to the point where when the club is on its uppers again, there is actually nothing left there to support it. I'm not envious of Notts County at all for that very reason. Notts County aren't about £40,000 a week contracts and mysterious foreign investors. I guess there will be around 3,000 County fans in amongst the "newbies" who are currently riding the wave but must in their hearts know that their club's existence is now based upon the whim and folly of somebody thousands of miles away whose name they don't even know.
Further down the chain, I look up the road from you Geordie at Durham Town. Marine gave them another spanking yesterday and whilst not many on here will know about Durham, they effectively lost their integrity, went for it, got to the Unibond but now following the withdrawal of sponsorship are withering on the vine and will do well to survive. The supporters of Whitley Bay must be loving it at present but again there must be a core amongst them who fear the club moving away from the integrity of "being" and representing Whitley Bay. I guess half the crowd were open to the elements yesterday. Should WB splash out on some "modern" new facility, should they plough on and elect to go up but face Durham's peril in doing so? Either way on either of these matters what some may see as progress others will see as a loss of integrity around some core belief about what being "whitley bay" is all about.
So that brings me back to Walsall. Fellows Park on match day represented Walsall the town in a way the Bescot has never been able to capture. Walsall FC lost a lot of integrity when it moved and has been doing so ever since to the point we have now where a matchday experience following the town's football team is in no way representative of the town itself. The (often dark) humour, the pride, the ability to regularly punch above its weight and stick two fingers up at "big town" charlie's who thought they were better than us, has all but disappeared. It has become gentrified to the extent that a trip to the Bescot is akin to a trip to Edgabston for a Championship match. Lots of empty seats and a very relaxing, almost comatose way to spend an afternoon. Not football and certainly not Walsall.