The Rushden fiasco

[amberaleman]

I for one thought that Max Griggs had built a strong enough infrastructure at Rushden & Diamonds for the club to survive the withdrawal of his support. Not so. Now the whole edifice is tumbling down.

The supporters' trust were unable to run the club at a profit and although Keith Cousins bought them out and stablilised the ship, once the latest owners had taken control R&D began to haemorrhage money again. Heavily in debt and booted out of the Conference, the club now looks likely to be liquidated - with the irony of Northants rivals Kettering (who I daresay regard R&D as ghastly parvenues) set to solve their own ground problems by moving into Nene Park.

Is there a lesson here? Was the Nene Park project too much of an artifice built on shallow foundations? However much cash a benefactor pumps into a club, without a fan base built up over time can short-term success ever be sustainable?

We now have the bizarre situation of Southport's reprieve creating a vacancy in Conference North filled not by a reprieved Stafford Rangers but by Bishop's Stortford moving sideways (subject to appeal!) from the South. This strikes me as bonkers. I'd rather the FA had discretion to reprieve clubs in ways that make geographical sense rather than being constrained by final points totals. (And I'm not best pleased at having to go to bleedin' Thurrock next season, after we thought we'd lost them back to the Ryman. )

[Sultan of Cannock- SRFC]

I'm afraid i always suspected that the R&D experiment would, sooner or later, crash and burn. It does seem a little indecent, though, for Imran Ladak to be marching his chav army in before the furry corpse has even stopped twitching. Perhaps they could merge the two clubs together, hitherto to be known as " Swine & Pearls."

The Bishop's Stortford situation has been waiting to happen for a long time. Currently, six clubs go down from the two semi-national divisions. With two of the feeder leagues covering the area south of Birmingham, you will always have 3 going down from Conny Norf being replaced by 2 from the NPL with potentially, like this year, 4 southern clubs chasing 3 Connie Sarf berths. Eventually, the "north-south" line which initially ran roughly from Stafford to Kings Lyn, will run from Forest Green to Chelmsford.

I feel like a lone voice crying in the wilderness that it is unsustainable to keep a national league system as far down as we do in this country. Surely, the simplest way to sort this out would be to merge League 2 with the Conference Premier, then divide this into League 2 North & South? The present Conference North and South could then be joined by the top SLP, NPL and ILP clubs to form 2 regionalised Conference feeder leagues each for Lge 2 N and S.

Alternatively, with common sense and the Conference seemingly never fated to meet, still less have a long and meaningful relationship, how about a solution that punishes everyone rather than just singling out some poor sods like Stortford? At the end of next season, draw 11 teams at random from Conny Norf along with 11 teams drawn at random from Conny Sarf and put them together to form "Conference England". The remaining 22 would then form "Conference National". And if we could stick Truro in with Blyth (making those fixtures midweek games, of course) and split up one or two local rivals into the bargain so much the better. The 6 relegated teams could then be replaced each year "like for like" as far as possible. There could even be potentially money-spinning "inter-conference" games scheduled for the Xmas and Easter holidays where teams get to play their "nearest and dearest" from the other division. In fact the more i think about it the more i'm warming to it!!! ;D

A true "Conference" solution, ;D but at least with the virtue of getting anyone coming up from the NPL,SLP or ILP in future to realize from the off that they are entering a national league, aimed seriously for eventual Football League admission and ask themselves if they REALLY have the resources and the ambition before setting foot in it....

[amberaleman]

Some interesting suggestions, Sultan. I've always liked having a national division as the apex of the non-League pyramid, and it has the virtue of producing one champion each season. Greater regionalisation would save travelling costs and probably increase attendances, but would make the divisions a bit less interesting.

A better way for Conference clubs to save money might be to go part-time. Unfortunately the clubs relegated from the League have always stayed full-time and that encouraged ambitious outfits like R&D, Stevenage and Crawley to turn full-time in order to compete for promotion. It might have been wiser for the upper echelons of the non-League game to have remained essentially semi-pro.