There is a hint of The Wild Bunch about the Notts County squad managed by Kevin Nolan. Sam Peckinpah’s gritty 1969 western, a classic of the “one last big job” genre, tells the story of Pike Bishop and his eponymous gang of ageing outlaws plotting their final robbery in a world threatening to leave them behind.
On Saturday, several ageing but instantly recognisable faces from Premier Leagues past will be on show at Meadow Lane for what could prove their final centre-stage moment. Top-flight opposition provided by Swansea City, in front of a full house. One last big job and then maybe – just maybe – a sequel.
Three of the players who finished on the losing side in Notts County’s defeat by Crawley Town in League Two on Tuesday have 511 Premier League appearances between them. With a combined age of 104, Nicky Hunt, Jon Stead and Shola Ameobi are riding into the sunset of their careers but, like Pike and his hombres, continue to rage against the dying of the light.
On the bench and in the technical area, Alan Smith and Nolan bring another 686 top-flight appearances to this particular League Two party. The 37-year-old Smith, a player-coach, has made 18 appearances this season. Smith’s manager, two years his junior, remains registered as a player but has yet to muddy his boots in the current campaign. “I’m not in physical condition to play, that’s my excuse,” he said in October. “But I don’t think I’d get in the team even if I was.”
Stead has been here before. Best known for his spells with Blackburn, Sunderland and Sheffield United, the 34-year-old striker was among the scorers when League One Bradford came from 2-0 down to stun Chelsea at Stamford Bridge at this stage of the FA Cup three years ago. The Bantams were 49 places below the Premier League leaders at the time, the same number of teams that sit between Notts County and Swansea.
Stead has still got it. He lashed home a penalty, his 10th goal of the season and fifth in successive games, against Crawley but it was not enough to save his side from their second consecutive home defeat. They finished two men down and 2-1 behind after the midfielder Matthew Virtue and the goalkeeper Ross Fitzsimons were sent off in the closing minutes. Both will be suspended for what would should have been the biggest match of their careers.
Notts County, unbeaten at home until last weekend when they lost to Exeter City, have failed to win their three league matches since beating the Championship side Brentford at Griffin Park in the third round. They remain second in the table, two points ahead of Accrington Stanley, who have two games in hand. Only Nolan and his team know for certain if the match against Swansea has distracted them from the important business of securing automatic promotion.
Although the importance of so much big-game experience among the side preparing to face Premier League basement-dwellers who have just beaten Liverpool cannot be overstated, it is worth noting that Nolan did not recruit all of this crew of veterans. Having famously taken his first tentative steps in man-management by babysitting an occasionally wayward Andy Carroll at Newcastle, he was announced as the manager of Notts County last January following a turbulent and short-lived tenure as the player-manager at Leyton Orient in 2016.
Then owned by their now-departed Italian Francesco Becchetti, Orient slumped out of the Football League the following season and Notts County looked set to accompany them until Alan Hardy bought the club and appointed Nolan. The ambitious young manager, having arrested the slide, has achieved stability and finds himself in charge of promotion contenders.
Smith and Stead were there when he arrived, the former Leeds, Manchester United and Newcastle man having joined from MK Dons in 2014 as player-coach during his friend Shaun Derry’s time as manager. Stead came a year later and is playing under his second owner and sixth full-time manager. Upon Nolan’s arrival, Ameobi and Hunt were recruited and what could have been viewed as jobs for the boys he knew from his playing days at Bolton and Newcastle look very shrewd pieces of business.
With the TV cameras in place at Meadow Lane, all five men look certain to be involved in an unlikely return to the spotlight and, unlike The Wild Bunch, there is no overriding sense of futility or doom about the task in hand. Far from being no County for old men, Nolan seems to have fashioned a squad in which they thrive.
