An attendance record could be broken at Nuneaton Borough’s Liberty Way Stadium on Saturday, which would be unusual for a club bottom of National League North with relegation confirmed weeks ago.
The reason is the visit of Stockport County, who will be promoted as champions if they win their final game of the league season. The attendance record stands at 3,480 and County could take more than 3,000 supporters to witness a resurrection that looked unlikely as recently as a week ago.
On Easter Saturday, six years to the day since Stockport dropped into the sixth tier of English football, they went to arch-rivals Chorley and lost 2-0 in a game that had long been billed as a title decider. With two games left to play, that left Chorley top of the table with promotion in their own hands. But everything changed on Easter Monday when Chorley were unexpectedly beaten by Spennymoor while Stockport were beating Curzon Ashton. Suddenly the team managed by stalwart’s stalwart Jim Gannon was back in charge.
The scenes at Edgeley Park, as Spennymoor score an injury time winner against Chorley and @StockportCounty go top of the league with one match to play. What drama. pic.twitter.com/WozisWM37j
— Christian Machowski (@Christian_ESEM) April 22, 2019
“Big Jim” is in his third spell of management at Edgeley Park after racking up more than 500 games for the club as a player – and Stockport will now return to the National League if they beat Nuneaton. Even a point would be enough if Chorley fail to beat Bradford Park Avenue, and supporters will travel to Nuneaton with high hopes.
Stockport have been through a lot since their 106 years as a Football League club came to an end in 2011. There have been takeovers successful and unsuccessful, ground-sharing with Sale Sharks and a weird period when the former Liverpool and Germany midfielder Dietmar Hamann was installed as manager. Gannon has been sacked twice and the club was placed in administration in 2009, but support has remained high and crowds of 6,000 have been seen this season, far from a regular occurrence in football at a semi-professional level.
Last season 6,230 turned up at Edgeley Park to watch County lose to Chorley in the play-offs. This season there has been a steady improvement with Gannon in control. County reached the FA Cup second round after accounting for League Two side Yeovil in the first, and made it to the semi-finals of the FA Trophy where they were narrowly beaten over two legs by upwardly mobile Fylde of the National League.
Now Stockport could be upwardly mobile themselves, though Gannon does not wish to take anything for granted. “We have to be focused on Saturday, no one is celebrating or thinking the job is done,” the manager says. “Until the game is over it’s just business as usual. We have to be professional.”
Gannon knows Stockport are lucky to have the sort of support that most clubs at the same level can only envy, but even though he enjoys the cup runs and key matches that bring in the crowds, he also admits to a nervousness about stretching the club’s resources too thinly.
“As a manager you always worry a little bit about the FA Cup and the FA Trophy,” he says. “Those are the games everyone looks forward to but they can also drain you of a little energy and take the focus away from your main task in the league. Thankfully that hasn’t happened this season, the support has been there but I think the fans realise that what we have done shows the strength of our training system and what goes on behind the scenes.
“We are in a position to go up as champions, what we have been working for all season is now within our grasp, but the important thing now is for us all to keep working. The fans have been terrific, they have definitely played their part this season. Everybody wanted to see this happen and now it is happening, but there is still a game to go. I hope the fans enjoy themselves, but we still have our job to do and we want to make sure we go about our last game in the way that has brought us here. It is a time to be professional and show what we are about.”
