By Steve Hill
‘Not again’. Along with a swathe of horrified fellow fans, that was my initial reaction upon hearing of Chester FC’s fresh financial woes.
Or at least that’s the printable version. Rumours had been circulating for some time, but it was finally revealed that the club needed to raise £50,000 simply to survive another month.
Less than eight years after the original Chester City went out of business, how on earth could this have been allowed to happen again?
Rising like a phoenix from the flames, the reformed Chester FC was to be run by the fans for the fans, promising the transparency all too absent under previous administrations.
Initially, things appeared to be going swimmingly, with three consecutive championships propelling the nascent club back to the National League whence its predecessor had been expunged.
Crowds were up, the feel-good factor was back, and the Deva was buzzing: Our City Our Community Our Club, as the non-corporate logo insisted.
The occasional crack, though, did appear, such as a despicable scrote of a barman being caught with his fingers in the till to the tune of several thousand pounds, but ultimately the club appeared to be heading in the right direction.
Indeed, without a calamitous boardroom regime to rail against, for once the long-suffering fans had to concentrate on the football.
Mindset
But when that took a downturn, the crowds began to dwindle. It’s strange, the psyche of a certain type of football fan who will happily turn up to see us roll over glorified works teams, yet when we get back to somewhere approaching our natural level they don’t fancy it because we’re not winning every week.
It’s a similar mindset to the people who only turn up for big cup ties. I’ve seen an FA Cup match at Blackburn Rovers delayed due to the sheer number of Chester fans trying to get in.
In more recent times, under the current guise as Chester FC, we took 2,000 to Barnsley in the Cup, yet can’t get anywhere near that for a home game. What do these people do on a Saturday afternoon?
The word is ‘supporter’. It’s when they’re struggling that the team needs you most. If I can get to every home game from 200 miles away, so can the majority of Chester fans.
Bucked into action by the financial bombshell, the response of the dormant fan base has been emphatic, with more than a 1,000 turning up for a youth game and slinging cash in a bucket.
At the time of writing, in excess of £45,000 has already been raised, with further events to follow, not least an all-star game featuring Colin Murray and Michael Owen.
Mainly greeted positively, there was however one dissenting voice who texted me to say, “Instead of organising some s**t charity match no one wants to go to, why doesn’t ‘Chester fan’ Michael Owen just write a cheque for a couple of million? Problem solved!”
That’s an argument for another day, and hopefully the match will be a success. But rather than cooing over someone off the telly for one night only, it’s more important that fans get down to the next couple of home games and cheer on the team, or what’s left of them following the relentless asset-stripping.
Get yourself in the bar, chuck some cooking lager down your neck, buy a programme, buy a pie, buy a silly hat, and then come back next week and do it all again. You might even enjoy it.
Clearly, appalling mistakes have been made at board level, with a rotating cast of faceless goons steering the good ship Deva towards the iceberg. But following mass resignations and an input of cash, hopefully calamity can be averted, for now. And if they could even manage a couple of wins then relegation might not be a certainty.
Stuffing banknotes into envelopes may stem the bleeding in the short term, but the Chester public needs to decide if they want a club, and if so to actively support it on a regular basis. As we have discovered before, you don’t miss your water ‘til your well runs dry.
Remember: a football club is for life, not just for crisis.
The Card: Every Match, Every Mile by Steve Hill will be published by Ockley Books in March. Pre-order by emailing [email protected]
*This article originally featured in The @NonLeaguePaper which is available every Sunday and Monday
