Notts County prove a trip to Eastleigh is not the end of the world

Those 157 years of history were not out there on the pitch. They were in the away sections of Eastleigh’s Silverlake Stadium, where 796 fans of Notts County gathered on Saturday to resume the ordeal of supporting what was, until May, the oldest professional football club in the world with a continuous league history. Only in England, surely, could a fifth-tier match attract a crowd of 2,668, of whom almost a third had travelled half the length of the country to watch their team, so recently humiliated, attempt to take the first steps towards rehabilitation.

There was to be no immediate reward for their faith. Fans of all ages, shapes and sizes went home having seen their players beaten 1-0, with two men sent off in the latter stages. Their team had created no meaningful chances and showed none of the residual characteristics of fallen aristocrats.

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And yet, given recent history, those fans were grateful just to be there. Less than a month earlier a handful had travelled to London to hear the proceedings in the high court where the club’s owner for the past two years, a local businessman named Alan Hardy, had been granted a three-week extension over payment of a tax bill of more than £250,000, a debt that had seemed likely to send Notts into administration and possibly extinction. Hardy, having bought the club for £5m and spent a similar amount, had put the club up for sale, but his promises of having identified potential buyers were no longer believed, particularly after his office decoration company – the source of his wealth – also went bust. This, after all, was the club where a consortium called Munto Finance strolled in 10 years ago boasting of Middle Eastern backing, installed Sven-Goran Eriksson as director of football, attracted a couple of big-name players, and was then revealed to have no money at all. The club was sold for £1, since when illusions have been thin on the ground at Meadow Lane.

As recently as February it was possible to joke about Notts’ plight, particularly when Hardy added another stain to his plummeting reputation by accidentally sending an intimate photograph of himself out on social media. The response, at the next home match, was the sight of a thicket of giant inflatable penises brandished by the fans in the away stand. Within months the joke had turned sour as Notts lost their relegation battle and their historic status along with it. Even less funny was the news that the club’s staff, including the players, had gone without their wages for two months. On 25 July the fans of Nottingham Forest passed round buckets at the City Ground during a friendly against Real Sociedad, collecting money to help the employees of their local rivals.

But then Hardy finally redeemed himself by selling the club to a pair of young Danish brothers, Alexander and Christoffer Reedtz, the owners of a statistics firm, Football Radar, which calls itself a provider of football betting advice. While the sum they paid Hardy – who was looking for £7m– has not been announced, it is known that debts to HMRC, other sums owed to local traders and the staff’s unpaid wages have been dealt with in full, which seems like a decent start.

The Vanarama National League is not the outer darkness. Nor is it a quicksand from which there is no escape, as Leyton Orient proved last year, like Macclesfield and Tranmere the season before. Some Notts fans may even find it a pleasant change to make their way to grounds like Eastleigh’s, strolling past a meadow filled with cow parsley and the moss-covered lichgate of St Nicolas’s parish church to reach the pleasant little home of the Spitfires, as Eastleigh are known. They will also find teams keen to test themselves against the representatives of a club that occupied a place in the top flight as recently as 1992 – sharing with Luton and West Ham the distinction of being relegated from Division One to Division One as the Premier League came into existence – and won the FA Cup 125 years ago by beating Bolton at Goodison Park, and which later this season can celebrate the 25th anniversary of beating Ascoli to win the Anglo-Italian Cup under Howard Kendall.

The present manager, Neal Ardley, took over in the middle of last season, after Hardy had jettisoned first Kevin Nolan and then Harry Kewell. On Saturday he pieced together a side from a few holdovers and a scattering of new acquisitions; understandably there were plenty of misunderstandings and few signs of polished interplay. Other matters were fixed at the last minute, including sponsorship: fans buying the new season’s replica shirts in time for the match found a blank square on the front, in the middle of the famous black and white stripes.

It’s reasonable to say the fifth tier is not where Notts County belong but it is where they find themselves, thanks to a series of disasters that cannot be blamed on the FA, the EFL or the failure of trickle-down economics. In some senses they are now in better shape than troubled league clubs such as Bury, Bolton or Coventry; they are, for the moment at least, free from debt and play their home matches, as they have done since 1910, in a stadium leased from the local council, where 18,816 seats await better times. Two matches at Meadow Lane this week – against Stockport on Tuesday and Barnet on Saturday – will tell the fans who cheered every sign of effort at Eastleigh what kind of a season they are in for, and whether hope can march alongside history.