At The Exacta Stadium yesterday afternoon, a crowd of 2,689 people saw Chester play out a goalless draw against Brackley Town in the Blue Square Bet North. It was a result that left the club seventeen points clear at the top of the table with a third of the season left to play, albeit with second-placed Guiseley having five games in hand on them.
Three of our six matches in this weeks non-league videos of the week feature clubs that are owned by their supporters. Our first match comes from the Blue Square Bet North, and features league leaders Chester FC and their home match against Worcester City. Second up is the Northern Premier League match between Blyth Spartans and FC United of Manchester, and then comes the Southern League Premier Division match between Cambridge City and Stourbridge.
Perusing acres of statistics that can be found in newspapers on the opening weekend of the
football season can be a most enlightening way to pass the couple of hours, even if focusing on the
attendance figures rather than the results themselves does require a certain degree of furtiveness.
At the top end of the game, there are few surprises to be found.
It is the end, then, of another long, hard season, and perhaps now is an appropriate time to be
looking at how those clubs that are owned and run by their supporters trusts this season managed to
fair. As AFC Wimbledon paraded the trophy that confirmed their accession into the Football League
nine years after their formation, the words of the FA's committee, that a new club in the borough
would be, "not in the wider interests of football", have never sounded more hollow.
Was it really two years ago? I am in the middle of rebuilding this site for a summer
relaunch, and some of the new pages that will be available will be covering various running themes
that we have gone into over the course of the last five years or so. I thought that I may as well
put these up as posts as well, so that you can trace back some of longer running sagas.
Revenge, it is said, is a dish best served cold and, while the imprisonment of Stephen Vaughan
for fifteen months at the North Liverpool Community Justice Centre yesterday was an incident
unrelated to his involvement in football, there may be some people in Chester that will regard this
sentence as some degree of providence, held over for what he did to their club.
Philadelphia Athletics historian Rich Westcott writes of Columbia Ball Park, "The park
functioned as a major league stadium for just eight seasons starting in 1901. During that period,
however, it helped to give birth to a new league, was the site of one World Series and was the
ballpark in which numerous future Hall of Famers launched their careers.
