It has, as many of you will already be aware, been a long few months for the supporters of Kettering Town Football Club. During this period, their club has been uprooted to the former home of their defunct former local rivals, they have been promised the earth and have seen only the delivery of unpaid bills and an uphill battle to avoid relegation from the Blue Square Bet Premier.

When questions about your football club are raised in Westminster and the Prime Minister agrees that the situation needs investigation then you know you are in a bad way. Not because you might be investigated but because the Prime Minister actually knows what Penny Mordaunt, MP for Portsmouth North, is talking about.

The phrase "emotional rollercoaster" is one that is overused in football these days, but the supporters of Darlington FC are rapidly becoming more than familiar with the term after another week in which their club sailed close to extinction before receiving confirmation from its joint administrator that it had permission to continue to trade and therefore play until the end of this season.

A little gallows humour can go a long way. Kettering Town's patchwork team played Gateshead in the Blue Square Premier in Tuesday night. Another crowd of under one thousand, another critical evening in a relegation battle that may yet prove to be highly important should the club somehow scrape through its current woes.

It is a sobering thought to consider that, for all the hard work and drama involved in keeping Darlington FC alive just nine days ago, the looming deadline over the clubs future comes up for renewal again on Monday. The last few days have seen a patchwork team lose narrowly to Fleetwood Town and Hayes & Yeading United in the league, but performances on the pitch have, by necessity, had to take a back seat to the continuing efforts to save the club.

So, Fantasy Football Owner is being played at Pompey yet again. Against a background of a HMRC winding up order for two months unpaid PAYE a total of £1.6m the familiar dance of chancers, secret consortia and mad millionaires continues. Yet no serious candidate has emerged. The transfer window advances towards slamming point and all our promising new manager, Mike Appleton, can do is manipulate a-one-in-one-out situation with our expensive but depleted eighteen man squad.

Two matches in the Blue Square Premier brought together four clubs from directly opposite ends of the football spectrum yesterday and, while the results of those matches were hardly unexpected, it was difficult not to feel at the end of this week that these were not as important as the fact that the matches had taken place in the first place.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. There can be few other sets of football supporters that have had to bear up to the sort of agony and exhilaration that the supporters of Darlington FC have had to put up with yesterday but eventually, more than an hour after final confirmation one way or the other of the clubs fate was due to be announced, those concerned with saving the club emerged before the press to make the announcement that so many had hoped for: Darlington Football Club remains alive for now, at least.

At the exact time of writing (almost one thirty in the afternoon), we do not know whether Darlington FC has been rescued or not. What we can say for certain is that a situation that may have seen the club die at one minute to midday has been extended and that further negotiations are now taking place and that a decision is due imminently over whether the club can be saved in its current form or not.

At the end of yesterday, Darlington FC remained alive albeit on life support. Today, however, stories started to emerge which threaten to fragment an increasingly fractious fan-base as the matter of this club's survival draws closer and closer to its denouement.
There have been words of encouragement and support funds and fury from many supporters that a situation such as this should be allowed to happen to the same club yet again but, at the time of writing, we are still nowhere near knowing whether the club will saved or, if it will, who by.

Shortly before 12.30pm today @TruroCityTweet declared 'ALL CLEAR FOR CITY -TAX BILL PAID IN FULL' (their capitals not mine but worthy of shouting nonetheless) and it seemed in light of the current cloud of doom hanging over parts of non-league that the sun has broken through over Cornwall at least.

While Darlington have grabbed most of the recent headlines in the race to the financial bottom that the bottom of the Blue Square Premier seems to consist of this season, Kettering Town remains in a critical condition itself.

On Saturday, their home match against Forest Green Rovers was called off at lunchtime, which is unlikely to have done the stricken clubs bank account a great deal of good, and this morning the Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph, a local newspaper which has been criticised by some supporters as being too ready in the past to toe the Ladak party line, also stepped off the fence to deliver its viewpoint of the recent difficulties that the club has faced.

It is very much a sign of the times that £50,000 is not a great deal of money to a football club in trouble playing in the fifth division of the English league system these days. An ongoing debate over the eventual destination of precisely this amount of money, however, seems to be throwing a spanner into the works of an attempt to rescue Darlington Football Club this weekend, and this isn't the only area into which it could be regarded as having a malign influence.

There may only be a couple of days left to go. Darlington FC continue to stare into the abyss and the comments of the club's joint administrator, Harvey Madden, in an interview with BBC Radio Tees this evening will have offered no comfort to those of the opinion that it is now only a matter of time before this football club folds after one hundred and twenty-nine years.

There has been, as has seemed perpetual over the last few months or so, a lot of bad news about recently. Whether we are driving to distraction over racism, looking at football clubs that are staring into the financial abyss or lamenting the death of anything approaching civility within our national game, putting our heads above the parapets of modern football for longer than a fraction of a second can be a thoroughly dispiriting experience, and it can become a thorough bind to even seek to engage with the wider world of football at times.

The news came through with startling speed, another rumour that swelled to an almost bewildering succession of public statements in just a few short hours. At the end of yesterday, the battle-wearied supporters of Darlington FC could only step back, blinking, and survey the wreckage. Their club has been pushed into administration for the third time in less than ten years, and the prognosis for its future looks bleak.

It is virtually impossible to forecast the next misdemeanour, potential or otherwise, to emerge from Port Vale's boardroom, without descending into the realms of bad-taste fantasy (one of the major protagonists revealing themselves to be a woman trapped in a man's body, for example).

Presumably believing Christmas to be "a week to bury bad news," Vale chairman Peter Miller informed everyone, including all fellow board members apparently, that he'd re-mortgaged the club's Vale Park ground to facilitate a £277,000 loan covering "short-term" cashflow problems, caused by the collapse of the much-vaunted "investment deal" with American sports turf firm Blue Sky International (BS).

Often, when push comes to shove in radicalising a group of football supporters, it will take one, symbolic moment to push those that might otherwise have merely got on with the job of watching their team to realise that the time for action is now.

For those that follow the ailing Blue Square Premier club Kettering Town, that moment may have come at any of three or four different occasions over the last month or so, but the tipping point for many may have cone with twin five-goal defeats at the hands of Luton Town over Christmas and the New Year (results which plunged the club back into the thick of the relegation places at the bottom of the table), it with the release of an official club statement which sought, unsurprisingly enough, to place the blame for the club's woes at the foot of everybody but those with the overall responsibility for managing its finances.

A new year may have begun, but familiar problems are already starting to make themselves clear with conflicting stories concerning the well-being of Blue Square Premier club Darlington. A club that has already had two spells in administration in the last decade could well be headed for further trauma following reports in the local press during the break between Christmas and the new year, but upon what were these initial reports based, and can a consortium group which has since announced itself get the assent of the club's current owner to take over a football club that has been shipping money left, right and centre for longer than most people care to remember?

On the pitch, Kettering Town have picked up a little of late. Two consecutive draws have lifted them just out of the relegation places in the Blue Square Bet Premier and, even though the club's transfer embargo remains in place, they even managed a full substitutes bench their match against on Tuesday night.

It was a story that started almost a year and a half ago in a blaze of publicity which involved a major newspaper, allegations of corruption in another sport, a non-league football club and suicide. Now, with the half-way point in the following season fast approaching, it seems almost certain that the final chapter to play out in the life of Croydon Athletic Football Club will end in the collapse of a club which found itself thrust into the front page of newspapers around the world and, as the authorities pick over the carcass of this club over the next few weeks and months, a question well worth asking will be that of how nobody came to recognise the signs that there was something terribly, horribly wrong at this club earlier than it was.

Clucking bell. Again. Remember that "£8m" investment deal between Port Vale and American synthetic pitch manufacturers Blue Sky International (BS). You do? Well, apparently that puts you one-up on Hank Julicher who just happens to be BS's Chief Executive, so really ought to remember, if the deal ever existed in the first place.

Whilst the eyes of most of the football world were focussed upon the likes of Stamford Bridge and the Nou Camp last night, an altogether more prosaic battle was playing out at Nene Park in Irthlingborough. The Blue Square Premier has had something of a flustered look about its lower reaches all season, with newly-relegated Lincoln City and Stockport County both finding life below the Football League tougher than they might have expected, but for existence-threatening financial difficulties, Kettering Town and Darlington beat all others hands down.

I was going to have a quiet weekend. Write some stuff about Everton. Catch up on the latest fun and frolics at Rangers, with Wilfrid Hyde-White's distant cousin Craig "I have nothing to" Hyde-White. And watch a Gaelic Football match in North-West London. Then a certain well-informed supporters' web-site in the Staffordshire area suggested 200% "take a look" at their latest postings.

The last time we reported from Kettering Town, the club was at the point of being on its knees. With the whole team having been put on the transfer list, they lost five players on loan deadline day, only to see three replacements having their transfers to the club cancelled after the club was placed under a transfer embargo.

Its a form of 'Pass the Parcel'. A crowd of Russian, Israeli, Hungarian, Hong Kong and even British businessmen sit in a darkened room and spin poor old Pompey around until it ends up in the hands of one or more of them. The holder then has to keep it going until he finds an exit strategy. Then it goes back on the table with the same players and gets spun around again.

Things seem to be escalating out of control very rapidly at Blue Square Premier club Kettering Town, where pre-season hopes of a fresh start at a new home have already evaporated, to be replaced by a sense of foreboding over so little as the short term security of the club. During the summer, Kettering's move from its traditional Rockingham Road home to Nene Park, the former home of the club's former rivals Rushden & Diamonds, eight miles from their home town, had provoked more than a few raised eyebrows.

It was a minor exchange among ‘readers' comments' in Bournemouth's Daily Echo newspaper. But it summed up much about AFC Bournemouth under current chairman Eddie Mitchell. The exchange concerned the relationship between parent company, AFC Bournemouth Limited, and a company set up by Mitchell, AFCB's then-largest individual shareholder, called Black Label Events (BLE), which runs catering and conferencing at Bournemouth's Seward Stadium.

The bulldozers moved in at College Grove in Wakefield last week. This, of itself, should probably not have come as too much of a surprise to those that have been watching the recent difficulties of Wakefield Football Club of the Northern Premier League for most of this year, but as a visual analogy it was depressingly appropriate that a club which has had a disastrous year should have seen its home almost completely razed to the ground in favour of a multi-sport complex by its owners at the same time that those running the club confirmed that it was on the brink of closure.

Yes, again. Last month, I started what I hoped was an epilogue to Port Vale's takeover saga. Then Plymouth Argyle's concluding fortunes took priority and Vale took their place lower down the article queue. But not before I wrote the following: So, farewell, then, internal strife at Port Vale. For now, anyway.

We are only three months into the new season, but already it feels as if history is beginning to repeat itself. In July, the county of Northamptonshire lost Rushden & Diamonds after a season of spectacular mismanagement a new club, AFC Rushden & Diamonds, has already started a youth team and is expected to begin again from the start of next season and this time around there is now a sizeable body evidence which indicates that the club that took over their Nene Park home during the summer, Kettering Town, could well be set to follow them into serious difficulties.

It hadn't been Rangers' best week. On the Monday, they lost two directors down the back of the corporate governance sofa, including "Mr. Rangers", John Greig. And three days later, the BBC broadcast some people saying not very nice things about owner Craig Whyte's business dealings. Either side of BBC Scotland's documentary Rangers: The Inside Story, Whyte threatened legal action over allegations it made whilst counter-alleging a BBC institutional anti-Rangers bias and joined the queue of football people suing the BBC, just behind West Ham manager Sam Allardyce, who "is going to sue" them.

Over the last few years it has become one of English footballs most instantly recognisable totems of the folly of ego, and now it seems as if The Reynolds Arena currently known as The Northern Echo Arena which has been an albatross around the neck of the club since it moved into it in 2003, may finally be play a significant role in the end of Darlington Football Club.

With a team that is top of the table, a new manager that has just won the Manager Of The Month award for his division and a winnable FA Cup tie coming up in a couple of weeks, these should be happy times for the supporters of Wrexham Football Club. As regular readers will be aware, however, very little at The Racecourse Ground is as it seems and the proposed take-over of the club by the Wrexham Supporters Trust (WST) has now hit the buffers again over clauses relating to liability for outstanding debts, which are being treated so seriously by the Football Association and the Football Conference that, once again, the WST take-over of the club might not go through.

Clever man, that James Brent, the (drum roll)... new owner of Plymouth Argyle. In the past week he has revealed himself to be far from the philanthropic ‘saviour' many fans have keenly labelled him, while displaying a sure political touch, to protect his financial interests, against those of staff, players and administrators owed money.

It is never helpful if, while writing about a situation, one of its main protagonists pipes up just before the proof-reading stage to issue a statement claiming the equivalent of "the earth is flat, the moon is made of cheese, and I'm taking my ball home if anyone argues." So it was that Mark Murphy's latest summary of the latest events at Plymouth Argyle was a bit rushed and disjointed.

Yesterday in Plymouth, some people with lots of money demanded more money, some people with much less money were told they were getting no more money, until the people with lots of money got more money. This was morally indefensible. Doubtless, there will be people on hand to claim "it isn't as simple as that.

Something may or may not be going on at Eastwood Town Football Club but it's increasingly difficult to make any sense of the situation.

To quote Donald Rumsfeld:

"There are known knowns; there are things we know we know.
"We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.

Organisation is the key to many of life's success, and this has been ably demonstrated than by Plymouth Argyle fans over recent days, in dealing with two potential obstacles to the club's exit from administration. The starkest issue was highlighted by Ian King on this site on Sunday as the story broke of attempts by former directors to disrupt and potentially threaten outright Argyle's exit from administration, in order to protect personal financial interests.

So near, yet so far. The future of Plymouth Argyle seems likely to be thrown into fresh turmoil if rumours that started circulating late yesterday afternoon regarding an attempt on the part of three former directors of the club to buy the mortgage held over its Home Park ground by Lombard North Central PLC.