Gone But Not Forgotten (Part 6)

Southport, possibly more famous in sporting terms as the home of the Royal Birkdale golf course, suffered the ignominy of becoming the last town to lose its Football League status in 1978. Southport fell victims to the Seaside Curse, which saw the likes Barrow, New Brighton and Workington lose their place amongst the lower reaches [...]

Gone But Not Forgotten (Part 5)

England played a friendly last night, apparently. To be honest, I had better things to do, like reading up on the history of New Brighton FC, who graced the Football League for thirty years until 1951, before falling away and into obscurity. I have to say that this will be the last one of these [...]

Gone But Not Forgotten (Part 4)

There seems to have been three main reasons why a football club would be voted out of the Football League in the days before automatic promotion and relegation with the Conference:
1. Being so spectacularly bad that there was no earthly reason why they should have been allowed to carry on playing professional football.
2. There just [...]

Gone But Not Forgotten (Part 3)

The far north-west of England had a bad time of things in the 1970s, in football terms. In 1970, there were three clubs from (as it was to become known in 1974) Cumbria. By the end of the decade, that would be down to just the one club and, in the 1990s, even the one [...]

Gone But Not Forgotten (Part 2)

The story of the end of Gateshead FC’s stay in the Football League may be one of the great forgotten story’s of post-war British football. In an age in which it was practically impossible to just get chucked out of the League, why were Gateshead, who had not done very much wrong on the pitch, [...]

Gone But Not Forgotten (Part 1)

Yes, indeed – yet another occasional series, this one celebrating the clubs that we have loved and lost. Nowadays, relegation from the Football League is far from the end. As Carlisle United and Doncaster Rovers have demonstrated, it can even be the jolt that a complacent lower division club needs to spring back into life. [...]