Left Stag: August 2025

A few minutes to noon on a muggy June day and I dump the last empty mail sack into the back of my red Royal Mail van, yank open the barely functioning door and sit back, eyes closed, with a heavy sigh. Ten miles of steep driveways and Stapleford stairwells have taken it out of me today, but as I’ve delivered the post, struggling to concentrate on the frankly dull audiobook I’ve paid for and now feel obliged to finish, I’ve had one thing on my mind. Today, the fixtures are out. After surviving our first season back in League One in two decades, we can now dream of consolidation and steady progress. Who will we get first day? What will be the first big away game? Last season we opened at Barnsley on a Friday night, with a huge away crowd and got the win! What about Boxing Day and New Year? And how will the run-in look? It’s not that I haven’t had any football over the close-season. I’ve watched the women’s Euros, some of the U21s and even saw England men vs Senegal at City Ground (less said the better), but this is what it’s really about. Club football is king and lower-league club football in this country is uniquely special.

I’ve often wondered about why it is that this country has such a rich and perennially well-attended football scene throughout the leagues – how you can have 150-year-old clubs attracting tens of thousands of fans to the same stadiums their great-great-grandparents watched in. It’s a wonderful tradition and something we should celebrate nationally, protecting and preserving clubs for their communities, whether as big as Sheffield Wednesday or as small as Morecambe. The clock ticks down to 12 noon and the fixtures are released. Burton Albion away is the first match – nice and local! Then Doncaster Rovers at home, another team in close proximity. A tasty start to the season. I think about the fans of those clubs. Donny is a town not dissimilar to Mansfield, with a club not dissimilar in size. Burton are smaller, having played mostly in non-league since their beginnings in 1950, but once took 11,000 fans to Old Trafford and have a brilliant nickname, ‘The Brewers’, reflecting local industrial history. As a history geek, this is right up my street (or canal, perhaps). Despite its locality, I’ve never been to Burton away, so when the chance of a ticket comes up, I jump at it.

August comes around quicker than usual, as I count down the days on my rounds, listening to interviews with new signings, pre-season predictions and opposition fan views. Many have Stags tipped for relegation, but I trust Nigel Clough to improve us each year and sign the right players to do the job. As it happens, it was our Nigel who catapulted Burton up the leagues and they are still enjoying the fruits of that effort, twenty-seven years after he took the job. On the Saturday of the match, I’m again on delivery in Stapleford, legs knackered and eager to clock out at 1.15. Thirty-five minutes later and I’m out of my red uniform and in the Great Northern pub in Burton, with a pint of local beer – it would be culturally insensitive not to! My dad, who can’t make it today, tells me to bring back the points and drink to our ancestors, who originally hailed from the Burton area before migrating to Mansfield in the 1920s, for work in the pits. Burton Albion didn’t exist back then, so my Great-Granfather watched Derby. I try to picture the men then, out of their gruelling work environments and letting loose among pals on the terrace, all flat-caps and fag smoke. To my great pleasure, and despite my sore legs, it’s an old-style terrace at Burton’s Pirelli Stadium. To my great displeasure, Stags play shit. We lose the game 2-1 and never look like winning. Back home without the points then. Sorry dad.

The following week is a chance to redeem the opening day loss and win at home, in front of an almost full house, packed away end from Donny and, most excitingly, fans in the Bishop Street Stand. It was there that I first watched a live match (a story for another day), and seeing it with fans again is lovely – another mark of the incredible backing these owners have given us. The atmosphere is electric as the teams emerge. The Rovers fans are in good voice. I’ve been to Doncaster away twice and seen us win both times, with not much noise for the opposition fans, so it’s hard to gauge what they’re like or what they think of us, but another drab performance of disjointed movement, in a clearly unsuitable 5-3-2 formation, sees us lose to an injury time sucker-punch, and the away fans go ballistic. The whole stand is now chanting “you scabby bastards, you know what you are” in our direction. I can’t say this isn’t totally unexpected. Despite not really seeing it much before from South Yorkshire teams, as we haven’t played them much in my lifetime, I’ve heard about it from my dad. I’ve heard it from other teams of course, especially Chesterfield, but it always brings back the stories I had growing up – of how I was born in August ’84, right in the middle of the strike, the village locked-off to prevent flying pickets, of cops and miners chasing through the alley behind the house, of Grandad forced into early retirement from the stress of it all. I always wonder how many of those chanting it have their own family stories or whether they’re just mindlessly following the leader. And the word ‘scab’ always stirs something unreasonably hateful in me, even though I wasn’t there.

For the next few days I’m on the road again, but dejected by the two defeats and the thought that maybe we might be as bad as people think. More immediately worrying is that on Tuesday we have a Leaue Cup first round tie at….Chesterfield! The last time we faced our storied tribal enemy, we all but relegated them to the Conference, to much smug celebration. This time, they are at the top of League Two with two wins from two, and rightly feel there’s no better time to avenge that embarrassing loss, seven years ago. In the days that follow, I immerse myself in the audiobook version of Jeremy Paxman’s Black Gold, a history of coal mining, and play every hypothetical match situation and subsequent emotion through my head. All will be forgiven if we can beat them. I only barely dare to dream, but I needn’t have worried! Stags, after a second minute goal and then a dodgy first half, score another in a much more controlled second period and reclaim the bragging rights. Huge relief and delight! I’m not sure why it affects my in this way, or so many others. It must come from the stories we tell our families at home, or our mates down the pub. But that’s what you get after a century of shared history and rooted folklore, and that’s why there’s nothing like English lower-league football.