Ecstasy, agony, Cobblers: Northampton Town's promotion battle

Words: Tom Reed

Images: Tom Reed

I’ve been trying to walk this crazy life

Been pushing through this pain and strife

Been trying so hard with my heart and soul

This burden is a heavy load.

A Heavy Load. Rudy Mills.

“Born to suffer” reads a fan’s flag at Northampton Town FC.

It certainly feels like that at the club that rarely seems to do things the easy way and which has dealt with more than its share of misfortune over the years.

Supporters from the shoemaking centre are as hardy as they come and wear their strife on their backs with their vintage Lotto shirts and in their well developed frown lines.

Visiting the club in the East Midlands puts things into perspective on the weekend that Man Utd fans marched against the Glazers.

Sure the Old Trafford club’s owners are properly distasteful but Utd haven’t gone through three major financial crises in 30 years like the Cobblers did.

©Tom Reed/ Terrace Edition. Northampton Town FC.

The East Stand at Sixfields sits incomplete following the last financial meltdown, still a shell some eight years since work started and halted in what has become known as Northampton’s “missing millions” scandal.

Everton fans are fed up with their board after another relegation battle from the top tier but try playing the majority of your existence in the basement division and the strain that comes with that, there’s levels to this game and levels to pain.

Cobblers fans take as much as a nine, in football terms, without even an aspirin.

Bradford boss Mark Hughes said that Northampton supporters fans had turned up to “celebrate” before Saturday’s crunch clash that could have seen the Cobblers enjoy a bright day and promotion to League 1 with a win.

Welshman Hughes clearly doesn’t know the Northampton natives, who are far too savvy for a premature party and were more than aware of the likelihood of the Bantams pecking their way to a scrappy victory.

His compatriot Dave Bowen got the Northampton people better, the captain of Wales in the 1958 World Cup, managed Cobblers for their solitary “season in the sun” in 1966.

Joe Mercer famously said said that the miracle of 1966 was not England winning the World Cup, it was Northampton Town playing in the Football League’s first division. Locals meanwhile remember it as an all too brief seat at the top table, after which they were back down to the bottom tier within five years.

Forgive Cobblers fans then, for wanting to turn up early and back their team in the spring sunshine with Carr’s bar heaving two hours before the game as home fans in their claret and white downed pints of locally brewed Carlsberg and listened to ska from the Sixfields Sounds DJ.

The Cobblers are generally much better run now than they had been, having trained on the town’s Abington park as recently as the 90’s.

Families and kids throng Sixfields with the well-shod locals sporting Oxblood Doctor Martens and the odd pair of Crockett and Jones, made in the town and rated by shoe connoisseurs.

These boots are made for stomping sang Symarip in the 1969 ska classic but it was to be more of a case of a Heavy Load by Rudy Mills for Northampton in the scoring stakes when the match kicked-off.

Bradford could have sold out the compact away end at Sixfields three times over but were quiet enough early on as Northampton’s young active fans in the West Stand upper outsang them in a full house of 7786.

In the age of FIFA and instant Prem content on mobile phones it’s heartwarming to see young fans committing to support their local club in such a passionate and vocal way. No-one seemed to be in the right seat, the aisles were full and the young shoe army went through the songbook from the Hotel End at the old County Ground with tunes that were around before they were born.

“Singing aye aye yippee yippee aye - Fuck the Posh!”, they chanted in a ditty that is less about class war than their hated local rivals Peterborough.

The needle before this match surrounded Northampton’s Sam Hoskins being named League 2 Player of the Season with 21 league goals, despite Bradford’s Andy Cook notching 26 in return.

Of course, Cook was the one to open the scoring at Sixfields with clever movement, if unmarked from a corner, a header from close-range and the home fans shushed.

Hoskins, Northampton’s Clarke Gable minus a foot in height was unusually quiet and operating too wide on a day when crossing seemed to be the most trusted route to goal.

But, knowing a win would see them promoted, Northampton were never done in and got an equaliser via a looping set-piece, headed goalwards by Sam Sherring and nodded home by Sean Dyche’s son Max.

You could almost hear Dyche senior’s growl as his lad’s goal registered and it was a moment of sporting justice for a team that has been operating with an eleven worth of players out injured.

Yet, where there is justice, sweet, rank injustice will follow and the Cobblers pummelled the away side for a good fifteen minutes in search of a winner.

The ball hit the Bradford bar and there were all sorts of near misses, that even the producers of the Saw films would consider too cruel.

Fingertip saves, balls flashing across open goals, the Cobblers completed an experiment in testing the net without actually breaching it.

Bradford’s winner was suitably soft in a match that could have ended a draw.

A long ball went in, another knock-back across goal and another free header to send the Bantams delirious with the 1-2.

They’d sucked up some shit from their home fans, so now was their time to give it back.

A toilet roll went on the pitch and although Northampton’s chances of automatic promotion wasn’t flushed down the khazi, someone was reaching for the handle.

Cobblers fans had gone from practically heading in Dyche’s goal themselves, to heads in hands within minutes.

As both sets of fans exited, a thin blue line separated the young lads pointing and offering each other a match-day dance and families rowed over leaving the ever-so-slow moving car park.

Northampton likely need a win at Tranmere on the last day of the season to get autos, with the lottery of the playoffs niggling in the back of Cobblers fans’ minds.

The shoe town faithful will be back, like nothing has happened, but there is something to be said for that resilience.

Northampton’s a club where you can almost see a timeline of evolution of young lads with the gazelles to old boys with flat caps, the passing of years measured through the clicking of turnstiles.

It’s a heavy load indeed, but one they have and will continue to bear together.