What do you do when your football club dies?

What would you do if you lost your football club?

Bury Football Club were expelled from the Football League back in August. The first round of the FA Cup last weekend marked 27 weeks without a competitive fixture for Shakers fans; it was the first season Bury haven’t been involved in the competition since 1894.

Gigg Lane sits vacant, a solemn monument of the past and a painful reminder of the loss the town has suffered. Groundsman Mike Curtis still cuts the grass even though no football will be played on his pitch. Its his way of keeping the club alive.

The question of what to do with their long, empty Saturday afternoons weighs heavy on the minds of the supporters. Without a game to plan their weeks around but unwilling to let go of football completely, the fans are left in a kind of purgatory.

A number made the short trip up the A58 last Saturday to watch Bolton Wanderers and Plymouth Argyle play in the first round of the FA Cup but their decision to do so was met with scorn by many fellow fans.

Argyle are managed by Ryan Lowe, a Bury legend who guided the Lancashire club to promotion last year. Amid the uncertainty that marred what should have been a time of celebration for the club, Lowe moved to Devon, taking his assistant Steven Schumacher with him. It was a decision he took with a heavy heart but given the dismal state of Bury’s finances – the staff had not been paid for a number of months – it was one that he had no choice but to take.

Such is the lure of playing under an exciting young manager like Lowe that he was successful in enticing five of his promotion-winning squad to join him in the West Country. This despite the fact that Argyle had suffered relegation to League Two the previous campaign.

The presence of Danny Mayor, Dominic Telford, Callum McFadzean, Will Aimson and Byron Moore in an Argyle squad led by Lowe and Schumacher was motivation enough for a handful of Bury fans who wanted to see some of their old players in action. One of them was Stuart Marno, a Bury supporter for 40 years, who was quick to dismiss the objections of those who might criticise his decision to get his footballing fix at a game not involving the Shakers.

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"It’s my choice to go and watch a game of football," he says. "I’m not coming here supporting Bolton. If I was sat in the home end then from a rivalry point of view they could have a bit of a whinge about it. But they can’t tell you what you can and can’t watch.

"I’ve come to watch a game of football with some former players in. Besides that, I’ve not been inspired to go and watch a game or watch a game on television.

"It’s the first round of the FA Cup, I’ve never missed the first round, whether it’s north, south or whatever in terms of travel." 

The fact that Saturday’s game featured Bolton, Bury’s fiercest rivals and a club which very nearly suffered the same fate before a last-minute takeover, was of little significance to Stuart. If there are any feelings of jealousy that their neighbours survived and Bury didn't, they are not apparent.

"I’m glad Bolton survived, forget the rivalry and all the rest of it. It is not fair on any football fan to see a club collapse. They managed to get out of jail. They got their fingers burned and we got our arses kicked.

"This is the first competitive game I’ve been to. The only other one was when I went to the charity game the other week at Radcliffe Borough when Lowe and Schumacher turned up," he said.

The charity game, which took place on October 20, pitted two teams of ex-Bury players against one another. It finished 6-6 and as well as being entertaining from a footballing perspective, it provided supporters the chance to reconnect after losing touch following the demise of their club. It also raised valuable funds for the proposed phoenix club but the atmosphere was a strange one as Stuart can attest.

"It was alright, a good craic, but it wasn’t football in the grand scheme of things. There were some parts of it like catching up with old mates who you hadn’t seen for the best part of a few months. The type of guys you travel up and down the country with. We used to get there a couple of hours before and have a few pints beforehand.

"There used to be four of us who went religiously every week. My old man passed away four years ago so we’ve all carried on doing it. Since I was three or four years old I’ve been to virtually every game," he said.

Speaking to Bury supporters about their collective loss is difficult, a fine balancing act between expressing sympathy and not wanting to come across as patronising. It is hard for a football fan who has never gone through the misery of losing their football club to really relate to the suffering they are currently enduring.

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"It’s hard to describe, it’s gut-wrenching because you see football fixtures every week, your mates are going to games and you’ve got no game to go to. It’s crap, there’s nothing to do, so you find yourself ignoring the results because there’s no point looking it up. What’s the point?" Stuart explains.

Along with the hurt and apathy there is a generous dose of anger. Anger aimed at the EFL, the FA and the club’s former owners Stewart Day and Steve Dale for contributing to Bury’s downfall. While Bury fans may disagree on how to spend their Saturday afternoons they are all bound by this sense of injustice.

Simon Henson wasn’t in attendance at the University of Bolton Stadium on Saturday. Instead, he was at the Rose and Crown, a pub not far from Gigg Lane, at one of many events organised by him and his friend Jon Wiggans, whose friendship is one of the few positives that has come out of the whole situation.

"Me and Jon got to know each other in the ground on the fans' day when we all got together to clean. That was the day of the takeover, supposed to be, and then all of a sudden at about half past three as we were painting a wall it all just went sour. They pulled out.

"I started talking to Jon about what pubs he went in and who’s going to suffer and we went for a beer and got our heads together and the rest is history really," Simon said.

The events take place in three of the pubs closest to the ground and act as a way of supporting the businesses worst affected by the lack of football in the town and as a means of raising money for the phoenix club through bucket collections.

"They are a success. The first one we did at the Stanley Club was on September 28 and they took £600 behind the bar. It was absolutely hammered. She was running out of beer.

"Up to now we’ve done six meets and we’ve made £1300 from it for the phoenix," he said.

That money will be invested in merchandise which will be sold to generate even more money for the phoenix club. At present the current footballing landscape is of little interest to those who attend these events and put their hands in the pockets, with nostalgia very much the order of the day.

"We put DVDs from every season on the telly. We don’t have any Jeff Stelling on because I don’t think people are interested. I just think we’re all drained with it. You know when you’ve been at a funeral and after it you’re at the morgue.

"It’s just wrong. I can’t get into it. I just feel really let down by the EFL, the FA and I think a lot of people are like that so we tend not to put the football on," he said.

When asked why he chose not to follow in the footsteps of some of his fellow fans in going to watch Lowe and his cohort of former Shakers, Simon is more diplomatic than most.

"It doesn’t upset me, I would just rather see them spend the money with us," he says. "I love Lowey to bits and Mayor, everyone who played for us, they’re heroes to me.

"We had a great season with them and they were outstanding, it was the best football I’ve seen at the Gigg for years but I think that money that they spent could have been put to turning up at the pub and putting a bit in the bucket."

The present turmoil is too much for some to deal with; many have cut themselves off from football completely, the pain too much to bear but, after attending a game between Southport and Altrincham earlier in the season, Simon is hopeful for the future.

"On the one weekend we didn’t have anything I went to Southport with my lad for an FA Cup qualifier. It was brilliant.

"It was 15 quid but the woman saw my Bury badge and knocked three quid off. We went in the bar and there were two pints waiting for us. I had a tear in my eye. On the way home we were sat with the Alty fans and they said 'you’ll love non-league football' and that gave me hope," he said.

The phoenix club is still a long way from reality though and while the wait for football to return to Bury continues, these fans must do what they can to keep the memory of their club alive, whichever way they choose to do it.