Northampton become first Football League club to earn promotion
Saturday 9 April 2016 20:04, UK
The champagne flowed freely at Sixfields on Saturday as Northampton became the first Football League club to be promoted this season.
The Cobblers did so with a 2-2 draw against Bristol Rovers which came after they had been 2-0 up but that double setback did little to diminish spirits at the club, who are now back in Sky Bet League One after an absence of seven seasons.
The bubbly was in bountiful supply after the match, and most of it ended up on manager Chris Wilder, who joins a small list of Northampton managers in securing a promotion for the club.
"Where I come from it's a criminal offence to waste alcohol like that," he said. "It's my only suit as well so I'm a bit gutted about that but I think I'll get over it."
We know it'll happen. It's just a question of when, so hopefully we can do that this week.
Wilder was brought in from Oxford United in January 2014 and his transformation of the team from relegation near-certainties to the strongest side at their level has been remarkable.
The achievement is made all the more special by the fact that Northampton were close to financial oblivion in the autumn, a factor highlighted by Wilder as he wiped the champagne from his brow and delivered his assessment.
"To become the first club in the country to get a 'P' next to our name is an outstanding achievement, especially when we all know what's gone off at the early part of the season," he said.
"We just tried to do our jobs to the best of our ability at that time, we just go about our jobs and we're proud to work for this football club.
"The players have had a lot of things that have gone against them this season but their attitude has been first class and we've won games in lots of different ways.
"Seasons like this don't come up very often. These aren't players that win trophies every year and we're determined to finish the job off now and win the title.
"It's been a feast-and-famine club and it should be a club that really should be in the division above. It's been up and down and I think people realise now what the chairman is all about here."
The chairman in question is Kelvin Thomas, with whom Wilder shares an Oxford association and whose arrival at the club in November brought light and optimism where there had been darkness and a deep pessimism that the club would not complete their fixture list.
Such grave thoughts were the result of a stark financial position which began when the club, under previous owner David Cardoza, stopped paying the builders for the redevelopment of the ground's east stand. The works were due to be paid out of a £10.25m loan from the local council, which the club also stopped paying back.
The council agreed to write off the loan when Thomas bought the club but withdrew the land they had agreed to give Northampton, with which the Cobblers had hoped to generate the funds to clear the £10.25m debt.
The primary concern to Thomas was to pay off a £166,000 tax bill which had led to a winding-up order from HMRC, a situation which also meant the players and staff went unpaid for several months.
There were tears in the away end at the Ricoh Arena where supporters feared they may have seen their team play for the final time in a 2-1 FA Cup first-round win against Coventry.
Cardoza stalled over the offer of a deal with Thomas, leading to an impassioned post-match plea from Wilder himself - who had contacted his former chairman about returning from his business interests in Florida to the world of English football - at Notts County, in which he implored the owners to "get the deal done".
The speech is now etched in club folklore and immediately assured Wilder of legendary status among the fans. With the club on the brink of promotion, there has been talk - and some of it only partly in jest - of a statue of the straight-talking Yorkshireman.
"We had kept quiet for a long time and possibly far too long," he says now of the interview.
"It was a moment where I spoke for the group, staff and hopefully on behalf of the supporters. We got a great reaction and we obviously moved on very quickly after that.
"If I've played a little part in helping with all that then that was great, but there were a lot of other things that happened, an awful lot of people who have played major parts - staff not getting paid, players being paid late and other people doing stuff for the club to make sure it survived."
Simple survival was the watchword at that time but even then the team was showing signs of being a competitive force in the current campaign. By winning at Notts County that day, they went third in the division and in the 23 games which have followed, have tasted defeat only once.
That incredible run includes a sequence of 10 wins - a club record - and had put the club a mammoth 16 points clear of fourth-placed Plymouth going into the weekend.
After Saturday's draw the gap to fourth became insurmountable with just five games left on the fixture list, and so that 'P' - so cherished by Wilder - appeared next to the club's name in the league standings.
Bristol Rovers provided the opposition for what is generally regarded as one of the greatest nights in Northampton's history, when the Cobblers overturned a 3-1 first leg play-off semi-final deficit with a 3-0 win which took them to the 1998 Wembley play-off final.
That ultimately ended in defeat but this time around, the club's supporters will be hoping the omens provided by Rovers this time around are considerably more positive for the coming years.
