Cheshire Solidarity Saves Chester

Did Northwich Victoria inadvertantly save Chester from demotion to the Conference North last week?

It looks that way to me.

The FA decided last Friday to overturn the Conference's decision to relegate the Vics a further division as a punishment for an "insolvency event". (Can you remember the good old days when football fans had never heard that phrase?)

And the F.A. were right. Basically, the Conference had two contradictory edicts in their rulebook. the newer one said a side which has a conveniently-timed "insolvency event" in the Summer must drop a division, and that was the punishment meted out to Northwich.

The problem is, there was already a rule saying in those circumstances you'd have to start the next season on minus ten points in the same division. They were caught bang to rights.

So how does this link to Chester? Obviously the original punishment meted out to Northwich is the road the Conference want to go down, and the chance to make an example of a "big" club would surely have been hard to resist. But it would also have triggered another humiliating slap on the wrist from the F.A. Which is great in terms of earning us a couple of juicy derbies in the midst of our long treks to Sussex and the North East, but isn't much consolation to Woking.

Conference Nod Chester Through

So City are in, thank goodness, with a ten point handicap. Now the fun begins!

Another D Day for Chester

Having crowed excitedly about the return of the Wrexham-Chester derby, then suggested our neighbours could be reprieved if Darlington collapse, I'm worried we might lose out on a resumption of cross-border hostilities after all today.

The Darlington issue never came to anything; their continued membership of the Football League was nodded through at their AGM yesterday in such a lowkey manner that it didn't even merit a mention on Darlington's website. The threat to our derby at today's Conference AGM seems more real though.

Woking, in a desperate attempt to save their skins, plan to object to Chester's membership of the Conference, citing the double relegation of Boston United as a precedent. I suspect they'll fail: the parallels are circumstantial, I feel, and I can't imagine the Conference, after the hammering it received last season over points deductions, has the appetitie for a similar fight.

No-one thinks City's sudden escape from administration feels right, of course, but their fans don't deserve to suffer further as a result of whatever happened behind the scenes, and we desperately want to renew acquaintances anyway!

Still, the last few years suggest that anyone who tries to speculate on which way the Conference is going to jump at any particular time is likely to get their fingers burnt. Watch Google News carefully today-it could get interesting!