Notts County prove that a trip to Eastleigh is not the end of the world | Richard Williams


After 157 years the Football League’s oldest club are coming to terms with life in the Vanarama National League

Those 157 years of history were not out there on the pitch. They were in the away sections of Eastleigh’s Silverlake Stadium, where 796 fans of Notts County gathered on Saturday to resume the ordeal of supporting what was, until May, the oldest professional football club in the world with a continuous league history. Only in England, surely, could a fifth-tier match attract a crowd of 2,668, of whom almost a third had travelled half the length of the country to watch their team, so recently humiliated, attempt to take the first steps towards rehabilitation.

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