THE FOLLOWING PASSAGE is an extract from ‘Whose Game is it Anyway?’ by Michael Calvin.

The sense of loss was stark.

James, a man in early middle age, channelled the child who first watched Bury in 1988, aged eight: ‘I remember my dad going to a mythical place called “the football” when I wasn’t old enough to go.

My first game was against Wolverhampton Wanderers. It kicked off at 11 o’clock on a Saturday morning and Bury won 3-1. I don’t remember a great deal about it, other than being sat on a crush barrier and being told not to go wandering, but it quickly became the thing that my dad and I did and wouldn’t be without.

‘It was never about the quality of football, although we have had some good teams that have played some good football. Martin Dobson got the team playing great. Ryan Lowe did the same in our last season. I’ve also seen an awful lot of dross in the 31 years I spent watching Bury, but it was still something I looked forward to every week.

‘You have got your routine down to a tee. You know what will happen and when it will happen. I’d go to my mum and dad’s for something to eat Saturday lunchtime. As soon as the Football Focus titles started rolling, my dad would say: “Are you phoning a taxi, then?”

I’d order one for quarter past one. At 1.16, my dad is looking at his watch and saying: “He’s not bloody coming, is he?”

‘We’d go to the Stanley Conservative Club behind Gigg Lane for a drink. You recognise everyone who walks in, put your hand up to greet them. It wasn’t so much about the game. It was about the million tiny interactions you’d have. The woman selling Golden Gamble tickets in the car park is not my lucky seller, so I’d go to Susan, who is selling them under the stand. I have to buy one from her.

‘I’d see Joan, who had worked for the club for 47 years. Joan’s dad is Bury’s most-capped player of all time, a fella called Bill Gorman. Lynne is her daughter. She’d worked for the club for 30 years. Mike, her brother, is the groundsman, but has done all sorts of jobs for the club over 33 years. They’ve watched me grow up from a snot-nosed kid.

‘You know everybody around you. You know every nuance of it. It’s learned behaviour. You are not taught matchdays. My dad didn’t say: “You’re going to experience this, this and this.” You just take in all these sights and sounds of a place where you are made to feel comfortable, made to feel wanted. You are not a commodity. You are a supporter. Individually you can be important to your club.’

He paused, pulled a laminated membership card out of his brown leather wallet and introduced me to his eight-year-old self. The boy had short black hair. He was smiling broadly and wearing a white Bury shirt. ‘I love the fact the signature is so haphazard,’ he said tenderly. ‘It’s just me, wobbily writing my name. We wore that shirt when we took the lead at Old Trafford in the fourth round of the League Cup on the night of the King’s Cross fire. I’ve still got the Sportsnight coverage, transferred from VHS to DVD.’

The Conservative Club, reached along a cobbled lane and a stone-walled entrance that led to a bowling green, had the musty air of a provincial museum. Team photographs from the Sixties nestled alongside grainy reproductions of goals scored by Bury legends like Northern Ireland striker Derek Spence. A panoramic colour portrait of Gigg Lane, pristine in pre-season, had been signed by 16 players.

A brass plaque, framed by two posies of plastic red roses and holly leaves, commemorated members lost in the First World War.

Allegiance isn’t necessarily sustained from cradle to grave, but it confers a certain sense of immortality. Later, at the AFC [Bury -- the club formed after Bury FC's demise] match, I was struck by a huge union flag behind one of the goals, which proclaimed ‘Beardyman Lives On’. This paid homage to the memory of Adrian Webb, a fan whose presence on club message boards was described as ‘often irreverent, irascible and politically incorrect’.

Other friendly ghosts emerged for a namecheck: ‘Barry Lockley was a friend we’d have a drink with before games. He once turned up to a game over Christmas dressed as an elf. He was a fantastic bloke, but he had cancer and died in 2015. I put something on the Bury message board, saying: “You might not know his name, but if I was to say he was the fella in the South Stand with a big Russian hat you’ll know who I mean.”

‘Straight away I started getting messages, “RIP Fellow Shaker”. He had his ashes interred at the side of the pitch. Our little group who drank with him went down to Gigg on a nondescript weekday morning. The groundsman was trimming the grass. There was just the general hubbub of a football club at work. And there we said goodbye to our friend. Gigg Lane was where he was happiest.

‘Recognition of those sorts of fans is largely missing from the game today. That little group who drank together didn’t sit together. My dad and I went into the main stand and everyone else went in the south stand. You invite those people to the night do at your wedding. You grieve when they die. When we found out that John Buckley who sat behind us had died my dad and I were absolutely distraught.

‘In 2009 I lost my job in quite distressing circumstances. It really pushed me to the edge. My dad said: “Do you want me to buy you a season ticket beside me?” I think he knew exactly what he was doing. The restorative power of sitting in that group on that regular basis, with that network around me, really, really helped. When everything else goes to shit you’ve still got your team.’

Crystal Palace fans with a protest about what happened to Bury FC. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

Until that team gets taken away.

‘What’s happened to Bury? We’ve been punished for the actions of somebody who couldn’t care less about connections like that. Steve Dale hasn’t been punished. By his own admission, he is not a football fan. But I’ve been punished. I don’t want to be glib, but until I met my girlfriend the club was the love of my life. I’ve had that taken away from me and I’ve done nothing wrong.

‘If you’d have asked me at seven o’clock on a Saturday evening during the last football season what I did between three o’clock and 4.45 I wouldn’t have been able to tell you because I didn’t watch Football Focus anymore; I didn’t read the sports pages, I didn’t buy football magazines. I’m sure Mr Ladbroke won’t be quivering at losing my two pounds every week, but I didn’t put a bet on.

‘Your whole interest in the game just disappears. You can’t look at the League One or League Two tables if it doesn’t affect you in any way because you don’t have that emotional investment in it. It’s extremely frustrating when all you want is something concrete. AFC are doing something concrete. They have been transparent from day one. It upsets me that we can’t all work together.

‘Gigg Lane is like a ghost town. When I go there now, it physically hurts. I could do the walk there with my eyes closed. I know every bump in every paving slab. Until expulsion, it was part of my life for 31 years, to the day. I know it sounds clichéd but you just stand there, go through all the goals, the saves, the great moments you had with your mates when you were a teenager.

‘Bury won the Second Division championship when I was 16. Is there a better age for something like that to happen, for a club to really get the talons into you? You just remember the best times of your life you had in that square mile near Bury Cemetery. You remember Tony Rigby scoring the goal against Preston that got you to the play-off final, and the absolute joy you felt, aged 14, that night.

‘To be able to ask Tony Rigby: “What did it feel like?” Imagine that. Players always used to go into the social club after games. You could get their autograph and they’d say: “How do you think I played today?” You could talk to them. I used to run on the pitch after every game and slap them on the back.

‘When Manchester City launched that tunnel club they said it would be the closest you’d ever get to the players. You were separated by a massive perspex sheet and the players all had headphones on. That is not what being a football fan is all about. Now I stand there at Gigg, looking at this shell that hasn’t been used for a year.

‘We actually got into the ground in the summer. I sat in my old seat in the South stand, V152, and my seat in the main stand, J15. The fact I know those seat rows and numbers off the top of my head tells you how important it is to me. You sit there, thoughts echoing. All the Tuesday nights we spent there. There were 1,396 of us against Stevenage. Again, that’s imprinted on my mind.

‘On a night like that you’re thinking: “Jesus, can it get any worse?” But you keep going to games because you hope that one day it will be like it was before. In the promotion season under Ryan Lowe we were 3-1 down at home to MK Dons with 18 minutes to go. We won 4-3. I’ll be talking about that game when I’m 80, and a prisoner of my own degenerating mind.

‘I am not a football fan. I am a Bury fan. I’m not one of those who say I’ll go anywhere to watch a game of football. If the football is on in the pub, and it is a Champions League semi-final, I wouldn’t really watch it. It was all those interactions at Bury that made me a Bury fan. They welcomed me in as a kid. It was like being welcomed into a secret society.

‘When I was a kid everyone supported Liverpool. Why? Because they were good. There weren’t many Bury fans at school. I supported them because I could actually go to a live game. I’m very proud to come from the town. So I see Bury football club as my link to my town and my family. I want dignity, pride, a sense of self from my football club. Steve Dale doesn’t give me that.’

That afternoon’s match was typical of the level, tier ten in the football pyramid. It featured flawed decision-making and lack of composure, flashes of natural skill and instinctive movement. These part-time players, paid around £80 a week, were relatable to the 150 fans, a capacity crowd under social-distancing protocols.

They rested their pints on a whitewashed, four-tiered breeze-block wall around the pitch, and were visibly and vocally glad they had something to watch. AFC were profligate in front of goal, having worked the majority of their opportunities down the right-hand channel, where the relative quality of Lewis Gilboy, a young winger released by Accrington Stanley, stood out.

Liam MacDevitt, whose goal separated the teams at half-time, is a former sprinter turned children’s television presenter, whose football career was derailed by untimely injury. He ruptured quadriceps muscles at the age of 20, and became AFC’s second signing following spells at Yeovil, Swindon, Bristol City, Farnborough, Stoke City, Livingstone, Gosport Borough, St Albans City, Stalybridge Celtic and two clubs in New Zealand, Southern United and Tasman United.

General view of messages left by a fan at Gigg Lane. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

He did media work for the PFA and had evidently developed a strong sense of narrative.

‘I was never going to play in the Champions League, but what I got from football has not changed,’ he said in a Football Shorts film that accompanied his arrival.

‘I loved the idea of playing in front of fans, representing the lifeblood of a community, becoming part of something bigger than myself. If you could be part of something this meaningful, you’d sign too, wouldn’t you?’

Nostell equalised seven minutes into the second half through Amir Berchil, and the game petered out in a flurry of inconclusive substitutions. Arlo Young didn’t appear to care. A bright-eyed boy, aged three and a half, he played between blue plastic seats with a green toy bus, produced from his miniature Star Wars backpack. In the car on the way home, he told his father Phil he loved the half-time chips and the way people smiled at him.

A rite of passage, attending his first live football match, had been completed. Phil, one of the pivotal figures in the new club’s creation, did not attach any grandiose importance to the occasion since his attachment to the sport was more measured than most of those around him. He took quiet pleasure in being a Bury fan and became involved with AFC almost out of a sense of civic duty.

‘I thoroughly enjoyed the anonymity of being a football supporter,’ he reflected as we sat at the back of the small stand behind the goal. ‘I didn’t go for a beer before or after the game. I don’t live in Bury anymore. But when I saw some of the things that would be required for AFC, I knew I would have to help. We needed to create a governance structure, put a proper financial structure in place so the club could be sustainable.

‘I work heavily in financial services and regulation. I sold my own business to a FTSE 100 company, so I know what systems and structures and governance look like. The club, in the way we have organised it, is effectively a business with a £300,000 turnover. Because of what happened previously to Bury FC we have to be absolutely squeaky clean.

‘Football is a world of excess. It attracts people with money, and attracts people without money, who want to look like they’ve got it. There are a lot of people out there who are driving very expensive cars, or living in very big houses, who have borrowed money they can’t afford to repay. That’s the equivalent of what we’ve seen at Bury.

‘Intellectually, I knew I had the skills and experience to help. On an emotional level, I kind of got fed up with the powerlessness of the fans who were hurt by the expulsion from the Football League. They were moping about. Maybe that’s a typical northern thing, tipping the cloth tap and waiting for someone to save them from the mill owner.

‘I don’t mind admitting that I’ve felt like jacking it in a few times over the last six months or so. The lack of belief in the community from the fanbase really frustrated me because I knew the talent, ability, effort and application required was there. It just needed a few people to push things together.’

This embryonic, modular organisation was operating on old school enthusiasm and millennial marketing skills. Older volunteers, acting as matchday stewards, exuded the kindly concern of lollypop men and ladies. Younger helpers devised a slick, interactive social media operation that sold 1,500 newly designed, fan-approved shirts in the month leading up to the season. Those shirts funded a fitness and conditioning coach through the lockdown.

Three internal teams, covering commerce, media and governance, were overseen by club chairman Chris Murray, who became a Bury fan as a teenager despite ‘the weird dynamic’ of having various factions of his family urging him to support Manchester United, Liverpool, Everton, Bolton and, most improbably, Sheffield Wednesday.

His tipping point came when a neighbour took him to see Bury beat a second-string Manchester United team, containing the Class of ’92 in its earliest incarnation, 4-0. ‘From then on, I was screwed,’ he admitted, with a gentle chuckle. ‘I’ve tried all the way through this to take sentiment out of it, and look at it from a business perspective, and I can’t. There are a lot of people who struggle to talk about it. They’re hurting.

‘It’s really weird. I told everyone from the start I would be respectful to their opinion, and listen regardless. Social media can be horrible, especially when you see the names some of the volunteers are being called. They’re Bury fans who’ve lost their club, and decided to do something about it, rather than tweeting “Fuck the EFL” every day. How long can you go on having your club held hostage?’

Each fan had his or her individual journey to make towards acceptance. Bentley’s Damascene conversion came at AFC’s opening North West Counties League match, a 3-2 victory over Steeton, secured by two goals in added time at the end of the second half by Tom Greaves, who wore the number nine shirt sponsored by him and his father.

The 95th-minute winner, a classic goal-line scramble from a right-wing corner, sparked unbridled, long-supressed scenes of joy; a fan, in an exultant time warp, even cranked up an old school rattle in celebration.

‘My throat was red raw,’ Bentley admitted in an entranced tone which suggested he could barely believe his good fortune.

‘It was one of those games you felt was written in the stars.

‘I had been wavering about whether it was for me, but it soon became apparent that this club is just as “Bury” as the one formed in 1885 because it’s all about the spirit of those watching. Your ancestors, my ancestors, just wanted to watch football. It’s not about the level. It’s about the familiar faces, familiar conversations with an extended family you haven’t seen for too long.

‘I hadn’t seen my dad so excited for years. He said when he woke up that morning he felt like a football fan for the first time in a long time. This story has more twists and turns to come. This could be the start of a journey that ends like AFC Wimbledon, or it could level out in the upper reaches of the pyramid like at Chester or Darlo, but I loved it and feel like I’ve got something back at my core.’

AFC are paying £30,000 to ground share with Radcliffe Boro for two seasons, during which manager Andy Welsh is expected to secure at least one promotion. Despite Dale quoting Voltaire, rambling on about ‘Calvin Cline (sic) boxers’ from Bury market and excoriating ‘people trying to pass off fakes as the real thing’, the ultimate aim is to purchase the charge on the original ground at Gigg Lane, which will cost up to £3million.

For Murray, football became a deeply personal, dauntingly painful experience: ‘My son Ryan is buried in the cemetery right behind the ground. He was buried in a Bury shirt. His headstone faces Gigg Lane. When I went there, I had this overwhelming feeling that “This couldn’t and shouldn’t happen to a football club.” I said, both on the day we got expelled and the day they refused to reinstate us in the League, that I have a duty for my son to get us back there. People want to go home.’

Fans in that situation have the desperation of a drowning man, scanning the sea for driftwood. David Hilton, another would-be saviour, a stranger with an indistinct background, was touted as the potential owner of a reformed Bury FC, inserted into the National League North.

When his initiative collapsed, some fans groundlessly blamed the phoenix club. Murray resigned after he and his family was subjected to ‘vile’ online abuse which prompted this Cri de coeur: ‘Regardless of opinions the abuse of everyone needs to stop for people’s mental health before someone ends up getting hurt, arrested or worse, committing suicide.’

Life, death and football: interlinked, and spanning the canyons between hope, uncertainty and despair. Unexpectedly, heading into a fearfully unpredictable winter, my head was beginning to clear.

‘Whose Game is it Anyway?’ by Michael Calvin is published by Pitch Publishing. More info here.