Absolutely , it get's stronger by the year , i really think it's time for 3 up 3 down to be considered.
Many recall the days league clubs being set against any automatic promotion, now so many ex-league clubs are in the NL that wheel has certainly turned.
Wasn’t the then Luton chairman (one Eric Morecambe) one of the ones who voted against Alty joining the league.
Extract from my When We Were Kings article covering the 1980 re-election travesty:
The votes cast in the eventual Football League re-election poll for the 1979/80 season were as follows: Darlington: 49; Crewe Alexandra: 48; Hereford United: 48; Rochdale: 26 and Altrincham: 25. If the Robins had received just one additional vote and tied with the Spotland club, a second ballot featuring only those two candidates would have ensued, in which the eligible electors were then obliged to cast a single vote for the club of their choice. In the two preceding instances when it had proved necessary to hold a second round of voting, the Non League club had, indeed, prevailed on each occasion and, hence, had secured admission into the Football League (Hereford United defeating Barrow in 1972 and Wigan Athletic overcoming Southport in 1978).
Alty‘s initial emotions of intense heartache and sheer disbelief at this cruel news that they had failed to displace Rochdale by just two votes were subsequently exacerbated by disillusionment and the impression that they had been cheated, when it emerged that two clubs had actually omitted to vote and the absence of their ballot papers had not been detected until after the AGM had concluded.
The first of the culprits to be identified were Second Division Luton Town, whose delegation of representatives had been late in arriving for the meeting after ostensibly getting held up in London’s traffic. Their Chairman, Denis Mortimer, duly released a statement: “The traffic was bad and we were delayed. To be fair to everyone involved, I am not going to reveal who we would have voted for.”
I seem to remember Graham Heathcote saying the reason the other club didn't vote was because their chairman got drunk and fell asleep when the vote was being taken. Was it Grimsby?
Further paragraphs from
When We Were Kings:
Grimsby Town were later unmasked as being the second guilty party in this electoral chaos, when it was disclosed that the Chairman of the newly-promoted Third Division Champions, Dick Middleton, had contrived to sit in the main body of the hall in error, rather than proceed to his rightful place at the front amongst the voting members. Consequently, he was not handed his ballot paper.
The Manchester Evening News’ Non League Football correspondent, Doug Peacock, succeeded in buttonholing an unnamed Grimsby Town official as they scurried away from the AGM, who sheepishly divulged their account of the cause of this farcical confusion: “We understood that in previous years, representatives of newly-promoted clubs stayed among the non-voting-members of the Third and Fourth Divisions during the meeting. It was a misunderstanding.”
However, a radically different theory pertaining to the reason for the absence of four of this total of eight uncast votes was subsequently expounded by Graham Heathcote in Andy Mitten’s article on Altrincham FC in the November 2004 issue of Four Four Two magazine, when the Alty midfielder alleged that: “One bloke who promised to support us got pissed and fell asleep."
Just to add insult to injury, the Robins’ officials intimated that both of the clubs involved had previously indicated that they were in favour of electing Alty into the Fourth Division. A crestfallen Noel White remarked: “Two clubs did not vote and they were as near as you can get to being ones we could bank on. But they did not arrive and now we feel a little bit cheated. We are very, very disappointed because we went flat out for the league this time. We only asked to be judged on merit and I don’t think we have been.”
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Playoffs
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