IT’S ALWAYS DARKEST BEFORE DAWN
Love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation. This has been Bury’s long hour.
The events of August 27, 2019 were every football fan’s worst nightmare. Bury FC – an institution of the English game since 1885, the focal point of a community – were expelled from the Football League. The club exists today in name only, with no fixtures, no players and no manager. For their suffering supporters, it has been a truly heartbreaking tale of woe.
“We never believed it would get to this stage,” Tom Pickup, a Bury fan for more than 30 years, tells FourFourTwo with a sigh. “We were all following the news and hoped that the club would be saved even up until the last minute. I was in a daze. It was surreal.”
“The moment that I found out, it was like the strongest punch to the gut I’ve ever felt in my life,” adds James Bentley, author of Bury books Things Can Only Get Better and The Forgotten Fifteen. “It’s not something I’ll ever recover from.”
On that fateful August evening, with the nation’s media trained on Bury, every fan across the country felt conflicted: a mixture of empathetic sadness, and silent, guilty relief that the unthinkable was happening to someone else.
For Shakers fans, however, the alarm bells had been wailing for some time.
THE DARKEST DAY
Bury were already in trouble when Stewart Day, a 31-year-old property developer, took over the club in May 2013. Having just been relegated to League Two, the Shakers had needed £1 million just to stay afloat a month earlier, after twice being put under a transfer embargo within three months. “Day wants to make sure that the club doesn’t end up
