Premiership crowds slipped a bit this season but, as John Morgan explains, it's boom time in Divisions One, Two, Three and beyond after yet another year of bumper attendances that put the rest of Europe to shame

The last thing you expect to find at a Dr Martens League Eastern Division game is a crowd. But when King’s Lynn played Histon in a top-of-the-table clash on Easter Monday there definitely was one: 1,617 people gathered together of their own free will in the same place. Empty seats in Lynn’s cavernous old wooden main stand were hard to find. The attendance might not seem much at first sight, but when you consider that the DML Eastern is on the seventh tier of English football, it becomes quite astonishing. It proved to be the highest gate of the season at that level, just one example of the attendance boom currently being experienced in England.

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Ed Parkinson is delighted Hartlepool's stars are no longer thought worth a transfer to Chelsea as Stamford Bridge seems worlds apart from Victoria Park

As a follower of a newly promoted club who just achieved their highest league placing in 94 years of grim struggle, it’s tempting to view the Second Division through heavily rose-tinted specs. To me it seems a delightful, cheerful and friendly division which all clubs should visit regularly. A survey of the changes in the division since Hartlepool’s last visit in 1991 shows that rigorous asset-stripping of promoted teams seems to have fallen out of fashion. In 1991 the winners of the old Fourth Division were gleefully dismantled by middle-aged men in sheepskin coats – any promoted side would lose three or four key players to big clubs (defined as anyone who was in the First Division, had ever won a major trophy, or just had a big ground). This year all three upwardly mobile arrivals retained nine or ten of their first-choice promotion team.

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Reading fan Roger Titford is worried by the state of the Nationwide as the Premiership fulls further clear

Pre-season favourites West Ham were always going to be the big story in this league, whatever they did. One of the top dozen clubs in the country (in theory) slumming it in the Nationwide; would it be ruin or revival? From a distance it sounded like a catalogue of disasters: the Rotherham dressing room; Glenn Roeder’s exit; the ruck with Reading over Alan Pardew’s contract; his failure to get a win for ages; losing a 3-0 lead to West Brom; backroom staff shown the door; Jermain Defoe collecting red cards like they were Monopoly properties before following David James out of the club; fans booing awful home performances; dismal dis­plays in key away games; the board under pressure from shareholders. And yet like a real EastEnders script they kept it going to the last moments of the season.

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The World Cup has had to expand to the point where it can be too much of a good thing, believes Philip Cornwall, who thinks the European Championship is now perfection

It’s part of the calendar of the football fan’s life. One summer is dominated by the World Cup; then there’s a quiet year; but now the European Champ­ionship circus rolls in, in many ways a less cumbersome, more accessible (closer if you want to go; always in our time zone if you don’t) and so more perfect tournament than the global event. Euro 2004 offers a steady stream of daily matches stretching for a fortnight, then a less intense but more important final week, finishing on a Fourth of July that will be cele­brated so wildly in one country that visiting Americans will complain about the fireworks. The tournament’s rise, creating a two-rather than four-year cycle, has ensured the eclipse of the international friendly, making them training grounds for the games that truly decide coach’s jobs.

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As a teengager Neil Forsyth stood on a terrace which had seen European semi-finals and a final and where, amid the swearing, the snowballs and the cheers, it turned out that everybody knew his name

Where in Europe lies the road that plays host to two European Cup semi-finalists at two separate home grounds? The answer is Dundee, where Dundee’s Dens Park Stadium lies just 100 yards from Dundee United’s Tannadice Park. In April 1984, United raced to a 2-0 first-leg lead against Roma at Tannadice before capitulating in the return leg amid intimidation and appalling refereeing, leaving Liverpool to defeat the Italians in the final. And Dundee? Ach, who cares?

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