Quote Originally Posted by ian gibson View Post
I was also at that Workington match, was a bit gutted for Workington as they dropped out of the league that season. The year before I think it was, we were on our way to Bolton to watch the city and the game was postponed so a few hundred of us went along to Rochdale to see them playing Workington. We all cheered for Workington and they won 3-1, their first and only away win that season.
Bill Shankley was a former Workington manager, but, more than any other club I can think of, they were always fighting against huge odds to maintain their Football League status. I can remember reading as a kid that they had, by some distance, the lowest population of any Football League club - Wikipedia shows that only 25,000 people lived there at the time of the 2011 census and gates of under a thousand were commonplace in their final season of League football.

I was at Somerton Park for Workington's last ever league game as well - there were 8,000 there as County completed an amazing escape from the re-election zone after looking doomed with a couple of months of the season left. it was an awful match won 1-0 by County with a very scruffy goal and can remember feeling sorry for Workington's players who were just extras in the drama really as they had known for some time that they were going to finish at the bottom of the table.

I've always had a bit of a soft spot for Workington after that night, but they've never come close to regaining their Football League status in the following forty years - they've never even made it into the Conference.