Barnet 2 Morecambe 1

Barnet are in a swish new stadium with facilities that feel far above the football their forlorn team are playing. Still, Morecambe are also struggling so there is always hope – and if all else fails, a nice warm bar for supporters.

- David Stubbs

That Barnet v Morecambe is a League Two fixture, or to those of us who go by the old money a Fourth Division one, prompts me to drift back to the pre-1987 days in which clubs were able to stay in the League despite finishing rock bottom by seeking reelection. With a few exceptions, such as poor old Barrow forced to give way to fashionable Hereford in 1971-72, they would do so successfully. Consequently, the moat between League and non-League felt like a wide one, with the drawbridge rarely lowered. While this must have been frustrating for excluded non-League aspirants, it did lead to a sense of continuity. As an 11-year-old, a wall map of the teams who then comprised the Football League, indicated by kit across the country, afforded me a detailed grasp of English and Welsh geography as I pored over it. Mansfield, Darlington – thanks to football, I knew where places were in this country.

Nonetheless, football futurologists and Darwinian realists of the 1970s were absolutely sure that in the near future, at least 20 of these clubs would go to the way of Accrington Stanley and Bradford Park Avenue as the game modernised. To imagine otherwise was as naive as to imagine there would not be nuclear war before 1993.

Instead, what has happened post-1987, when automatic relegation to and from the Conference was introduced, is an expansion of the number of clubs playing at a level credible enough to have their results read out on late Saturday afternoon TV to well over 100. The concentration of wealth enjoyed by the Premier League’s elite has reached staggering and obscene levels undreamed of by the gloom mongers of yesteryear. But despite the absence of trickledown, it has not led to obliteration in the lower leagues.