Hartlepool United: On the way to the Football League? It's still too close to call (2024)

A tight race in Hartlepool and a sense of moment, of tension, of place and meaning. It is blue versus red and on Clarence Road at 7.20pm, a gaggle of people are on the other side of the gates, singing, “We’re on the way, we’re on the way, to the Football League, we’re on the way”. This is Saturday, outside Victoria Park. Inside, Hartlepool United have just beaten Chesterfield 3-1 and it feels like a landslide.

As the sun slants across the pitch, David Challinor is taking nothing for granted. The team have extended their unbeaten run to 16 matches and a small group of fans have descended on the stadium. “Challinor’s blue and white army”, they chant and bounce as the manager reels off his answers to the BT Sport cameras: “It’s another one to chalk off… we’re in a title race… we would have taken this.”

The live television coverage tells you something about the fine job Challinor has done since his appointment 18 months ago, but then the locals are increasingly familiar with this sort of attention. Earlier that day, Sir Keir Starmer, leader of the Labour Party, had visited Liberty Steel, his third trip to the north-east coast in short succession. “The best way to rebuild trust is to listen to people and I’ve come here with my ears,” Starmer says.

Starmer was referring to the old certainties; whether sporting or political, some have gone in Hartlepool and others are trembling. In 2017, Pools fell out of the Football League after 96 years, all of which were spent in either the third or fourth tiers. There has been trauma, more slump, a toying with liquidation, but after recalibration and a dusting of Challinor’s magic, a return is within reach.

Yet the race is claustrophobic. Victory left Hartlepool third in the National League. Only first place brings automatic promotion, with the rest bound for the play-offs, but Challinor’s team have the best home record in the division, scored 10 goals in two matches and are playing silky football. Momentum powers them. All in blue, they dismember the red of Chesterfield. There is symbolism there.

Less than 48 hours later, momentum sticks two fingers up. Hartlepool make the long journey to Bromley and on an artificial pitch, they lose 1-0. They are now fourth, six points behind Torquay United, the leaders. Sutton United, who are second, have a game in hand. Stockport County are third.

Harsh words afterwards? “Football’s not like that any more,” Challinor says on the club’s YouTube channel. “I’d love it to be — battering each other and throwing each other around the dressing room, but it’s not like that. They tend to accept things too easily. I’m the grumpy, horrible one who wants to fight everyone after we’ve lost a game.” And: “We have to move on.”

On the same Bank Holiday Monday, Boris Johnson, the prime minister, is in Hartlepool. Like Starmer, it is his third time (he has previously had a kick about at “the Vic”, on the club’s pitch). On Thursday, there is a by-election in a town that has returned a Labour MP since the seat was formed, but which staunchly supported Brexit four years ago. For Johnson’s Tories, it is about chipping away at Labour’s “Red Wall” of traditional northern support. For Labour, it is a must-win.

It is a double spotlight. “We’re back on the map, aren’t we?” Ian “Buster” Gallagher, the team’s head physiotherapist and a Poolie to his core, tells The Athletic. “We’ve been on the national news most nights. And we’re being talked about in a positive light with what’s happening at the club.” The timing makes separation difficult. “None of the other clubs I’ve been to as a player or manager have been like this,” Challinor says. “The club is the town. It’s everything.”

This is Hartlepool and it is too close to call.

“Ah, mate, it wasn’t the club we all loved,” Gallagher says. “It was crumbling around us. The way a club is run off the pitch is reflected on the pitch and we got punished because of how it was run. The club got relegated. The fans didn’t deserve it, the players didn’t deserve it, but the club itself probably did. I won’t lie. The numpties in charge of the place ruined it. I don’t mind saying that.”

Buster has a connection to Hartlepool that is almost umbilical. He watched his first game at five, had a season ticket at seven, signed schoolboy forms with the club at 14, made one league appearance for them before one dream was killed off by persistent knee injuries and then lived another as physio. In an interview with the Times in 2015, he said, “It’s more than a job to me. It’s my life.”

Back then, Pools were clinging on. In 2013, they were relegated from League One. In 2014, after seven defeats in their last nine games, they finished 19th in League Two; on the day they secured safety, Gallagher cried in the dressing room. In 2015, after being cast adrift, losing to Blyth Spartans in the FA Cup, and on their third manager of the season, it was 22nd and securing safety in the penultimate game.

That was an embodiment of the club’s unofficial motto, “Never Say Die”, but there was also a lingering sickness. A sale of the club was on, off, then on to somebody else. In 2017, they laboured and then, for the last two games of the season, Gallagher was part of a makeshift coaching team. “I had to do something. We were going down without a fight,” he says.

Hartlepool were fresh out of miracles. “And that was it,” Buster says. “I knew they’d get rid of me. I’d been there virtually every day of my life for 26 years. Looking back, I was in shock, gutted. It affected me massively. Even though I still lived in the town, the first time I went back to the ground was three years later when Dave asked me to come in. I couldn’t go anywhere near it.”

Yet, from a personal standpoint, Buster’s sacking by Hartlepool, his club and his life, proved to be “the best thing that’s happened”. He landed a new job at York City and set up his own business. When he was invited back by Challinor, who had trained as a physio beside him, the club had been through financial turmoil — at one stage, fans raised £85,000 through a JustGiving page to keep it going — finished 15th and 16th in the National League and had a new owner in Raj Singh.

“I left a club I didn’t recognise and I’ve come back to a club I don’t recognise because of the pandemic,” Gallagher says. “For all the crap fans have gone through over the last few years, this season should have been a celebration. Don’t get me wrong, when you win, you buzz, but it’s not the same as when the place is full of Poolies. They’ve been robbed of memories.

“I’ve known Dave for years and I always used to wind him up — ‘I’ll let you manage my club one day…’. His record is unbelievable. How he hasn’t been linked with other jobs, I don’t know. He gets every last ounce out of everyone. But the players are great, too. At the start of the season, I’d have probably said they were too nice, but they work for each other. No bad eggs.

“It’s a skeleton staff, but there’s still passion. There’s a camaraderie, a togetherness. It doesn’t matter what anybody says, the chairman has come in and saved the club with his own money. There’s a feel-good factor. It’s exciting football, attacking football, we’re energetic, in their faces. I’d pay to watch us, put it that way. I’m thinking, ‘Here we go again, it’s going to happen’. I’m confident we’re going up. You just get that feeling.”

Inside the Vic, there are remnants of the club Buster left and the club it still is. Banners are draped across empty terraces: “We’ll Never Give Up the Fight, The Mighty Blue and White”; “Pools Are My Religion, Victoria Park is My Church”; “Poolies Are Born Not Made”; “Born a Poolie… Live a Poolie… Die a Poolie”; “One Town… One Passion… One Pools”; “United We Shall Never Be Defeated: Never Say Die”. At the back of the Cameron’s Brewery Stand, a bird has made its nest.

Buster was speaking late last week. As the old cliche goes, it can be a long time.

Sam Lee wrote about the team for the Hartlepool Mail for six years. It was 1999-2005, when Pools were either pushing for promotion or promoted, when they reached the play-off final to get into the Championship. “I loved it,” she says. “They were a fantastic bunch of lads. Everybody wanted to talk to you about Pools and you were writing about them doing well. I had the easiest job in town.”

Barry, her dad, first took Lee to the Vic when she was a kid. “There weren’t even any women’s toilets when I started going,” she says. “I had to go to the loo in the pub outside.” These days, she takes Billy, her seven-year-old lad, or would do if these days were normal. “It builds bonds in families, doesn’t it,” she says. “We’re a special breed.”

This week, she is standing in the by-election as an independent candidate. It is quite a change, although she moved out of journalism at 29 to start her own business. Now 45, she has “had enough,” of the two main parties, of career politicians. “I sit on all these committees and they talk about opportunities, but Hartlepool is just so overlooked it makes me want to cry,” she says. “There’s nobody shouting for us.”

Her campaign began with a request on Facebook: should she do it? The answer came back, a resounding yes. “I want the town put first,” she says. “It’s such a frustration. You look at other places that have investment coming in and we’re just sat stagnant because there’s nobody doing that job for Hartlepool. I’m well connected, I know the town inside out, I’m passionate about it.”

She has seen Johnson and Starmer doing the rounds. “It’s just photo opportunities, isn’t it?” Lee continues. “It’s like a circus, an ego trip for the pair of them. It’s Starmer’s first by-election and Boris wants to go, ‘Look, aren’t I doing well, I’ve even cracked Hartlepool’. The parties are campaigning like mad. You have to wade through flyers when you walk in the door.”

Lee’s candidacy is more word of mouth. She knows people and has held meetings, but she isn’t pounding the streets. “There are 16 candidates standing in this election — can you imagine them all knocking on the door?” she asks. “There’s nothing more annoying. You’re getting the tea ready, you’re trying to stop the dog from running out the front door. ‘Eff off!’ I’ve not knocked on a door. I’m living my life. That’s my campaign.”

At the 2019 General Election, Labour held on, but Hartlepool has always had its own mind. “Geographically, you don’t go through Hartlepool — you have to come to Hartlepool to be in it,” Lee says. “It’s six miles out on a limb from the main road. It’s quite a unique town in that most of us will be born here and die here. We lose a lot of young people who move away for university or work, but we’re a really good community. We can’t keep being cut to the bone.

“We’re the anti-establishment capital of the UK. People have said to me, if anywhere in this country can vote in an independent it would be here. Hartlepool voted Brexit in a big way. We voted in a monkey mayor. Everybody thought the mayor thing was a joke. People said that everybody who voted Brexit was stupid. They’re not. They see how little politicians do for them.”

The monkey mayor? On May 2, 2002, Stuart Drummond was elected as Hartlepool’s first mayor. Drummond was also H’Angus the Monkey, Pool’s official mascot, who had campaigned on a platform of “free bananas” for schoolchildren. Drummond immediately stepped out of the monkey suit. “I am Stuart Drummond, I am the mayor of Hartlepool, not the monkey,” he said. He subsequently won two more mayoral elections.

Hartlepool has become a vital battleground for Labour and the Conservatives in what feels like a significant moment for the town. “You have certain basic needs everywhere and ours are not being met,” says Lee, who is the third favourite to win with some bookmakers. “My mam had a heart attack last weekend. I can see the hospital from her house, it’s literally 50 yards away, but I couldn’t take her to it because they’ve removed our A&E services.

“I’d just called in for a cuppa on the way back from Billy’s football training and my dad came to the door white as a sheet on the phone to the ambulance. I was trying to keep my mam calm while we waited, but I was thinking, ‘At some point, I might have to start CPR here’. We deserve life support. We deserve more. I’m just not having it. I’m going to go down there and tell them. I’m not taking no for an answer.”

Having a successful Pools team is “everything” to the town, she says. “When the ground is full, the pubs are full, the shops are full, people are out enjoying themselves. When you have a feel-good factor like that, it’s contagious. It brings more people into the town, we get positive publicity. It boosts the town in every way. With the pandemic and how fed up people are, it’s been something positive for people to relate to and keep them going.”

As well as watching them, Lee still has others links with Pools. She remains a member of the Football Writers’ Association, she chaired Ritchie Humphrey’s testimonial committee — Humphreys was voted the club’s player of the century — and before Singh’s arrival, her company had undertaken a marketing audit of the club, to examine how they could improve funding. She used her contacts to try and find a buyer.

“The books were terrible,” she says. “They were having to put in £180,000 a month to keep it going.” Singh had previously been chairman of Darlington, Hartlepool’s big rivals, which was controversial for some. “There have been a lot of redundancies, it’s been a case of cutting back and it was a shaky time, but fair play to him, he’s stuck with it,” Lee says. “We need to get up, really, but Dave Challinor has done an amazing job. I still think we can do it.”

Tuesday morning, the day after Bromley. There had been delays on the motorway and Jamie Sterry, along with his team-mates, had not got home until nearly 2am. “It was a massive disappointment,” the right-back says of the game. “It was just one of those days.”

It was a rare sensation for Sterry, who joined Pools in December and has since experienced only three defeats. He is a Rolls-Royce at this level, which shouldn’t be surprising given that he made a couple of league appearances for Newcastle United, his hometown club, before his release at the end of last season. After that, there was a short spell at South Shields as he sought to build his fitness and play matches. He knows there have been too many injuries.

Sterry, 25, has spoken eloquently about mental health as well as his own physical issues, but he has thrived at Hartlepool. “It’s the happiest I’ve been,” he says. “It’s the longest run of games I’ve had. It’s a huge club, we’re a good footballing team and we must be the fittest in the league. Everything has worked out perfectly. Only promotion could make it better.”

Given his ability, it seems unlikely that Sterry, whose contract is up this summer, will be at the Vic for long, but then this is the knack of a good non-League club, giving chances to players who have slipped through the cracks. “I believe in my own ability and I think I read the game well, but the one thing lacking was game time,” he says. “I’d been hoping to get a team in the Championship, but that didn’t happen. I’ve loved it here. It’s a big few weeks for the club, for all of us.”

There are four regulation games left. “It was already tight before Bromley, but we can only focus on what’s in our control,” Sterry says. “We’ve got to keep going. Our focus has always been on getting this club into the Football League and if it’s through the play-offs, we know we’re good enough to beat anybody. I’m confident. I enjoy the big pressure games. I’ve played in front of big crowds. This is what it’s all about.”

Challinor apologises for the mess in his office. Hartlepool’s training facilities are at East Durham College in Peterlee. There are pitches and portable cabins and the manager’s room feels like a place of storage as much as work and tactics. There are bundles of shirts and bibs, whiteboards, scouting reports, stacks of paper. He clears a seat. Joe Parkinson, his assistant, brings in a coffee. Buster is in the building, wise-cracking. The place smells of football. It is good to be here.

Challinor arrived at Pools after three promotions at AFC Fylde, whom he took to the fifth tier for the first time in their history. In 2018-19, they reached the play-off final, one game from the Football League, where they lost to Salford City, returning to Wembley a week later to win the FA Trophy. By any standards, it is an impressive record and by the standards of Hartlepool — entrenched decline, sprinkled with chaos — he has been a godsend.

“At Fylde, I was trying to build a club, not just on the pitch but off it as well,” he says. “I’ve always wanted to be a Football League manager, but if that can’t be the case then can I go to a big club with expectations and infrastructure and move it forward? A lot of people would say this was almost a poisoned chalice, that you couldn’t have success here, but I think we’ve proved that wrong.”

This is Friday, the day before Chesterfield and three before Bromley. “It’s ridiculous,” Challinor says as he scans the top of the National League. “It’s tightened up and got a bit edgier. You’ve probably got four teams thinking they’ve got a chance of that top spot. But the mood’s great. Everyone would say a club that’s winning games is much easier to manage. It takes care of itself.”

This was not the case on day one. “It was still a League One club playing in the National League, with surplus staff, lots of money being haemorrhaged in lots of areas because of different regimes,” he says. “You have to cut your cloth and I don’t think they’d done that. I don’t want this to come across the wrong way, but I don’t think they’d recognised they were a National League club.

“I’m not saying we should have gone part-time or anything like that, but you’ve got to have a plan for where you want to be within a year, five years, 10, and have some longevity about your thinking. I don’t think that was ever done. Now, in terms of infrastructure, we’re run like a National League club. Maybe even a bit less; we probably need some more bodies in.

“The pandemic has meant some very uncertain times and that becomes unease, but what it’s also done is make everybody look at their business model and how you can be efficient. That’s certainly helped here. Hopefully, the club has hit rock bottom in the level we’re at. There needs to be a gradual upward curve.”

Winning helps. “The supporters have cried out for it for years,” Challinor, 45, says. “They’ve had a lot of disappointment and with north-east clubs, you almost build up a pessimism, expecting the worst. You’re just waiting for the wheels to fall off — that’s nature. Turning that around is tough.

“And all the recent successes here have come in failure: the team giving themselves a chance to win a game and stay up, or having a great escape. This one is different because we’ve got a chance of success in a successful season. On the flip side, what you don’t want is to have everything hanging on that. If we can get promoted this year, brilliant. If we can’t, we’ve got to be positive about where we’ve come from and build on it.

“Getting up would be an unbelievable achievement, but regardless of the division, we’re in next year the aim will be the same. If we’re in League Two, we’ll be looking to push on again and get ourselves to the top end of the table. If not, you can’t wallow in it. The most difficult thing at the moment is having to make at least two plans and possibly three around recruitment, pre-season, all those sorts of things.”

As a player for Tranmere Rovers, Stockport and Bury, Challinor was a “head it, kick it centre-half, who liked to defend but could chuck the ball a mile” — his words. He was renowned (“over-renowned,” he says) for his long throw-in, which was once measured at 152 feet and earned him a Guinness World Record. “I’ve got the certificate up in the garage,” he says. “The only thing that bothered me was that it detracted from the other, very good, players in that Tranmere team.”

He knew he would stay in the game in some capacity. “It’s not that you become sick of the dressing room but you either want to be in or you don’t and I always wanted to stay in,” he says. “I loved being around players, training every day. There’s no bigger buzz than seeing your team carry out what you work on between Monday to Friday and then winning. There’s no worse emotion if it’s the other way around.”

Challinor’s Pools have won more often than not. Just as importantly, they stand for something better and more fulfilling than clinging on. “You’ve got to resonate with the support and on the back of our shirts it says ‘Never Say Die’,” Challinor says. “We want to be on the front foot and make it exciting, but the minimum requirements are working hard and leaving everything out there every day.”

Nobody knows what will happen next, but at a junction for the town and a spell of prominence, the team that means “everything” has set out its stall. “If you’d offered us this position at the start of the season, I’d have taken it and not kicked a ball,” Challinor says. “We’ve got here, so it’s about embracing it. We have an opportunity to bring joy and happiness to a lot of peoples’ lives.”

(Top photo: Getty Images/Design: Sam Richardson)