[This Charming Man]

[quote=shakermaker;497214] I'd rather be watching Deano, Lutel, Jamo & Smithy playing Whitby away.

I can't help thinking that this sort of opinion is overly nostalgic and as a result is also rather confused. Yes, it was great watching these players playing away at Whitby, or at anywhere else for that matter. We had a great side playing at that level 6/7 years ago and the players of that era should always be hailed for helping to get us where we are today. However, harking back to a golden era in the clubs past is, in the end, unfruitful. Even if we were to return to the NPL/Conf North it couldn't, for lots of reasons, ever be the same as it was back then.

Moreover, there isn't as big a big gap between Stanley in 2001 and Stanley in 2007 as the nostalgics would have us believe. The club now is reaping the rewards of what Lutel etc did for us at the turn of the century. Thus to say you'd rather we didn't have what we've got now (i.e. league football and all that goes with it) doen't make sense, as it necessarily involves saying you wish Lutel etc hadn't done so well for us and got us to where we are now.

We need to accept that the club has progressed and has grown. An upshot of this is that there will be changes in how close you as an individual fan feel to the club. These changes have been steadily occuring over the last 15 years or so though and haven't suddenly just hit us. For example, I vaguely remember an outcry similar to this in the 90s when it was deemed no longer acceptable for the fans to travel on the same coach to away games as the players.

However, I don't think the changes are all one way (i.e. fans feeling less attached to the club as the club grows) either. When I started supporting the club I lived in Burnley so didn't get the Accy Observer plus, although I went to school in Accy, no-one at school supported Stanley. My only knowledge of Stanley players and general club goings on was gleamed from turning up on a saturday and reading the match day programme. I'm glad to say its much different now. Thanks to the club growing and being able to take increasing advantage of internet technologies I now know much more about potential signings/current players/managers views than we ever did previously.

I've ended up posting a (much!) longer post than I'd intended but I just wanted to make the point that the positives of our progression far outway the negatives. I'm not a club apologist and I do think, for example, that we could have made much more in terms of Google Page Ranking out of our return to the football league. However, nostalgically longing to return to bygone times isn't helpful (for a start, what effect must such longings have on the morale of the current crop of players?). In short, if we do have grievances then there are more constructive ways of expressing them.