Saturday 20 September 2025, Vale Park, Stoke-on-Trent

Kick off: Three O’Clock.

Roll the windows down on the A38, brother, and let the wind whip your face like a miner’s ghost whispering through the hedgerows. You’re heading south, but the past is riding shotgun. Coal dust in the lungs, hops in the heart — Mansfield’s coming to Burslem, and it’s bringing its baggage.

Mansfield — not just a town, not just a name on a fixture list — it’s a living, breathing contradiction. A place where history doesn’t just linger, it heckles from the terraces, it spits from the shadows. You can still hear the chants from Barnsley, from Sheffield, from the places that remember. 1984 wasn’t just a year, it was a reckoning. A winter that bit like a dog and never let go.

The miners in Mansfield didn’t strike. They stayed underground while the rest of the country burned with solidarity. Law-abiding? Maybe. Democratic? Possibly. But when the soul of a nation is on the line, sometimes you don’t get to play it safe. They scabbed. And the word stuck like soot on skin.

And before politics soured the air, there was beer. Sweet, coal-fired, East Midlands nectar. Mansfield Bitter — brewed with pride, poured with purpose. The brewery was a cathedral of ale, and every pint a sermon. But even cathedrals fall. Bought out, shut down, chimney toppled like a toppled dream. The soul of the town bottled and buried.

Flash forward — May 2022 — Wembley Stadium. Vale versus Mansfield. A final, a fight, a fever dream. We were magnificent. Possessed. Kian Harrett, before his days of  throwing deckchairs like confetti, James Wilson, that beautiful crazy from Biddulph, Mal Benning slicing through defenders like a poet with a blade. Three-nil. Tears from Darrell Clarke, the kind that come from somewhere deeper than football. Camden after, hipsters blinking at us like we were ghosts from a forgotten war. No time to explain. We were flying. We were alive.

And now they return. Mansfield Town. A club with a scab’s handshake and a brewer’s swagger. Sitting 13th. Nigel Clough steering the ship. But we’ve got no fear. The Gooners are coming in the Cup, but we’re not blinking. League survival is the mission. The circus can wait.