One week on from the nervous tension and final-whistle celebrations at Boreham Wood, Fleet fans can start looking ahead to next season’s National League campaign as the dust settles.
It was another hugely exciting end to a season at the Kuflink Stadium with plenty at stake – and Danny Searle’s side rose to the occasion to pull off survival at the expense of their final-day opponents. Have Fleet fans ever experienced anything quite like that… and does 2023/24’s campaign lay claim to be the greatest of great escapes by a Fleet side?
Fleet’s lowest position throughout the season came during a week in February sitting second from bottom of the table after Danny Searle’s first game in charge. Fleet drew 0-0 (appropriately enough the same scoreline that proved enough for the manager’s last game in charge this season as well!) but that midweek were overtaken as Woking won to leave us just one place off the bottom. In mid-February, we were five points adrift having played more games than all the teams above us. To take the season to a final-day battle which effectively became a relegation play-off against our opponents is certainly the most exciting (if that’s the right word!) survival scrap the club has ever faced – and surely deserves the title of the greatest escape as well.
The Fleet have certainly negotiated some late run of form to lift us clear of danger before. Relegation wasn’t an issue for the first decade or more of the club’s existence even though we finished in the bottom two of the Southern League twice in that period, as there was no formal relegation as such. It wasn’t until 1960 that such a threat first loomed…
1959/60
The Southern League introduced a lower Division One for the 1959/60 season. Champions only two seasons earlier, the Fleet’s ageing squad saw star man Jimmy Logie retire while manager Lionel Smith’s commitment was on the wane in his final season. By March, Fleet were in a perilous position, losing 7-1 at Chelmsford and having to pack in 13 games to the final five weeks of the season. We slipped into the relegation zone and lost five of the last six games but a crucial win at home to Bedford Town in that run of matches and another over relegation rivals Poole Town just before it proved enough for survival by three points – and we could actually afford to lose the last four games as well!
1960/61
Not so much a great escape as a massive ‘PHEW!’ after Fleet looked safe for most of the season but ended up surviving on goal average only. In a healthy eighth place as January ended, Fleet won only two of their last 12 matches to nosedive towards trouble. The final seven matches yielded just two draws and five defeats, including an 8-2 thrashing at Oxford United. The Fleet faced Yeovil in the final match of the season but lost 3-1 at home, leading to an anxious wait to see what Dartford could do in their final game, also against Yeovil, a few days later. A point behind us, Dartford managed only a draw and Fleet survived by the tiniest of margins, a 0.11 goal average higher than our local rivals. This probably ranks as the narrowest of escapes but being as we weren’t actually involved on the final day and Dartford relegated themselves by a failure to win, it’s probably not the ‘greatest’ escape.
1961/62
A third successive escape for the Fleet but this was a rather more relaxed affair than the previous season. A change of manager from Ron Humpston to Bill Lane had been made in November 1961 but with just two wins in the first two months of 1962, Fleet were in the relegation zone by March. Lane bagged three important signings – Tommy Huckstepp from Dartford, Tommy Williams from Watford and ex-Arsenal youth Johnny Sanchez – and his side finished the season with a flourish, winning six and drawing one of the final 10 matches to climb clear to 14th place. After three great escapes, however, Fleet couldn’t manage a fourth and the club’s first-ever relegation came the following season.
2002/03
Similar to this season in many regards, newly-promoted Fleet began life in the top flight well enough but found the going becoming increasingly tough as winter descended. With 15 games to go, Fleet were managing to stay out of the relegation zone but it was tight all the way through to the end of the campaign. April was nervous, however, with four draws and a defeat heading into the last game of the season and Fleet were in a five-way fight with Nuneaton, Southport, Leigh RMI and Woking to avoid the drop. A Liam Hatch goal on a memorable final day at home to Halifax Town kept Fleet in the division by two points as Nuneaton and Southport both lost. The survival at Boreham Wood last Saturday probably outshone this as a great escape being as it was a much more ‘do or die’ scenario against a fellow relegation opponent than was the case in this 2003 final-day match.
2008/09
A glance at the final table of this season might not suggest there were any relegation woes at all but with Fleet’s progress in the FA Trophy and a run of postponed games, it meant Liam Daish’s side were left playing an awful lot of games in the final month – 14 league matches in the final four weeks in fact! Even though the squad budget suggested Fleet were too good to go down, the team did actually fall into the bottom four with 12 matches to go. We did have three to five games in hand on some of our rivals but even so, those games still had to be won in a punishing schedule. In the end, Fleet won half of them which was more than enough to steer us clear of relegation worries and into mid-table.
The near misses
2009/10
Shorn of most of his FA Trophy-winning and otherwise experienced squad, Liam Daish assembled a mixed bag of older heads and young, untested players and the results were initially predictable, with the team winning only one of the first 22 games and nine points from safety by November. But with Magno Vieira and Moses Ashikodi firing goals and one or two more players added mid-season, a great escape began to form through early 2010. Undermined by losing three points as a result of Chester’s demise and the expungement of their results, Fleet went into a titanic last-day battle at Tamworth that was very similar to last Saturday’s visit to Boreham Wood. Needing to win, the Fleet came back from 3-2 down to triumph 4-3 but the celebrations were muted when news came through that rivals Eastbourne, Forest Green Rovers and Gateshead had also claimed enough points. Fleet were relegated by a single point and this was the great escape that never quite materialised.
2019/20
Another that wasn’t quite a great escape but it really should have been had Covid and the decision to decide the league table on points-per-game not come into effect. With 15 games left, Fleet looked dead and buried, eight points from safety (21st place was good enough that season due to Bury’s liquidation) and some 12 points behind Maidenhead United. After a 4-0 loss to then-relegation rivals Chesterfield, things looked even less promising but Fleet built on a win over Chorley to add three more victories against Maidenhead, Hartlepool and FC Halifax Town. That last win at Halifax was enough to see us climb above Maidenhead having bridged the 12-point gap to leave us a point and a place clear of the Magpies. However, after the league programme was postponed because of the pandemic, a decision was reversed to allow for relegation despite the lockdown. And once the maths had been done, Maidenhead were granted a reprieve as their points-per-game total was 1.078, ours was 1.076. So down we went by the very narrowest of margins.
