Welcome to the Desperation Cup Final: Oldham and Southend fight for big league return ticket

Telegraph

01-06-2025

According to Maurice Scott, the chair of the Oldham Athletic Supporters Foundation, when his team face Southend United in the National League play-off at Wembley on Sunday, the game should have a different name.
'It's almost the Desperation Cup Final,' he says. 'I know we're desperate to get back. They must be, too. Everyone talks about the Championship play-off being so huge economically. But winning this would be absolutely enormous for both of us. It's not just financial, though it is massive with things like being able to reinstate the club's academy. More, it's about your club's relevance.'
He has a point. This is the collision of two clubs of long and distinguished competitive history driven out of the Football League by some of the worst examples of financial mismanagement in the game. In 2021, Southend United, after 101 years of league membership, found themselves evicted to the fifth tier in a flurry of winding-up orders and unpaid bills, of players without wages and fans in mutinous despair.
A year later they were joined by Oldham, founder members of the Premier League, a club that had been eviscerated by an owner who got through managers at a rate their neighbours Manchester City were winning trophies, firing 10 in four years. These two were the poster boys for self-destruction, once thriving community assets, driven by scandalous directorial incompetence to the very lip of extinction. And now they are back, infused with optimism, both with a chance of a return to where they believe they belong.
'This feels like the shot,' says James Nottage, who has followed Southend since he was a teenager, once leading a pitch invasion at Roots Hall after victory in the League Two play-off semi-final in 2015. 'At the moment we can say we are a Football League club that's fallen on bad times. One more season and that's no longer credible. We'll become a non-league operation.'
The game is that big and, for both, this match represents the light at the end of a very long tunnel.
When the football agent Abdallah Lemsagam bought Oldham in 2018, his plan was to use the club as a shop window for overseas talent, who could be sold on at a profit. But the application of his idea was completely chaotic. There was a hint how successful it might be from the off, when the manager John Sheridan arrived back from the first closed season under new ownership to find the training ground filled with players he had never seen or heard of. Lemsagam's brother was installed as director of football, a man who reckoned his knowledge far superior to any mere manager. Sheridan was the first of many to go; Paul Scholes lasted seven games before tiring of the interference, Harry Kewell and David Unsworth not much longer.
Staffed with players entirely inappropriate for League One and Two, the team tumbled through the divisions, its descent accompanied by a flurry of unpaid bills, winding up orders from HMRC and supporter boycotts. It was not until they were ensconced in the National League that Lemsagam ended his disastrous experiment, selling the club in 2022 on to local businessman Frank Rothwell, a man whom the previous year at the age of 70 had demonstrated his determination by becoming the oldest person to row single-handed across the Atlantic. Rothwell had no history as a fan of the club. But he is a huge supporter of the town of Oldham and immediately saw them as a standard-bearer for the community.
'Let's get people being proud of Oldham again, talking about the club in the chippy, at school,' he said when taking control, while wearing his trademark flat cap. 'I want people to feel like they own the football club.'
In with the away fans 🏟
Oldham Athletic owner Frank Rothwell watching his side face Chesterfield alongside the Latics supporters 🦉 pic.twitter.com/3TQSxcN26E
— Football on TNT Sports (@footballontnt) August 19, 2023
It took a couple of seasons, but, under the stewardship of chief executive Darren Royle, son of the club's greatest manager Joe, stability has been restored. Micky Mellon has been the club's longest serving manager for more than a decade. If not quite at the levels applied in the past couple of seasons at Wrexham and Stockport, in the attempt to regain league status, money has been thrown at bringing in players of proper experience. And, with things now settled off the pitch, the fans have flooded back.
'We're like rebels without a cause now,' says Scott. 'Everyone is pulling in the right direction. Now we need to get over this final hurdle.'
At Southend, things were just as woeful. Under the ownership of Ron Martin, who took over in 1998, the place stuttered and staggered on for a couple of decades before becoming mired in misery. Martin, a property developer, had promised a new stadium and new training ground. But his plans were about as authentic as his hairline and while his coiffure bloomed, the club wilted. Between 2009 and when he finally relinquished control in 2024, the club swerved 18 winding-up petitions, most from HMRC over unpaid taxes.
'The depths we plunged ethically and financially was reflected in the amount of jeopardy on the pitch,' says Nottage. 'The number of times judges said they only stayed the winding-up orders because this was a football club and a community asset... '
Only You x SUFC 🦐 pic.twitter.com/jCNVceDksr
— Southend United FC (@SUFCRootsHall) May 30, 2025
Now under new Australian ownership, and with the club legend Kevin Maher (who also played 31 games for Oldham in 2008-09 season) in the dugout, there is a sense of hope at Roots Hall. Such is the feeling of revival in both clubs, an attendance record will be set for a non-league match when more than 50,000 fans make their way to Wembley. Though the crowd could have been even bigger. Restrictions were put on the capacity because engineering work means Wembley Park station will be closed on the day. Initially, only 40,000 seats were made available. Until the Oldham Supporters Federation and its Southend counterpart got to work, that is.
'We combined in lobbying. It worked well,' says Scott. 'I think everybody who wants to go can go now. Certainly for us, a lot of people who felt estranged by the Lemsagam times are coming back. No wonder, it's our first visit to Wembley since the 1994 FA Cup semi-final.'
The decision to close Wembley Park was taken back in February. And in fairness to Transport for London, a glance at the National League table then would not have suggested the two best-supported clubs in the division would be meeting. In truth both are fortunate that the National League play-off system gives a chance to those who finish as low as seventh in the table. Neither had distinguished seasons: Southend finished 15 points behind Forest Green Rovers, whom they beat in the semi-final, while Oldham were 23 points adrift of their opponents York City. For both, everything seems to be coming together at the season's sharp end.
'We were pretty hopeless up to the play-offs, then we got senior players back who had barely played for us this year,' says Scott. Players like the Cameroonian centre-back Manny Monthé, or Corry Evans, the seasoned Northern Ireland international midfielder.
Scott added: 'I'm optimistic. Our captain Tom Conlon lifted a play-off trophy for Port Vale, our manager did it with Tranmere. None of them will be intimidated by Wembley. They will know exactly what to do.'
Meanwhile, it is an optimism shared in Essex. 'I don't know if we're any good,' says Nottage. 'But this just feels right. We've sorted the off-field. Now it's time for the on-field. Though honestly, I daren't even think about what it will mean if we lose. No, I'm not going to go there.'