sport news Luton's journey to Championship play-offs shows clubs must be free to get it ... trends now

Luton play what is possibly the biggest match in their history on Friday. Next Monday there is another one. And the biggest of all on May 29, if all goes well.

That is 11 days after Rangers travel to Seville for a mammoth date with Eintracht Frankfurt that could grant them instant entry to the Champions League group stage.

Two very different clubs, but with a connection. Failure. If Luton can make it through the Championship play-offs, they will complete a journey that began in the National League, falling through the fourth tier courtesy of a 30-point deduction for financial mismanagement.

For Rangers, the road to Andalucia began at Brechin City on July 29, 2012, their first match as a Division Three side, following demotion after financial collapse. Rangers were entered in the Scottish League Challenge Cup, a competition for lower division teams which in that season included Inverurie Loco Works, Wick Academy and Annan Athletic.

Yet here they both are. Back, if not at the summit, then certainly within sight of it. Rangers have subsequently won the Scottish title, and the championship in the three tiers below.

Luton have won the National League and League One titles, and promotion from League Two. For both clubs, it has been a fabulous ride.

And nobody is advocating fiscal incompetence as a perverse road to glory. There has been a lot of heartache, too, days when it must have been feared these clubs might not survive or would be cast into oblivion. And yet, that is football. There now seems to be a movement to ensure that every club exists in a safe space. 

No club ever fails, no club ever gambles. They are run, all of them, like provincial accountancy groups, with the sole aim of getting their taxes in on time. Yet some clubs have to blow it for others to take their place.

That is what makes football compelling. Oldham were founder members of the Premier League but will play in the National League next season. Luton are coming the other way.

These are football journeys. They make the game exciting. Forest Green Rovers were founded in 1889 but only entered the Football League in 2017. Next year they will play in tier three. Fabulous.

Sutton United, founded in 1898, came into the Football League for the first time this season and missed out on the play-offs for promotion to League One by a place.

Yet for all these journeys to be made, someone has to mess up. Not go into liquidation but get it wrong. On the field, off the field, overspending, underspending. There are many ways to run a football club well, there are many ways to run a football club badly yet, increasingly, we want that element of jeopardy removed.

We want rules and checks and balances and safety nets and harnesses, and the Government to mark the owners' homework, and for the ultimate ambition to be 12th place and a nice, big tick from the regulator.

But someone still has to go down. And the more it is painted as this doomsday scenario, the more fear there will be. And yet the shadows and light are where the magic is. Manchester City supporters do not talk about their many, many years of watching straightforward, dull as ditch water mediocrity. 

For a certain generation every success is seen through the prism of the year it got so bad they ended up at Macclesfield in tier three: Saturday, September 12, 1998.

Shaun Goater scored the only goal of the game with four minutes remaining. When your team is playing in a Champions League final, it is made all the sweeter by that memory.

Luton were doomed by a rogue owner called John Gurney. He wanted to rename the club after the local airport — London Luton — or merge it with Milton Keynes Dons, a club that at the time did not exist, or have it play at a new stadium built for Formula One adjoining junction 10 of the M1.

He sacked Joe Kinnear, the manager, and then gave him the opportunity to win his job back via a public poll. Despite Kinnear's approval rating running at 85 per cent locally, he somehow lost by four votes.

'Of course the voting was fair,' said Gurney, affronted. 'It was done by the people from Pop Idol.' He was a menace.

And, truly, it must have been soul-destroying to be a Luton fan through those times. But what are the stories that are told now? They will not be of all those instantly forgettable seasons treading water.

It will be the Gurney years, the fighting to survive years. Adversity is what gives a club its character and soul. Standing outside the London Stadium before the tie with Eintracht Frankfurt two weeks ago, West Ham fans swapped semi-final stories.

One in particular: Oldham 6 West Ham 0, League Cup semi-final first leg, February 14, 1990. A group of lads hired a van and bought some lucky heather from a gypsy at the M1 services. 'The away end was uncovered, it never stopped snowing, we got beat 6-0 and on the way back the f****** van broke down,' was the punchline.

Of course, not every club get a redemption tale, a happy ending. Bury certainly haven't, Oldham haven't. Bradford fell from the Premier League to the fourth tier and, so far, have stayed there, Mark Hughes now nobly entrusted with that comeback trail. Yet we have seen it done. By Wigan, by Wimbledon, by Bournemouth, maybe by Luton.

There has to be the freedom to get it right, and wrong. There has to be joy, and pain. If a journey that began at Glebe Park, Angus, can end with a European final in Seville, then Oldham can go from Wembley to Wealdstone if that is what their ability and acumen dictates.

We cannot insulate from success, or failure, because that is the game. The journey is the game. Whether to Seville, Luton Airport or Oldham, in the snow.

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