Gateshead’s fruitless trip south offers hint of Manchester City’s doomsday future

His team bottom of the National League, Lee Cattermole’s ‘bomb squad’ approach could well end with him departing

Among many doomsday scenarios facing Manchester City is plunging down the football pyramid. Would that be so bad? Instead of yawning at the prospect of yet another meeting with Real Madrid or repeated Avanti train-hampered journeys to Wembley, how about the exoticism of away travel to Wealdstone? In the National League, City’s ownership may wish to know, there are no formal financial fair play or strict salary cap regulations.

Wrexham, Notts County and Chesterfield have taken advantage of such lax constraints to regenerate. For City fans, Ruislip’s buzzy high street, full of nail bars, estate agents and a couple of homely pubs, would represent a welcome world away from Milan’s Via Monte Napoleone, as would the suburbia of Grosvenor Vale, Wealdstone’s home in the middle of a housing estate, which may jog memories of late-90s visits to Macclesfield and Lincoln. Simpler, happier times, perhaps.

On the fringes of west London, with rich, non-league history, last season’s FA Trophy finalists, managed by the 1980s QPR hero Gary Waddock, Wealdstone is the club from where Stuart Pearce, Vinny Jones and Jermaine Beckford began their journey.

In the digital age, the club became famous for the meme pioneer Gordon Parmar Hill, AKA the Wealdstone Raider, whose “you’ve got no fans” war cry went viral on a pandemic scale in 2014, the same year his assault on the UK Christmas No 1 with, naturally, “Got No Fans”, reached No 5. The Raider even made himself available for hire on stag weekends, though despite a recent social media comeback that revenue stream has been shuttered, a quieter life now observed.