Stalybridge's Achievement (in Part) (Lightning Strikes Twice)

A glance over the grid of this season’s results in the Championship (see previous post) unearthed the fact that, amongst the facts of League-winners Stalybridge Celtic’s impressive victory campaign, they had achieved the not-inconsiderable feat of winning all six matches against the three clubs who, from around mid-season, with Celtic, established themselves as the effective challengers for the title and subsequently finished immediately below them in the final table, one of the decisive factors in Stalybridge’s deserved success.

This discovery then prompted a statistical analysis of the history of the results between the ‘top four’ in each of the League seasons since the inception of the national ‘Football Alliance’, based on this most recent campaign’s obvious distinction of four teams as championship contenders but allowing for the obvious fact that not every season follows a similar pattern, that, of course, sometimes fewer and on other occasions more than four comprise the would-be champions’ pack.

The findings of this analysis produced a most interesting and, indeed, remarkable fact – that, although the eventual champions have on quite rare occasion emerged unbeaten from the series of matches against their immediate rivals, Stalybridge’s six wins out of six achievement has been recorded only once before in 35 seasons…by Stalybridge themselves as they won their only previous championship, back in 1984-85.

On the opposite side of the coin, Liverpool St Helens’ return of a single point from the matches against their top four rivals this season is the joint second worst ever, and an obvious contributory factor in their failure to win the league: six defeats from six is a fate to have befallen only one team during the history of the regular league season - Blyth Spartans, even more coincidentally in the unique environment of 1984-85.

Such ignominy has occurred on one other occasion, albeit during one of the short-lived championship play-off series, the victims being, of course, Stalybridge Celtic, in 1986-87 (their regular season record was 5 points from W2-D1-L3, better but still the poorest of that particular four).

It might also be noted that Marine, who will rejoin next season’s Championship as winners of this term’s Second Division, are the only other club to have gained but one point from the six-game ‘leagues-within-leagues’, in 2004-05 (when Gainsborough Trinity gained 14 from the possible 15), and are also one of the few to have dropped no more than a point ('86-87 Play-offs), another curious coincidence.

Here below is the full season-by-season record of top-four results, from 1980-81 to 2013-14, which, as an additional point of interest, of course allows an overview of the teams to have been champions and contenders, consistently and occasionally (sometimes only once).