Crewe

Port Vale sit closer on the map than in the standings — Stoke-on-Trent lies barely 48 kilometres from Gresty Road, and the fixture between the two is fought with a sharpness the county boundary between Cheshire and Staffordshire never quite explains. Stoke City, further along the same road, draws a smaller but still real grudge.

Crewe Alexandra grew out of a cricket club, taking the field first in August 1877 as the football wing of the Crewe Alexandra Cricket Club, itself already eleven years old. The name honoured Alexandra of Denmark, then still a princess. Football broke away from cricket in 1891, and the club did not become a limited company in its own right until 1899.

What Crewe built its reputation on was not silverware — the Football League Trophy, won in 2013 with a 2-0 final victory over Southend United, stands as its one major honour, alongside two Welsh Cups from the 1930s picked up in the years when border clubs were still eligible to enter. It was the academy that defined the club, and one name sits above the rest of that story: Dario Gradi ran it from 1983 to 2007, a tenure long enough to shape more than one generation of the first team and to give the club its identity as a producer of players rather than a collector of trophies.

The closest the club came to major cup glory was a run to the FA Cup semi-final in 1887/88, ended by Preston North End. Promotion arrived in 1997, via the Second Division play-offs. Home matches are played at Gresty Road, known these days under its sponsored name, the Mornflake Stadium, in red shirts with white shorts. None of it carries the weight of the fixture against Port Vale, the one date in the calendar Crewe supporters mark first.