Stafford Rangers

Marston Road holds just over three thousand, a little over five hundred of them seated, and it has been the address on Stafford Rangers' letterhead for long enough that no one remembers the club playing anywhere else. The ground fits the team that plays on it: modest, unglamorous, built for a club that has spent most of its life in non-league football and has generally been at its best there.

That best came under Roy Chapman in the 1970s. In 1971–72 Stafford Rangers took the Northern Premier League title, the Staffordshire Senior Cup and the FA Trophy, beating Barnet 3–0 in the final, and Ray Williams scored 48 goals that season alone. Three years later the club went further than anyone expected in the FA Cup, beating three Football League sides in a row — Stockport County, Halifax Town and Rotherham United — before losing to Peterborough United in the Fourth Round in front of 31,160 people, still the kind of crowd this club talks about rather than sees.

Stan Collymore passed through between 1989 and 1991, sold on to Crystal Palace for £100,000 before the career that made him a household name elsewhere took shape. Paul Devlin went the same route on a smaller scale, 50 appearances before a £60,000 move to Notts County. Neither stayed long enough to change what the club was, which has always been a staging post rather than a destination.

Hednesford Town remain the rivalry that matters, the meetings between the two known locally as "El Staffico." The club dropped out of the National League in recent years and found its way back to the top flight of the Northern Premier League by winning it outright in 2016 — the same competition, in a different shirt of black and white stripes, that Chapman's side had already won twice before most of the current support was born.