The football carousel is just around the corner again. The Saudis are ready to pay Kylian Mbappe £5,000 a minute. Arsenal have paid £105million for a player they believe will be a bridge to the title.
But nowhere is the anticipation quite the same as in Bury — at the Staff of Life pub on the Manchester Road, in the queues at Walsh’s butchers in the town’s famous market and amid the back-to-backs on Gigg Lane.
For four years, those places and their town have not been same on Saturday afternoons, as Bury FC’s famous ground — home to the club since their formation in 1885 — fell silent, cut from the fabric of the British football landscape by a rogue owner, Steve Dale, who milked the club and drove it into extinction.