24/12/2007 - Chesterfield 2 Mansfield Town 0
NEVER before will Mansfield fans have sat down for their Christmas dinner feeling so dejected about their beloved club’s prospects.
Being bottom of the entire Football League and five points adrift of safety is reason enough to be down in the dumps.
The collapse of the proposed takeover of the club earlier this month, after a deal seemed settled in October, is hardly likely to help their mood either.
But what will make Stags’ followers even more upset tomorrow as they take knife and fork in hand is that they will still be trying to be digest a crushing defeat to their derby rivals – as well as their turkey roast.
At the moment, the only festive cheer you are likely to find as a Mansfield supporter is in a bottle. Certainly on the pitch over the last few weeks, there has been precious little for them to raise a smile about.
After the makings of a mini-revival in October and early November, the Stags now seem to have slipped back into the disappointing ways of earlier in the season.
Defeat at Saltergate was a third in the last four League Two and a fourth on the trot on the road. There is no doubt that Mansfield have been hindered by postponements and their lack of home matches in recent times – they have played only three at Field Mill in the league since the start of October and not lost any of them.
But by the same token, a team which has failed to pick up a win in what is now 11 games on the road – eight of them ending in defeat – means the club have hardly helped themselves. In most of the games they have been competitive for the large part, even if performances have been far than dynamic.
But the table does not lie. This is no hard luck story. Mansfield are holding up the rest because they are a poor side, no two ways about it. The Stags fans went into the game with fond memories of their last trip to Chesterfield in 2003 when Liam Lawrence gave them a last-minute 2-1 victory.
But a similar result never seemed on the cards and was merely a fading memory once Jack Lester put the hosts in front in the 52nd minute. Yet the visitors initially gave reason for a glimmer of hope, if only a small one, by the relative inactivity of the first half.
Mansfield hardly had a sight of goal themselves, but it boded well that they managed to keep Chesterfield, and in particular star man Lester, quiet.
However, any platform they established in the first period was removed by a sloppy and costly lapse of concentration at the start of the second half.
For a few seconds, Alex John-Baptiste and Jake Buxton, dependable to that point, lost position at the same moment. It was all the invitation Lester needed.
He showed his class by racing clear from a ball that was no more than a defensive clearance and beat the advancing Carl Muggleton with ease.
From there, things followed a familiar pattern. The shoulders of the Mansfield players slumped, the team lost their shape and control of the game was surrendered.
Chesterfield managed to score just once more when Jamie Ward swept past Johnny Mullins at pace as he took a cross-field pass in his stride to hammer home from the edge of the box.
But it could have been three had a potential Lester second not be ruled out for offside or one of several other breaks been converted.
At the other end, Mansfield rarely threatened Barry Roche’s goal save for off-target shots from Michael Boulding and Simon Brown.
Even when Chesterfield were reduced to ten men for the dismissal of Kevin Gray, after he had upended Brown from behind, there was no spark from Mansfield.
It should have been the catalyst for them to throw everything at their opponents and make it a difficult and tense final 15 minutes for the Spireites.
But while Dearden did do so in a numerical sense, employing no less than five strikers, it did not translate into attacking pressure.
Indeed, without counting, it was hard to tell who had an extra man in the closing stages and illustrated the ease with which the hosts closed out their first home success since September 7.
At times like this Mansfield have always had a player in the team capable of finding that little bit extra to make the difference.
Richard Barker was capable of it and, before that, so too was Lawrence.
But Mansfield don’t seem to have that kind of go-to man right now.
The most worrying thing for Mansfield’s followers is they know things are unlikely to change with the current personnel alone.
It is now vital new players are brought on board, yet there are no guarantees manager Billy Dearden will be given the resources to do that.
All eyes over the next few days, therefore, will be on acting chief executive Stephen Booth.
With owner Keith Haslam no longer taking an active role in running the club, it is the newly-installed head of the club who has the power to do something about Mansfield’s plight in January.
The hope is he will loosen the purse strings to allow at least three new players to bolster the Field Mill staff.
The increasingly-likely alternative is non-league football – and that is something no Stags supporter can bare to contemplate.