David Conn: Fans steer Chesterfield through first stage of struggle for survival

Supporters' trust which owns club has seen financial and managerial decisions vindicated but crisis is not over yet

Losing on penalties can be football's cruellest fate, but following Chesterfield's recent traumas, no mere missed spot-kick could dent the profound pride at a packed Saltergate after Tuesday night's exhilarating 1-1 draw in the Worthington Cup with Premiership West Ham. Having nearly been put out of existence last year after 11 horrible months in the hands of the former chairman Darren Brown, who left the club £1.6m in the red, fined and docked nine points for footballing irregularities by the Football League and with two sides of historic Saltergate closed on safety grounds, just hosting a game of such atmosphere and intensity qualified in itself as a triumph.

That the club has survived at all is due largely to the Chesterfield Football Supporters Society, a fans' trust of 3,200 members – close to the club's average attendance – which bought the club in April 2001 when bailiffs were jostling with moneylenders to recover their debts, and immediately put the club into administration. Eighteen months of huge effort later, helped by individual local businessmen, the club is out of administration, met a £183,000 payment to creditors last month and has reopened the whole of historic Saltergate. Dave Rushbury, the club physio whom the Supporters Society appointed as manager, has, with no money to spend, marshalled a tidy side which survived last season, sits fifth in the Second Division after an unbeaten September, and on Tuesday stood up manfully to the intricate West Ham talents of Di Canio, Cole and Sinclair.

But Chesterfield were at pains afterwards to stress how far their struggle is from being over. The defeat, 5-4 on penalties, would have been harder to take had the game not been covered live on Sky Sports, which meant a windfall £100,000 on top of the bumper 7,102 gate. Local businessmen are lending the club money to cover ongoing losses, and substantial money is still owed to creditors.

"Tuesday was a great night, made special by the real sense that we could have been out of existence until so recently," said Phil Tooley, a Supporters Society director. "But we still have massive work to do to safeguard the club's existence." The work so far has been a monument to the pride invested in lower division football clubs – at a time when their existence is more widely threatened – and to the commitment fans muster to stave off crisis.

Darren Brown bought Chesterfield, who had money in the bank, from the former chairman Norton Lea in June 2000 via his company UK Sports Group. He was hailed as a tycoon, and his company as a fledgling empire, which included the Sheffield Steelers and Hull Thunder ice hockey clubs and Sheffield Sharks basketball club. But it collapsed rapidly under an avalanche of debt, £1.6m at Chesterfield alone.

The postscript to the disaster is slowly being played out. In July a businessman, Michael Bacon, was sentenced to 200 hours community service at Derby Crown Court after he admitted presenting false invoices to the club totalling £25,000 and pleaded guilty to four charges of false accounting.

On 23 October, another man, Andy Marples, who acted as an accountant at Chesterfield during Brown's time, is due to appear before magistrates to face 12 charges of false accounting which allegedly caused the football club to be defrauded of £485,750 between June 2000 and February 2001.

Brown himself has been arrested and questioned by Derbyshire Police officers, who are investigating alongside the Serious Fraud Office, and he is currently out on police bail. In May, Brown's personal creditors rejected his proposal to pay 14 pence per pound out of the total £283,506 he admitted he owed to a roll call of banks, credit card and finance companies, the Inland Revenue, the British National Ice Hockey League and £64,338 to Chesterfield FC.

Saltergate, believed to be the oldest League ground in England and therefore the world because football has been played on it since 1871, had not been worked on as plans for a new stadium were being advanced, and was further neglected under Brown. The Football Licensing Authority finally lost patience, closed the Kop end and Compton Street side in December 2000, and was threatening to close the Cross Street open terrace. This would have left open only the Main Stand, a 1936 relic of steel girders and wooden seats, which has never exactly been a contender for an architecture award.

The supporters took over in April 2001 in the teeth of the crisis, and, in administration, had managed by September to refurbish Cross Street and install safe terracing on the Kop, at a cost of £320,000. The supporters, including an accountant, Alan Walters, worked tirelessly, for free, to stabilise the finances and drag the club out of administration, while continuing to pay players and staff and try to compete on the field. The deal, eventually agreed with creditors and ratified by court order, was for the club to pay around £300,000 initially, followed by three further instalments of £183,000, one this year and one in each of the next two years, a total of £549,000. Then, with grants from the Football Foundation, Saltergate was opened again on all four sides this season when Compton Street was converted, at a cost of £160,000, into a 1,200-seat stand.

The financial agreement, though, was made in the expectation of receiving money from ITV Digital, and Chesterfield were hit harder than most by Carlton's and Granada's refusal to honour that contract. The supporters needed help and two former directors, Barrie Hubbard and Mike Warner, together with Jason Elliott, a supporter who won a fortune on a National Lottery scratchcard, and Walters, who became financial director, agreed to become directors and fund the ongoing expected losses of £250,000 this season. The Society now has two directors on the club board and has to concentrate on raising the money to pay off the creditors. This has not been easy – the first £183,000 was only paid last month with around £70,000 from the club's own lottery scheme – and raising a further £366,000, from a fanbase suffering crisis fatigue, looks a massive undertaking.

This stricken environment is not what ambitious football managers would cite as an ideal, but Dave Rushbury has so far surpassed realistic expectation. A West Bromwich Albion and Sheffield Wednesday player in the 70s and 80s, Rushbury holds a Uefa A coaching licence, but, when he arrived at Saltergate with the former manager Paul Hart in 1989, there was no vacancy for a coach. He stayed, working as the club's physiotherapist for 12 years. When the then manager Nicky Law left for Bradford on the last day of 2001, the board, then made up entirely of supporters, appointed Rushbury as the caretaker manager, and, in the face of many doubters, gave him the job permanently in February.

Told he had no money to spend, Rushbury has vindicated their judgement by keeping Chesterfield up last season, and has built a tidy side out of young players and free signings. Chris Brandon, who confidently went the long way round David James to score a sparkling equaliser against West Ham, is a former Bradford Park Avenue player signed on a free transfer from Torquay. Mark Hudson, who stood strong in the centre of midfield against Michael Carrick and Joe Cole, is on long-term loan from Middlesbrough, after the Football League last month forbade Chesterfield from paying £100,000 to sign the player permanently. Effectively, the club is embargoed from spending money.

"The situation is still very tight indeed," Walters said this week. "People must not get the idea that the crisis is over. We need all the help and commitment we can get from everybody in the town."

On Tuesday, Rushbury described the game as: "A testament to you, the supporters, who would not let this club go to the wall", and sent his team out to do them proud. Howard Borrell, a Supporters' Society director who works as the Saltergate public announcer, called at the end for the fans to return: "If you've liked what you've seen, tonight, please come back."

Like all the efforts made by the supporters to save their stalwart, historic club, it was a plea from the heart.

d.conn@independent.co.uk