The piranhas have gone and now it is down to the people of Darlington to save their stricken club The same guys who were this week sacked will play on Saturday, for nothing. The intravenous injection of capital consisted of £50,000 raised by a collective of local businessmen calling themselves The Darlington FC Rescue Group, with a further £10,000 coming from the supporters" club. Quite what they are rescuing they probably haven't considered. Darlo's recent financial history makes Greece look the epitome of fiscal discipline. It has stumbled from crisis to crisis, supported by the tireless work of figures like Liddle, who have been dreadfully used by a succession of comedy owners. Its state of the art 25,000-seat stadium, the hubristic folly of the former safe-cracker, tax-evader chairman George Reynolds, costs more to stand empty than the club earns. Crowds of under 2,000 barely cover the electricity bill. Other assets long ago seeped away as a succession of opportunists took temporary control of the club, and then, at first sight of its hapless bottom line, took flight. Which makes it all the more astonishing is that, in a week when five major high-street retail chains have gone out of business, Darlington, a company with the turnover of an ailing corner shop, somehow survives for another three weeks at least. But then, unlike fashion outlets and soft furnishing stores, football clubs invariably do survive. Because, in extremis, after the asset-strippers and property developers have finished wringing every last drop of cash from its tills, a club's fans will always come to the rescue, rattling tins and shaking buckets to raise the necessary funds. Darlington joins the list of those like Bournemouth, Brighton and Notts County, where the fans have taken on all economic logic in defence of their club. The truth is, Darlington might be a wholly unfeasible financial entity, but to its followers it simply has to exist. Take a fan called Lee Davidson, who breached the terms of a restraining order keeping him away from the club's matches in order to attend the New Year's game with Gateshead. It was, he told the magistrate hearing his case this week, possibly the last time he would ever see his team play. Never mind a potential prison sentence, he simply had to be there. That is what you call dedication. The challenge now for the fans is this: in order for the club to survive, everyone has to accept its limitations. The self-destructive ambition of Reynolds, who was convinced that he could rocket the club up the leagues simply by building a stadium was, at the time, lauded among the supporters, who admired a man who shared their more absurdist dreams. The crook-attracting myth, spun by the bonkers economics of the Premier League, that football in the lower leagues is some sort of passport to untold wealth, duly ensnared another victim. Yet a PhD in rocket science is not required to run a lower league club. There are plenty - from Tamworth to Salisbury, from Wimbledon to Oxford United - who have learnt from bitter experience that a plausible bottom line is far more sustaining than misplaced ambition. Cutting your coat according to your cloth need not be a debilitating presiding ethos. Thanks to the dedication of a diehard core of supporters, Darlington staggers on. Now it is up to the rest of those who live there to demonstrate that they wish to see the continuation of a 128-year history of football in the town. When Reynolds opened his pompously self-named arena a decade ago, 16,000 paid to watch the first game. It was not wholly satisfactory: the teething issues were manifold, the queues out of the car park humungous and Darlington lost. Few have been back since. But if similar numbers paid to attend Saturday's fixture with Fleetwood, it would go a long way to financing the rest of the season. Darlington's lesson is this: the locals can save their club. After all, now the piranhas have disappeared elsewhere, no one else is going to. Stuart Lancaster should have looked to Steven Spielberg The ever more impressive Stuart Lancaster has continued his bold spring clean of English rugby by inviting a series of prominent speakers up to Leeds to address the England squad on the qualities required to succeed. Gary Neville, Dave Brailsford and Hugh Morris have all been booked to share their wisdom. But you can't help feeling that Lancaster missed a trick in not issuing an invite to a man who was a temporary visitor to this country on promotional activities this week. If nothing else the stand-in coach might have learnt a lot himself. After all, as he has demonstrated with his latest blockbuster, Steven Spielberg is a man who knows more than most how to choreograph a bunch of carthorses across a ploughed field.