It would appear, from the outside, that Stockport are making the classic mistake which many Football League clubs fall for when dropping down to The Conference. It’s based on the mistaken notion that non-league football’s a chasm into which they’ve dropped, the plummet from League Two being the breaking point between real football and oblivion, and the best way to bounce back is to flex their muscles and take advantage of their status as a big fish in a small pond.

I’ve got to be careful in criticising them, as I fell headfirst into the same error. I remember writing in the Leader early in our first season at this level that we had to back our superior resources to blast our way back out of the division. My thinking was coloured by memories of our last promotion campaign, in 2002-3, when Denis Smith responded to a dismal relegation season by compiling an attacking side and backing us to be better than whoever we were up against on any particular day. The outcome, a fluent side with an Edwards marauding down each flank, ostensibly playing as wing-backs, to provide the ammunition for the prolific Andy Morrell, was a wonderful return to League One.

However, you can’t do that in the Conference these days. Perhaps you could when automatic relegation to non-league football was introduced in the 1980s because the scarcity of movement between the two divisions meant a genuine gulf had developed between the two leagues. That’s no longer true. The standard’s high, with plenty of Football League clubs scrabbling for the lifeboats, while the apparently weak team are certainly not easy meat. With the exception of Alfreton, it would seem, the part-time clubs who only get a four figure crowd when there’s a big away crowd are more competitive than you’d expect. Well-drilled, they’re more than capable of taking points off the bigger clubs, even if sustaining a promotion push is unlikely.

Appointing a celebrity manager is one of the mistakes clubs make of course. We did it with Dean Saunders, and although he did succeed eventually, it wasn’t until his third season; you could argue he learned the ropes at our expense in the first two years before getting things right. The similarities with Dietmar Hamann are rather obvious: a former Liverpool star who has built up a reputation as a coach and is now taking a first dip into being his own man on the touchline.  His side’s erratic early results suggest he’ll agree with Saunders that taking a post at this level is certainly an eye-opener; indeed, having seen his first match as boss at Forest Green, I think he’ll have learned that lesson very early as his side came out quickly, backed by a fine away support, but soon found itself scrambling to a point against well-drilled opposition.

Hamann seems to have a lot more humility than Saunders did in his early days at Wrexham though. Saunders had to learn to take the division seriously, whereas Hamann might seems oddly diffident and disconnect at times, but he certainly doesn’t seem to have underestimated the enormity of his task. It seemed to take Saunders a long time to come to terms with working with players who weren’t able to carry out his instructions as comfortably as those he was used to coaching and training at a higher level; how Hamann copes with that issue might just determine his longevity at Edgeley Park, although he says it’s not an issue. Come to think of it, the itchiness of his chairman’s trigger finger might be more decisive; Football League teams just don’t bounce straight back up, so whether Hamann will enjoy some patience as he rebuilds might just determine whether a man who played a decisive role in the greatest of all Champions League finals just six years ago can conquer a very different challenge in the fifth level of English football.