On Friday night I was thinking is it all worth the effort? However, as with so many times in the past, the determination and quality of Stoke AC's small band of endurance men makes it worth it and got us through in the end. 

Our sole aim at the start of the season was to stay up, and this we did with a couple of hundred points to spare in the end, but it is tough when one car is virtually your team bus! 

With strong men Tom Gayle, Brian Cole and Andy Allen all unavailable, we were down to 6, until Richard Barrington responded to my late evening text.

Top man throughout the whole winter, Seb Duffy ran superbly to achieve his personal goal of a top 20 finish. Seb has led the way in all four races and his consistency and continued improvement underlines our potential if we can gain similar recruits at his level.

Steve Bazell was our next man home, back in the 50s again after a tough mid-winter with illness and injury. It was brilliant to see Steve striding out again, even though I had no chance of keeping up with him this time! 

In my case striding out was a bit of a problem having picked up a groin strain at the Midlands Cross Country two weeks earlier. In the circumstances I was always going to finish, although I may not run again for a while...

Next man, Dave Lee put in his best performance of the winter to finish 104th. All of us are starting to realise Dave's potential when he puts down some structured training, and because Dave wants to beat us all, who knows how far he can go if he puts both his body and his mind to it!

Just 30 seconds behind Dave, 17 year old Liam Hendricken may have paid for a fast start, but next year Liam will have much more strength and fast starts won't be a problem. If you want to perform at this level you've got to have the ability and the intent and Liam definitely has both.

And how about this for commitment? Junior Rob Cook may now be a student at Bath University, but somehow he got himself to Coventry so we could pick him up on the way down. Although much more of a track speedster than a mud-plugger, Rob embodies the fighting spirit that we Stokies have, and he ran as hard as he could to make sure that we would not fall at the final hurdle.

In cross country races there is always a chance that someone will twist an ankle, or worse, so you always need a 7th man. Over the past 45 years Richard Barrington has been one of the club's greatest servants and he underlined this with his run for us again today, a couple of weeks after his 65th Birthday. Thanks once again Richard.

Our supporters, Kevin Hendricken and Maria once again shouted very loudly, and are an essential part of our small team. Thanks.

Although I mentioned earlier that Tom Gayle, Brian Cole and Andy Allen were missing this time, there is no chance that we would have stayed up if they had not competed in the earlier races. So thanks to you guys too, we know you really wanted to run.

This is of course the real key to producing good team performances in the Birmingham League. You need to have enough quality men to enable you to still record a good team result even if some top guys are missing. 

All credit then to local rivals Staffs Moorlands who finished 7th overall with a young team, and also managed to finish a B team, using at least 25 men over the season! Congratulations to them on a good season.

However a measure of our own relative success must be that the other two teams that came up with us from Division Two last winter, Wolves and Bilston and Bourneville, found this level too tough and went straight back down again...

If we want to do better next year we need both new recruits and the development of our existing athletes to cope with the competition at this level - very difficult, but not impossible. We don't want you to feel sorry for us though, just run for us! 

John Danahay

Full results and League positions

Photos from Mick Hall