Fans again turn their backs on the Checkatrade Trophy

Chesterfield’s Proact Stadium is the destination for manager Stuart McCall’s men in a competition that proved a huge turn-off for fans, if not club accountants, last season.

Boycotts and protests were the order of the day in 2016-17 as supporters made clear their disdain for the change of format that saw Academy teams from the Premier League and Championship invited to take part.

More of the same is planned this term after the Football League made only minimal changes to the competition’s make-up this summer, with fans of Doncaster Rovers and Grimsby Town staging their own charity match tonight three miles away from where the two clubs will meet at Blundell Park.

The aim is to attract a bigger crowd to Lucarly’s Sports Ground, Humberston, than that which watches the Group H tie – something that seems entirely possible with Grimsby’s two home ties last season attracting gates of just 609 and 597.

Attendances did not quite sink so low at Bradford, but the 1,444 who watched a 1-0 home win over Stoke City’s Under-21s a year ago still represented the second-lowest in the club’s history at Valley Parade.

This, together with the abandoning of the regional element in the knockout stages that saw City endure those three long road trips in January means only the accountants when counting the £80,000 in prize money won by McCall’s side could have felt any degree of satisfaction at the club’s involvement.

Even Timothee Dieng, the scorer of the winner against Stoke, had to suffer the merciless mickey taking of his team-mates in the wake of netting in Bantams colours for the first time.

“I remember sliding on my knees after I scored and looking up and there was no one there in the stand,” said the French midfielder with a huge smile on his face.

“I knew there was no one there but I just wanted to slide. It was a big moment because it was my first goal for the club. But the lads still had a laugh about it afterwards.”

Rotherham United started their Checkatrade campaign a fortnight ago with a 1-1 draw against Manchester City Under-21s that, thanks to the frankly ludicrous American-style demand for there to be a ‘winner’, turned into a penalty shoot-out loss.

It means the Blues lead the Group F table with two points, one ahead of the Millers, in the quest to reach a knockout stage that has had a regional element reintroduced until the quarter-finals.

This means no repeat of the farcical run for City that brought two trips to Oxford on consecutive Tuesdays, the first having been postponed just 10 minutes before kick-off, on the back of another long journey to Cheltenham.

Other tweaks to the competition format include the relaxation of team selection criteria for League clubs, all Academy teams playing fixtures away from home and an increase in prize money to £3m.

Dieng added: “At the beginning, no one really took it very seriously, but the more we progressed, the more important the games became.”