DAVE STANFORD looks back at the two-year fight to keep City at Bootham Crescent.

IT MAY only be two years, but it feels like York City fans have been fighting to save their football club forever.

Countless lost causes have been won in the preceding traumatic 25 months, but today's announcement is surely the save of the century.

Minstermen fans will remember this day, for even if little York City were to one day go on to win the Champions League, that glittering prize would pale into insignificance compared to reclaiming Bootham Crescent.

Rubbing shoulders with Europe's elite may well seem a flight of fantasy, but when little more than two years ago Douglas Craig put City up for sale and slapped a £4.5 million price-tag on the ground, the ultimate man in black, the grim reaper, was preparing to blow the final whistle on the club.

City supporters were committed, but disparate, and after years of tugging their forelocks in deference to their masters in the boardroom, lacked the confidence to believe the impossible was possible.

Most fans reckoned the club's best chance of survival lay with a sugar daddy with cash to splash.

Motor racing boss John Batchelor drove into town to answer the call, but his ambition was not matched by money, and amid a whirlwind of false promises and secret deals served only to make a bad situation worse.

The debts had grown, the vultures started to circle again, and just to rub salt into gaping wounds the spectre of homelessness was now looming large.

All the time, the so-called guardians of the game, the Football Association, said nothing and did even less to help. The taxman made sure he got his share of the slowly rotting carcass too.

Almost as a last resort, the administrators finally, thankfully, turned to the increasingly influential, pragmatic, and confident Supporters' Trust to take control.

There was barely time to celebrate though. A battle had been won, but not the war.

Finances had to be stabilised, but more importantly the ground issue continued to cast its shadow in those earliest days of spring. The bulldozers had started their engines.

Huntington Stadium was offered up as a solution, but to fans it was far from the Promised Land.

Problems continued to confront the Trust at every turn, not least the future of the running track at the stadium.

Even the dead stuck a knife in, with the discovery of a Roman camp at Huntington forcing yet more delays to the club's planning application.

But the Trust, dismissed in some quarters as a "bunch of enthusiastic and idealistic amateurs", was now well acquainted with adversity and refused to buckle.

Indeed, such adversity merely strengthened the resolve and perhaps gave the board the confidence to chase the impossible.

By the autumn, it was understood tentative, but secret, negotiations had begun to try and stay at Bootham Crescent.

It was the best solution, but equally the most unlikely, and yet, against all the odds, it has now happened.

The underdog has wagged its tail, David has toppled Goliath.

City's destiny is now truly in the best hands, and a club that wants to position itself at the heart of the community is perfectly located.

Just as the death knell sounded for York City two years ago, today the bells of York Minster should ring out in celebration.