The Lion of Vienna is a name that will not ring many bells with today’s generation of football fans but you can be sure it will be engraved on the hearts of those of a certain vintage.

And very soon it may be all those supporters have left of their club, Bolton Wanderers – memories of their greatest-ever player Nat Lofthouse.

If ever there was evidence of years of mismanagement taking a famous old club to the brink of extinction, it is there for all to see at the University of Bolton Stadium, standing alongside the M61 motorway.

Broken promises, striking players, debts said to be upwards of £200 million, they are in the process of being sold by an unpopular chairman to an even more unpopular man who briefly owned Watford and was declared bankrupt five years ago, but is considered a fit and proper person to own a football club.

With pantomime timing of the ‘Oh, yes he did, Oh, no he didn’t’ variety, the haggling goes on and the Trotters totter on the brink.

We have heard of dozens of cases of clubs on that same edge down the years and somehow they manage to survive but the day will come when a famous name will disappear from the fixture list forever. That time is ever closer while two parties bicker over the scraps.

Laurence Bassini, the would-be new owner, supposedly promised to pay the players to get the game with Brentford back on. He said he didn’t make that promise. The game did not go on.

Wanderers were one of the 12 founder members of the Football League back in 1888. Are they about to be the first to disappear?

The strike action by the players who were still waiting for their March wages resulted in the game with Brentford being called off.

Was it the only option left open to them? Who knows, but the response from the EFL? You have two games to play – put out your youth team.

So, while the top end of the game wallows in more cash than it knows how to spend, clubs like Notts County (the oldest of all), Coventry and Bolton are hanging on while men in suits decide their fate.

Goodness knows what that Lion of Vienna, who scored 255 goals for his home town club, had a statue erected outside the stadium and a stand named after him, would make of the goings-on at the place he called home.

*The great north-south divide is alive and well in the world of rugby.

The notion that league is for northerners and union for the south has never come across as anything other than a contrived variation of a petty class war. Until now.

It is real enough.

Just as London Broncos are the only British Super League club south of Wakefield, so Sale Sharks are about to become the only union torch bearers in the Premiership north of Leicester.

With just two games to go and nine points adrift of safety, Newcastle Falcons are on the edge of relegation to be replaced by London Irish while the Broncos lie at the foot of Super League and face the prospect of the same fate.

Their replacement is likely to be Toronto Wolfpack, which is north wherever you draw your line.

Yet, it is a fact that the two codes are linked closer together than they have ever been since those annoying mining folk decided to form the Northern Union so that they could be paid for losing their wages back in 1985.

Players swap codes, coaches attend the same seminars and clubs even share grounds. Everybody just gets along fine.

Of course there are still differences – union would not dream of reducing their game to 13-a-side to create more running space; League would never consider the idea of scrapping their play-the-ball ruck – no matter how much of a ridiculous exercise it has become. And as for scrums in both codes...

There are still differences, though – like top flight league is for the north, union for the south … and never the twain shall meet. Rugby is a strange world.

*It only made a footnote on the big night of Virgil van Dijk’s collection of the PFA Player of the Year award and Raheem Stirling’s Young Player presentation, so it is time to put that right.

Congratulations to Georgia Stanway, local girl now of Manchester City, on collecting her Women’s Young Player of the Year award at London’s Grosvenor Hotel.

Van Dijk cost Liverpool close on £75 million when he signed from Southampton and few would argue that he is a deserved winner, but the growth of women’s football is one of the game’s success stories.

And whether you are a fan or not, you can’t dispute that it is a pleasant change to watch a match without players rolling around as if they have been hit by a bullet after ever tackle. Or haranguing the referee after every decision over such important issues as a throw-in.

Another footnote you may have missed: Fort William ended their Highland League season in much the same way it started. They were beaten at home by Wick Academy, going down 5-1.

It is probably true to say that they are looking forward to their summer break.