In her hit Someone Like You, Adele sings of love, loss and moving on in the aftermath of a relationship ending.
Macclesfield soon had to deal with such a scenario.
Savage’s success with Macclesfield was rewarded with an approach from Forest Green – an offer he couldn’t refuse.
Not only did Macclesfield lose their manager, but his assistant John McMahon and three players went too,, external as Tre Pemberton, Neil Kengni and club captain Laurent Mendy followed Savage to Gloucestershire.
“I’ve always been honest and transparent with Rob,” Savage says in the documentary. “I rung him and said I’ve been offered the opportunity to speak to a club. Rob said ‘you have my blessing, go and smash it’. That was all I needed to hear.”
While Smethurst clearly wants his friend to succeed, he is seen to be visibly hurt by the speed of Savage’s exit.
“It’s like losing my left arm,” he says. “We had just won the league. It didn’t make sense as to why he was going.
“Sav had loads of opportunities to leave, I didn’t think it would ever happen. I thought we were in it together. Our dream was always to get this football club back to League Two.
“Now he’s gone it does feel very different, but nobody can ever deny what Sav did for this football club.”
At the end of the documentary, the pair are reunited as Smethurst visits Savage at his new club.
They hug and go for a walk around the training facilities before sitting down in Savage’s office.
“We were all on such a high,” Smethurst tells him. “We were going into the summer, we had spent ages looking at players, we had a few arguments over budgets.
“It happened so quick, it was like the heart had been ripped out of the middle.
“People genuinely believed that you were going to be with us forever. It was the speed and the letdown to the fans at the time on how quick it happened.”
Savage says he didn’t realise the backlash would be as great as it was.
“It makes me sad,” Savage says. “Every time I drive past I want to pop in. That hurts because it was our club. We built it from nothing.
“I could have kept that job for five years with you because we were together. I feared failure for the first time in my life. The stress was too big, I felt so much responsibility and it took over my life. Here I can just concentrate on being a football manager.”
At the time of writing, Forest Green are fourth in the National League, one point off top spot with only two defeats all season.
Under new manager John Rooney, Macclesfield are 14th in National League North but have games in hand that could push them towards the play-offs, and are through to the second round of the FA Cup.
“If you hadn’t have given me the opportunity to manage the first team, I wouldn’t be sitting here,” Savage tells Smethurst. “So I owe you everything in terms of my managing career.
“That’s why Macclesfield will always be part of me.”
