Pre-Season income is keeping us going in cold snap, says Darts chairman

Sunday 10th January 2010

DARTFORD co-chairman David Skinner says the Princes Park club is ploughing into the money generated from their lucrative pre-season matches as the cold snap bites non-league football clubs here in Kent, writes Stephen McCartney.

Kent’s largest supported non-league football club have averaged gates of 1,133 at Princes Park this season, but their last two home games, against Boreham Wood and Margate, have been frozen off and with their next two scheduled games away from home, the club is concerned with the lack of income being generated.

“Obviously it’s very hard,” Mr Skinner told www.kentishfootball.co.uk today. “We have no match income, obviously for us where we run the Princes Park facility there’s no income from the 3G pitch or the golf course consequently it’s even harder to keep going.”

Every single football match in Kent was frozen off yesterday and only two games in the Premier League (at Arsenal and Birmingham City) beat the big freeze.

With the recession already biting non-league football, the big freeze is the last thing clubs need at this present time.

“We’re in a fortunate position where we’ve had a good pre-season with friendlies and that’s built up a little bit of buffer so you’ve got a little bit to tie us over for the short term,” revealed Mr Skinner.

But he warned: “But if that goes on for much longer then obviously we’re going to start having problems like everybody else.”

With excellent facilities available at Princes Park, Tony Burman’s table-topping players trained on the main pitch yesterday to keep their bodies ticking over.

The chairman said: “The intention was to train on the 3G (pitch) as that was partially cleared but even that was frozen so Tony decided it would be softer for them to go out on the snow and train on the pitch, although the goalkeeper’s actually trained on the 3G.”

Subject to the weather, Dartford are scheduled to travel to Hendon (this coming Saturday) and Maidstone United (Tuesday 19 January) before hosting Carshalton Athletic on 23 January and a Kent Senior Cup tie against Welling United three days later.

“We’ve got two home games coming later on in the month so hopefully we’ll get those in and that will be the equivalent to a normal league arranged month, which you normally reckon on two games in a month,” said Mr Skinner.

“Obviously if that goes in that won’t be too bad with the prospect of the other two games later in the year.”

Dartford are in an excellent position to clinch the Ryman Premier League title this season and gain promotion into the Blue Square South for the very first time.

Burman’s side have collected 51 points from 20 games and are nine points clear of second placed side Hastings United, who have played four more games.

However, Mr Skinner sees the threat coming from third-placed Kingstonian (36 points from 22 games) and fourth placed side Wealdstone (33 points from 17 games).

He said: “We’d bite everybody’s hand off to be in this position halfway through the season. As everybody’s said, it’s ours to lose, rather than anybody’s to win it.

“Even a normal, if you like, form from the rest of the games should be enough for us to clinch the title.

“We’re not really looking at people like Hastings because they’ve played too many games. What we’re looking at are people like Kingstonian and Wealdstone, who are the form teams at the moment.

“Wealdstone have certainly got games in hand on us, although they’re going the other way, where by they’ve maybe have too many games to play. They’ve already got 26 league games before the end of the season as well as they’re still in two cup competitions so they’re going to find it very, very hard.”

The Dartford stalwart admits this is a rather frustrating time for everybody involved, but we have to wait for the white stuff to clear before we can look forward to an exciting run-in.

He asked: “Can you really predict a period like this? The fixture list can normally take one or two postponements, which is what you normally get in a season, but we’ve had a tremendous wet November and we had postponements and now we’ve got a cold snap so really it’s totally unexpected with the number of postponements that we’ve had.

“There’s not a lot we can do. They’ve already changed the League Cup to later on in the year, which doesn’t clash with FA Cup or FA Trophy games so they’ve made one sort of move to even the season out.

“There’s not a lot you can do with freak weather like this. You can’t really make plans for freak weather. You have to bare with it and do the best you can.”

Visit Dartford’s websites: www.dartfordfc.co.uk & www.dartfordfootballclub.co.uk