Welcome to another Friday and another week without any football. The freezing weather saw off both of our scheduled home games this week in what is an unwanted blow to the cashflow of the club, as it would with any business that has been unable to trade for three weeks.
However these are exciting times for the club, our league position is fantastic and our ambitions off the pitch remain positive, but it was very sobering at this week’s Board meeting when we reviewed the financial impact of these past few weeks and how it has knocked us off track from where we wanted to be.
Don’t panic, we are not suddenly pulling the rug on the playing budget or sacrificing the season, however, we acknowledge that we need to work even harder to generate additional commercial income and continue to raise our local profile and hope that supporters come along to the midweek games in the same numbers as they would a Saturday game, and ideally spend as much in the bar!
Supporting our partner charity also remains a priority and I am delighted to say that tickets for our charity choir concert will be on sale from Wednesday 1st February. We are very privileged to have the legendary Treorchy Male Choir visiting Chesham to perform at St Mary’s Church on Saturday 17th June. For 130 years the Treorchy Male Choir has been recognised as one of the greatest choral ensembles of all time and has given Royal Command Performances, appeared alongside international entertainers and undertaken an enviable number of tours around the world. I have been privileged to witness them a number of times and believe me, you will be moved by their performance.
We are restricted to 250 tickets, priced at £25 each with all proceeds going to our charity partner Bucks Mind. Tickets will also be restricted to two per person as we want to ensure the tickets are all sold to genuine attendees and not touted around. Look out for more details when tickets go on sale on Wednesday.
Elsewhere this week we have been approached about taking part in the Chesham Carnival this year. This was discussed at our Management Meeting last night and the desire is there for us to attend as ‘One Club’ with representation as the senior club, Ladies, Youth and Supporters’ Trust working together. It was even suggested by one person that if things went our way we could potentially take a float to parade anything we might win this season…they were very quickly told to not tempt fate (Though wouldn’t that be nice!). We do have a number of people away the weekend of the carnival, 10th June, but we are hoping to be able to attend and someone has been tasked with looking at our options. If you have any ideas, or would like to help out with our appearance at this year’s carnival, we would love to hear from you, contact me at chairman@cheshamunited.co.uk.
I am hopeful that we will play some football this weekend as we travel just up the road to Beaconsfield. The weather is looking fine and they have recently installed a 4G pitch so we should get some game time and hopefully pick up where we left off from our last game, an impressive win again Bracknell Town. Being a local game, it would be great to have your support there and I know we can make it feel like a home game for the players with our tremendous travelling support.
Talking of 4G pitches. It was soul-destroying to hear at our management meeting on Thursday how the youth section is struggling to find pitches to use in the local area for their matches, and as a result they are having to turn away some kids that want to play football. This is one of the fundamental reasons that we want to move to a new ground so that we can provide the facilities for all of these teams, and anyone that wants to play football, for the benefit of our wider community. The more people we get using and supporting the club, the stronger and more influential we can be to get good things done. I know that sounds all idyllic, but there is no reason why we should not strive to achieve that. There are other clubs successfully doing it and the knock-on effect is that it builds a supporter base for generations to come and strengthens the club from top to bottom.
We will get there, but first of all I’m just pleased to be heading to Beaconsfield tomorrow and hopefully seeing some good quality football – I hope to see you there.
Peter Brown, Chairman
