A big week ahead for Chesham United this week with an FA Trophy tie at The Meadow tomorrow (Saturday) before we begin the preparations for our huge community Fireworks Extravaganza on Friday night.
Last year’s Fireworks event was a huge success and received fantastic reviews, so be sure not to miss out. We have a large logistical operation in place to provide what we believe the best venue for miles around to watch a professional and safe display. With terraces all around the ground, covered areas if it does happen to rain, bars selling refreshments and food stalls selling hot food – what more could you want for the perfect night out?
Gates for the event open at 6.00pm, please do arrive in good time to ensure everyone is in the ground and in position for the start of the display. The best way to guarantee a speedy entrance is to purchase your tickets in advance, this can be done from the website here.
As I say, before that we have a cup tie against Lewes. In the last round we had an excellent 4-0 win at Enfield Town, hopefully we will carry this form into tomorrow’s game and continue on our journey towards Wembley – why shouldn’t we dream? Many of us will know the history of when Chesham United went to Wembley in the Amateur Cup Final in 1968, the FA Trophy is our modern equivalent for fulfilling that dream, so please do come along and give the team your support.
We also continue to battle it out at the right end of the league table following an excellent win over Metropolitan Police on Tuesday night. I am sure I am not the only one who was thinking ‘not again’ when the visitors pulled it back to 2-2 after we had been 2-0 up at half-time, much as Poole Town did last Saturday – thankfully this time we managed to score a winner and take all three points.
Off the field we are continuing to strengthen with the addition of Mike Caidan to the Board of Directors. Mike has a commercial background focused on growth and has avidly followed the club for 43 years (the last 18 from Sussex) and is now in a position where he spends most weekends in Bucks. I am excited by the appointment, and I am hopeful that as we grow the Board, the snowball effect will see more and more people getting involved at different levels of the club as we strive towards our vision of being a successful community football club, both on and off the pitch.
I am also delighted to hear positive feedback from a meeting that took place this week to push forward the drive to launch an independent community group that will help the club to massively increase our engagement with the wider community and use our facilities and position in the footballing world to benefit people of all ages, including children and young people, people with disabilities, older people, people from particular ethnic groups, people living with mental health issues, people living in financial hardship, and for the benefit of the public generally. You can go back to the 1980’s and find that the football club was using the strapline ‘the community, our goal’, if we can get this project off the ground, and I sincerely believe we will now with the people involved, I think we can actually achieve that goal, at long last.
Back on the pitch we are delighted to welcome new player Lucas Sinclair to the club, Lucas played against us last season for Beaconsfield and the managers were impressed. We have signed Lucas on a dual registration from Flackwell Heath and we would like to thank Flackwell for their help with the signing. Lucas made an excellent first impression scoring the winning goal against Metropolitan Police on Tuesday night.
I am pleased to say that Jake Peck is now marching around on his crutches, desperate to get rid of them and back out on the football field. Unfortunately due to unforeseen circumstances the planned Golf Day for our Players Injury and Rehabilitation Fund has had to be postponed until the new year, but you can still make donations via the GoFundMe page here. We have had a terrible run of injuries at the start of the season, hopefully this is now behind us and we can avoid any further long term absences, I notice that the two sides above us in the league have been able to field much more consistent matchday squads than us so far, the fact that we are still very much in the title race is a credit to all involved.
Talking of Tuesday night, hopefully those of you that were there appreciated the new floodlights. Well I can tell you that we have since then had them tweaked and the improvement even since Tuesday night is quite amazing. With the clocks going back this weekend, it will not be long until we are using them on a Saturday afternoon as well.
Thank you as always for your support,
Peter Brown
