Another fantastic win for the First XI again last weekend when they showed incredible character to defeat high-flying Yate Town 1-0 at The Meadow. The visitors came on the back of a six-match winning run, full of confidence and determined to make it seven wins, but our team is no pushover anymore and stopped Yate at every opportunity, grabbed a superb goal early in the second-half, had a man sent off with twenty minutes remaining, defended for an additional eleven minutes of time added on and at the end of the game fully deserved the plaudits from an excellent crowd of over 580. A fantastic afternoon, if not for the feint hearted.
This Saturday we travel to Swindon Supermarine for what will be another tough encounter, but the team is full of confidence and focused on claiming one of those play-off spots come April. Anyone able to make the journey for this match, your support will be hugely appreciated.
Looking to fixtures ahead, Non-League Day this year is on 26th March, we are exploring ways that we can promote the day with our home fixture against Poole Town. We were hoping to bring the kick-off time forward to enable people to attend our game and still get to Wembley for the England v Switzerland match, but with a long journey involved, Poole wanted to keep to 3.00pm. We will just have to look to show the England match in The Chess Suite after the game and encourage supporters to stick around for a couple of drinks post-match.
We had another good meeting at the club this week as new Director Chris Kay begins to get his feet under the table with our commercial activity, both in the short term and looking ahead to next season. One thing we will be implementing again shortly is the distribution of match posters around town once again, which also includes a little more detail such as recent results and league positions of the teams involved.
We have also drafted our plans for relaunching the Claret Club for next season with some excellent opportunities for local businesses whilst we will be introducing some exciting new packages for supporters that go beyond just being a standard season ticket holder. The commercial team are working on this now and we look forward to sharing these plans, and others, towards the end of March.
Talking of plans, next week we have a meeting with the council to discuss and receive feedback from our pre-application plans for a new ground and the existing land at The Meadow. It is important that we work closely with all interested parties to deliver a facility that benefits the wider community whilst causing the minimum disruption to anyone within the vicinity of either development. We are looking forward to the meeting, keen to work with the council and hope this will be the beginning of the wheels getting in motion once again. I will keep you posted as soon as we have any information that it is appropriate to share.
Without giving too much away now, please look out next week for our next project at The Meadow which will involve a significant improvement to the facilities whilst we are still at our current location and be completely transferrable to a new ground when the time comes. There are significant grants available, but we will also need to raise a fair amount of money ourselves to complete the project. For that we will be using a GoFundMe page, details of which will be available very shortly.
Possibly related to the above, we have had some excellent design ideas for next season’s kits, home and away, please do keep them coming to chairman@cheshamunited.co.uk. It is possible, if things go well with the above, that we might be in a position to return to claret and blue as our home kit in time for the next campaign so, in hope that this is the case, let’s open up the design brief to include a completely new claret and blue design for next season – Get your colouring pens out!
Finally, we are starting to sell tickets and will shortly have posters and flyers available for the Tony Woodcock dinner on Thursday 21st April. Individual tickets for the event, including dinner and entertainment, are £70, with tables of 10 available for £600 ex-VAT. Email me today if you would like to reserve your places.
Thank you as always for your support,
Peter Brown, Chairman
