4:36pm Monday 30th November 2009
By Derek Bish
GEORGE Rolls hopes Weymouth Football Club will be able to stand on its own two feet in 18 months as he set out his vision for the future of the Terras today.
Even though the club has debts in the region of £700,000, Rolls admitted that the club could survive with the right backing from supporters, creditors and investors.
The new chairman of the Wessex Stadium-based outfit plans to survive Blue Square South relegation this season, push for promotion next year, but most importantly make sure they still exist as part of the community for years to come.
“Weymouth’s a sleeping giant,” Rolls told a Press conference at the Wessex Stadium. “You only have to look at the crowds to see it’s in a false position now.”
He added: “Any Football club wants to play as high as it can. If we are not in the Blue Square South it wouldn’t be a disaster, it just means it will take longer to get back to the Blue Square Premier, where it deserves to be.
“We need to make sure this club is here in another 120 years time.”
One of the ex-Cambridge chairman’s first initiatives was to announce that under-16s will be able to attend Weymouth home Blue Square South games for free for the rest of the season.
“We’ve got to get the community to be proud of it’s football club again,” he said. “Without fans there isn’t a club.”
Staff at Weymouth Football Club should finally be paid tomorrow, for the first time in eight weeks, after Rolls confirmed all back payments would be made and that he plans to keep manager Ian Hutchinson at the helm.
However, when it came to other payments – including that of creditors – the new chairman admitted that figures kept creeping out of the woodwork, and the club’s situation was still not fully known.
“The first few weeks we need to assess the situation fully because we have taken a bit of a flyer and we don’t actually know the full extent of the damage here,” he said. “To be fair to Ian Winsor he’s the only director that’s full co-operated over that time. Some of the others have gone missing in action.”
Rolls will be joined on the board by vice-chairman Pranas Preidzius, the Supporters Club and Terras Trust – or an amalgamation of the two – and Winsor, as a non-executive director.
Read the full interview with Rolls in tomorrow's Echo
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