I said when I took over the club a year ago this month that it was important that I communicate regularly with our fans, in an honest and transparent way. I have tried to keep that promise and the end of the season seems as good a moment as any for the latest update.

As has been well documented, this time last year the club had dropped to its lowest point on and off the pitch and genuinely faced extinction. What a difference a year makes!

As I said when I spoke to members of the Supporters’ Trust at their SGM this time last year, the club needed investment and it also needed a plan to turn the tide. Then with the size of our city and our incredible fan base people would join the ride and things could snowball forward. We are now beginning to see this in action.

As I have bored you all by saying numerous times, I identified 4 key areas of the club that needed immediate improvement. We have been working for the last 12 months on all 4 and I have pleasure in updating as follows:

1. The first team. Absolutely everything flows down from this so it was priority number 1. We sat down with Chris last summer and agreed a competitive budget and some ambitious targets. In fact he promised me he’d win the league! But budgets and targets are only the start, they are easy to waste at any level of football!

The successful delivery is 100% down to Chris, his management team, and the players who deserve our full admiration. We were all devastated to fall agonisingly close to a trip to Wembley, which would have been huge for everyone connected with the club and indeed the whole city. But when we look at it, this season has been absolutely fantastic.

Our number 1 target at the start of the season was promotion. We have done that emphatically by winning the league by 19 points accumulating over 100 points, then we had that added bonus of a run to the FA Vase semi-final, along with winning a cup and another cup final to come. Full credit to the team for achieving all of this but also for the exciting style of play that has entertained our fans so much.

The biggest pleasure of the last year for me has been seeing the smiles and joy back on people’s faces. To see the positive emotion, after so many years of pain, makes everything worthwhile and is ultimately why we all do it. We are planning a big celebration of this season on May 17th. We invite all of our fans to please come and join us at the event and see this group of players receive their trophies and well deserved recognition.

After that we can’t stand around congratulating ourselves for too long, we have to keep driving it forward! Myself, Tim & Chris have already met and are planning for next season. As with any step up in level next season is going to be a huge challenge, but we will embrace that challenge. We can’t make big promises and won’t be winning every single week, but rest assured we are not going into step 4 to make up the numbers, we plan to do everything possible to be competitive and keep driving this club forward.

2. The youth section. This is a vital part of any football club. We have always had a good youth section, but it ran separately from the main club. We are busy turning it from good to great and have also fully integrated it and implemented the ‘one club’ philosophy that I spoke about last May.

We have recenty appointed a brilliant new youth chairman in Dan, and new youth committee who between them have brought in so much energy and fresh ideas. We are now up to 29 youth teams, including 7 girls teams, and have just hosted our biggest and best ever trials where over 600 boys and girls turned up to trial for the club.

We have also established a working group of myself, Chris & Nick Clayton from the first team, Tim Harris (Director of football), Sean McGregor (U21), Kev Brookes (U18) and Matt Tally (U16) to ensure that we have a pathway from youth through to first team for our best talents. We have recently secured some talented 18 year olds who with their parents were genuinely impressed by this. The future is exciting and bright!

3. Our commercial operations. This needed a lot of improvement. We have always had great support from the Pinches family, which we continue to be grateful for. But outside of that it was a case of a few companies kindly giving us a few hundred quid for a board and that’s pretty much it. We have invested in recruiting Ryan who has been an outstanding addition, and added Rob & Karl into commercially focused positions on the board.

Between us we have developed a comprehensive commercial offering, moved to an outlook of building mutually beneficial relationships where we provide value to our corporate partners, and we have increased our number of those partners to over 40.

Due to the success of our first team, attendances and match day income are also up significantly on last year. But again this is just a start and we have a long way still to go. To be fully open with you all, without investment we have still made a trading loss this season.

But we are headed in the right direction, making good investments, and putting the right foundations in place to try and progress to a sustainable position ASAP. This is clearly hampered by not having our own home, but Rome wasn’t built in a day!

4. Our facilities. This is probably the most challenging of the 4, but was always going to be. The long term plan is to own our own home, which also facilitates training facilities for our youth teams and brings everything together.

We are working on the Hindlip option and have spent the last few months consulting with all the relevant stakeholders, including the all important public consultation. Factoring the feedback in, we are now amending and finalising the plans ready for a full planning application to be submitted later this year.

In the meantime we are simultaneously working through the challenges of our existing facilities at Claines, including the pitch issues, and the required ground improvements for step 4. We will be updating on this shortly.

We are also working through training facilities for our youth and have secured a large portion of the slots on the new 3G at Perdiswell.

Progress in these 4 areas has been significant but it is just a start, there is lots still to do! This has been and continues to be a team effort by so many fantastic people. The board, who in my time working with them have been hard working, honest and passionate about leading our club. The playing management and staff. Our incredible volunteers, who I have to thank for their immense work and without whom we couldn’t do what we do. Our sponsors. And our amazing supporters - please continue to support the team in large and vocal numbers as you have done this season, the players will tell you it has made the difference!

I hope you have all enjoyed the season. After Monday I hope that you all enjoy a nice few weeks break, then we go again. My final message is the same as it has been since last May - keep the Faith and enjoy the climb!

UTC