Rolls: Local is the way forward
By Derek Bish

Tuesday 9th March 2010

GEORGE Rolls has admitted that local players and staff should be the way forward for Weymouth as they bid to stabilise themselves in the Zamaretto League Premier Division next season.

With left-back Martin Slocombe, who has joined Chippenham Town, becoming the fifth player to have departed in the last few days, the Terras’ chairman has resigned himself to the club losing its Blue Square South status, especially with more players seemingly heading for the exit door.

A Company Voluntary Arrange-ment (CVA), proposed to pay off creditors nine per cent over five years, would see the Wessex Stadium-based outfit booted out of the division anyway, if accepted, and Rolls is looking for a fresh start next season.

“We have to regroup and look at getting local lads in who want to play for Weymouth and give their all,” he said. “To be fair, a lot of the lads have given their all this season but not been good enough.

“We need to find stability and I think that is what the fans want so what I’ll be doing, if the CVA goes through, is letting the fans know what our budget is next season and saying this budget is probably a mid-table budget.

“If we come higher than mid-table we should applaud the team. If not, they can get on at us, but at least we’ll still be about.”

However, there are more pressing concerns regarding the future of the club itself with Rolls needing 75 per cent of creditors to back his CVA proposal to avoid liquidation.

“There have been a lot of fans come up to me, all being very positive and supporting me, which is great,” said Rolls. “I’m sure there are plenty more who aren’t so supportive. The disappointment for me on Saturday though was how many Weymouth fans turned up.

“It wasn’t the greatest support from the home crowd but I can understand that with the situation the club has been in.

“Like I have always said, we need the fans to get behind us for us to stand a chance of being a club.

“I hope we’re not going to fold. We’ve had 120 years of history and I hope there will be another 120 to come.

“It would be disappointing if the creditors were to vote no at the meeting.”

Rolls also answered questions as to why the Terras Saviours were listed as creditors in the CVA document.

“It’s a liability to the Football club – I was one of the people who paid their money and didn’t get what was on the tin,” he said. “It’s just as well I did put it in because the insolvency practitioner (IP) phoned me yesterday and said he had five or six companies and people phone up and say their credit listed them as X but it should be more because they had Terras Saviours.

“People have got confused about liabilities and debts. They are two different things. We’ve put every single liability that this football club has, that we know about, on to the creditors list.

“For example, everyone keeps asking about Andy Cooke. We’ve readily said we’re disputing that claim and the IP will have to make a judgement on what that claim is and if it should be for that amount of money.

“The other thing people have questioned is, why is it going up to £900,000. The reason for that is because another employee has been given another three-year fixed term contract by a previous board member and that was a claim I only found out about after we had spoken to the IP so that claim will go on as well.

“Although, to be fair, that employee hasn’t said they were looking for the money but it’s something we’ve got to look at.”

Rolls added: “Hopefully on March 26 we’ll go to London and the creditors will back the football club, then we can look forward to building a local team of local players and local staff.”

* One creditor that will not be supporting Rolls’ CVA proposal is the Dorset Police Authority (DPA).

The authority is listed in last week’s CVA document as being owed £1,658.10.

A spokesman for the DPA said: “Our policy is to pursue debts owed to the Police Authority in full. The amount owed is public money and any under-recovery will effectively be picked up by the council tax payers of Dorset.

“To achieve recovery of this sum we have therefore been working with Weymouth Football Club, and have an arrangement in place to receive staged payments towards this debt Clearly the potential for a CVA is not welcome as it will potentially severely limit the amount that we will be able to recover.