We are all pinching ourselves, thinking is this just a dream?

SATURDAY was one of the best days of my life. A wonderful moment. I’m proud of the club, proud of George Elokobi and what he’s done for the whole community. The town of Maidstone, which perhaps hasn’t had too much sporting glory in the past, is lapping it up. And they deserve it. Certainly the older fans value just having their club because they lost it for many years and they know just how precarious it can be.

They are appreciative of the work that has gone in behind the scenes by my colleagues and all the volunteers to keep it going and make sure the club is around not just for this moment of magic but many years to come.

As an owner you are intensely involved emotionally in the fortunes of the club but you have to get used to the fact that there will be ups and downs. And every day there is work to be done, bills to be paid.

This will have a massive impact, of course, but you can only take stock when it’s over. It’s not over and with George leading the side, he probably believes we can win the FA Cup. He has an incredible belief.

One thing it will do is help us recover from last season when we lost money for the first time in 12 years.

We were promoted to the National League and there’s no significant increase in solidarity payments, but travel costs are higher because it isn’t regionalised and the players you need to prosper are more expensive. We performed badly so crowds were down and you can’t drink alcohol in sight of the pitch in the National League so our bar takings dropped by £100,000. Money from this FA Cup run will help us replace our artificial pitch in the summer and put us in the black, and we can consider projects to help longterm stability. What we won’t do is splash it out on players. I can guarantee that.

There is a bonus scheme for the players put in place at the beginning of the season. If they’d asked us in August for 50 per cent of the gate money if we get the FA Cup fourth round we would have probably laughed at them and said you can have 100 per cent. But we will think about that. We have huge admiration for what the players have done and we will see them this week to talk through that.

It’s astonishing to find ourselves in the fifth round. Everyone is still pinching themselves and trying to work out if it’s all a dream. These are fun times for our little club.