‘It would be crazy to risk sanctions’
Griffin doesn’t expect others to follow Dover’s lead
Peter Griffin has said he doesn’t expect any further National League teams to follow Dover Athletic’s lead by refusing to play matches over the lack of grant funding for the remainder of the season.
Dover were one of seven National League Premier sides who voted for the season to be curtailed immediately, and results declared null and void, but – so far at least – the south coast club are the only ones not to have fallen back into line when the majority of clubs voted for the campaign to continue.
Kings Lynn initially threatened to do something similar, but Griffin is confident that the threat of the sanctions which could be handed out by the league will stop them from doing so.
He also thinks it would be surprising for a club to threaten their security in the league next season when there are only a couple more months of this campaign left to get through.
“Kings Lynn were definitely looking at that route,” he said this week. “I did speak with their chairman to canvas opinion on this, and he was looking to play on for a while. They now know there’s going to be no relegation, that’s been ratified by the FA on Friday, but of course the punishment that’s going to be handed to Dover is still unknown.
“It could range from no punishment, a financial punishment, but I think that would be unlikely given what they’ve said about not having the money to carry on.
“The other ones would be a points deduction, but obviously not for this season, it would be for next year and there’s also the threat of relegation or being put out of the National League system all together.”
“So, there are a whole range of
things that are unknown. A chairman may look at it and say, ‘we’ll be okay for this season’, but the punishment handed out could be relegation anyway, so nothing is guaranteed on that.
“I don’t have any inkling and I haven’t heard any rumours that anyone is going to stop playing now.
“Here we are in the middle of March, it would seem crazy for anyone to risk those sanctions when you’ve already paid out most of the money they’re going to be paying to their players over a period of time.”
Griffin said Maidenhead were in the process of applying to Sport England for a loan and should be hearing imminently on whether they’ve been successful. The process isn’t so straightforward it seems and not every club will get what they ask for. Last week Boreham Wood had their application turned down, while Sutton United have had theirs accepted this week.
Griffin said: “It’s in the process, but we should be hearing imminently. I saw that Boreham Wood were turned down for theirs last week, basically because the figures showed they didn’t need the money.
“I also saw something this morning about Sutton United’s application being accepted. So,
I’m not sure what will happen. It’s a confidential process. I don’t know whether they just give you the money you’ve asked for, or if there’s some sort of formula. But the paperwork was filled in before the deadline and we should be hearing this week.
“While it was not our first choice to have loans, we’d much prefer grants of course, but our view, and Jon Adams’ view is that we were given grants up until Christmas and that covered us and kept us going. We can’t be naïve. In this country a lot of people have been affected by the pandemic and have had to look after themselves without access to grants or loans. So, while we’ve been given some grants and some loans, I think it’s fair given what others have had to put up with during the pandemic. It’s a longterm loan that can be managed over a number of years.
“We can adjust our playing budget or spending money to take it into account. We should be able to afford it so long as we don’t overspend in the coming years.”
Burnham manager Ash James has said there needs to be more clarity and information from the league about a proposed Hellenic Cup competition this spring before the Blues can agree to sign up to it.
For the time being the club has voted against taking part, however, James said that if the competition could be delayed to allow supporters to attend matches, they could still be interested.
The Hellenic League hopes to run the competition from mid-April to the end of May, and Windsor boss Mark Cooper said recently that the Royalists would be interested in taking part.
However, he and James have both admitted the difficulty in staging matches without at least some income from supporters to offset costs.
The Hellenic Premier Division season has now been officially curtailed, but at the time of going to press no official decision has been taken on whether to null and void the results. It seems the league still hopes that some form of promotion and relegation can be maintained to enable a wider restructure of the league to take place this summer ahead of the new season.
“There is still some talk of promotion, but it’s all still up in the air,” said James this week. “We also had a vote about the cup competition, and they asked us all who wanted to take part in it.
“As a club we wanted to, but it wasn’t clear when it would take place in terms of dates and we just felt there wasn’t enough information, so we have voted against it for now. Before, I said it would be good to have a cup competition when the fans are back in to get some revenue in, but I think this would be without fans so what is the point in rushing it?
“We’ve got the goahead to train again from the end of this month and we can arrange to
play friendlies from then and there won’t be any pressure from the league to play this many games by a certain date. The lads would be alright playing without getting money, but we would rather just do it properly.
“Let’s wait until the fans return and then it’s going to help everyone.
“At the moment it feels like everything is being rushed, but, if they come up with something that’s clearer, and there’s still time for us to get involved then who knows what will happen.”
James added that if the club opts not to take part in the Hellenic competition, it could look to stage its own round-robin event in late spring, early summer in order to get some fans back through the turnstiles ahead of next season.
For now though James said that the focus was simply on getting the squad back together for informal and relaxed training sessions from the start of April, with a few to staging a few friendlies in the coming months.
“I think we’ll get everyone back involved,
just have a few training sessions and start building up friendlies from there,” he said.
“It’s not going to be anything too extreme; it’s probably going to be one session a week to begin with just to get the lads back together.
“We’ll have some time to rebuild before the new season, and in terms of the league, there could be a restructure, so we’ll just have to see what happens with that as well. I think they’re still deciding on promotion because for the restructure to happen I think we might need a few more local teams in the league. So, there might need to be a couple of teams promoted from the league below to make that work and allow us to go in that direction.”
“That could affect the players we bring in with regards to location.
When May comes about, we’ll start to look at getting friendlies booked in and things like that. There are some exciting things happening behind the scenes and I see no reason why next season can’t be an exciting one for us.”