FANS MAY TURN BACK ON TIGERS
TRURO City supporter Simon Birch fears fans will refuse to travel 55 miles to watch home games in Plymouth next season as their stadium hell continues.
The White Tigers have vacated their Treyew Road home after the ground’s owner Jojo Investco Limited reached an agreement for a new Lidl supermarket to be built on the site.
As part of the deal, £1.2m has been secured to contribute towards the Stadium for Cornwall plans, a new facility to host the Cornish Pirates rugby club and Truro.
In the meantime, Truro will groundshare with South West Peninsula League club Plymouth Parkway and have £600,000 to invest in bringing the ground up to Step 3 standards and make up for lost income.
The club were top of the Southern League Premier Division South when last season was abandoned and they currently sit fourth in the table, with the season under suspension.
“Most Truro fans are quite weary now about the whole thing really because it’s been going on for so long,” Birch, a supporter since the 1970s, told The NLP.
“We do not accept that given the time the current owners have had to look around for a temporary facility they could not have spent the money they’re planning to spend on Plymouth Parkway’s ground on a ground in Cornwall, nearer to us.
“It would have benefitted the fans and Cornish football because another club would have had those improvements rather than a club in Devon.
“We’re really no closer tangiand bly to having this miraculous Stadium for Cornwall built. Not a brick has been put in place. It’s massively unclear what even the purpose for this stadium will be.
“We’re going to Plymouth but no one has any faith we’ll be moving back to Cornwall anytime soon.”
Disaster
The new stadium is aimed to be completed for the start of the 2022-23 season, but what was initially thought to be a 10,000-capacity ground may now be reduced in the first phase of the build to 3,000.
Cornish Pirates owner Dicky Evans bought Truro in March 2019 from Peter Masters and Philip Perryman, who had temporarily relocated the club to Torquay United that year to try force through the supermarket development. “The Torquay thing was a disaster, sometimes the crowd was less than 20 and I don’t see it being much more than that at Plymouth,” said Birch.
“I and the people in the Truro Independent Supporters’ Association will absolutely not be going to Plymouth on a routine basis to watch our home games.
“If we’re at Plymouth for more than a year, I think people will give up on Truro.”