Village sides united

Panthers set to groundshare with Canaries

RISING football side NKF Burbage are moving to nearby Barwell for the coming season.

The Leicestershire Senior League side - which has enjoyed four promotions in six seasons and is awaiting a decision on whether it will move up a division again next season after a secondplace finish - is set to groundshare with Northern Premier outfit Barwell FC at their Kirkby Road ground.

The agreement comes after a sponsorship drive by NKF earlier this year - when the club said it was “growing at an alarming rate” and required new facilities to keep up with the successes on the pitch.

At the time, the club, appealing for sponsorship, said: “We are very proud to have such wonderful football talent locally sourced and we feel that we owe it to our youth and adult players and our management team to ensure that their potential is not impeded by off field financial restraints.”

Currently the Canaries do not have a reserve side, so the Panthers will be able to fill that void and alternate use of the facilities on Saturdays.

In addition, two members of voluntary not-for-profit club NKF’s set-up are to join the board of Barwell FC.

It is hoped the moves will ben- efit both clubs - both on the pitch with young talent at NKF possibly feeding into the Canaries, and off it with extra spectators heading along to catch both sides’ home matches to boost the coffers.

Merv Nash, Barwell FC spokesman, said: “NKF came to see our chairman Dave Laing and our vice chairman Colin Burton, and came to quite a few games towards the end of the season, and it all came to fruition at our recent AGM.

“They have a lot of young lads, their average age is around 21 years. They have a couple of people joining our committee too. “They seem very keen. “We have made an agreement for the next 12 months and we’ll see how it goes from there and how it works out.”

Rigel Statham, chairman of NKF Burbage, said: “I’d like to thank Dave Laing and Barwell’s committee for this opportunity.

“We’ve found a lot of common ground.

“There’s been a lot of hard work since 2008 when we got the idea of starting the club, but we’ve always been moving in the right direction and wanted to do things the right way.

“We had teams coming to play us at Britannia Road to be disappointed to find us playing on a park.

“Now we have a home and the chance to grow, support local talent and go as far as we can do.”