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Stadium Company row part 78,294
Stadium Company row part 78,294
Monday, 7th Jul 2008 16:57

It seems we are set for yet another Dale v Hornets falling out, after the weekend saw the Council side with the Football Club to allow an injuction preventing a junior Rugby League competition take place before the Hornets v Keighley game on Sunday.

The story has broke in the Rugby League newspaper on Monday. It announced that the Football Club and the Council had decided to go through the courts to ensure that schoolboys game did not take place with the reasoning being that the pitch wasn't up to such activities alongside the Hornets game following its recent work.

There's been significant work taking place on the Spotland pitch after our season ended. Despite the short time available, the groundstaff were doing everything they could with the pitch to try and avoid a situation like last season where we suffered a great number of postponements.

Hornets as you can imagine have reacted angrily to this, with their Chairman David Vining being quoted in the RL papers:  "I was amazed that we were banned from playing this pre-match game. The tournament was the culmination of nine months hard work by our development office and it was a big blow to tell the players that we couldn't play at Spotland.

"We managed to take the games to a nearby school (Oulder Hill), but we are not happy with the heavy handed approach. It is amazing to think that there could be a fear that schoolchildren could ruin a pitch tended by professional groundstaff.

"It has probably cost us £5,000 in lost sponsorship and goodwill - not to mention the fact that we had advertised the pre-match entertainment and were expecting a lot of parents and pupils to cheer their mates on. This leaves a lot of people angry and disappointed."

Of course, there's two sides to every story and it transpires that the Stadium Company chairman Peter Rush - himself a former director of Rochdale Hornets - had requested a while back that this competition not take place due to the work that has been carried out on the pitch, however that request fell on deaf ears hence the club and Council taking the action that they did.

And there's the regular rumblings about the lack of contributions from the Rugby Club to the running of the Stadium Company which have reared their head again in recent weeks. Last season's relegation has hit Hornets' attendances severly with some crowds around the 350 level this season.

On gates of that size, it must be almost impossible for any organisation to keep to the rental agreements, signed when crowds were three or four times that size. If true, it's bound to have been a factor in the decision made by the Stadium Company powers that be to go to court.

As always, this will be something which rumbles on and on, with argument and counter argument taking pace on the back page of the Observer, but it seems clear from the outside that this marks a new level of action being taken against the Rugby League club.

Photo: Action Images



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