The local community want the Wands to come home, insists Cray chairman Hillman

Friday 21st May 2010

CRAY WANDERERS chairman Gary Hillman says building links with the local community is important in his bid to bring the club back home to it’s birthplace in four years time, writes Stephen McCartney.

As part of the club’s 150th anniversary year - the Ryman Premier League club are staging a free exhibition at Bromley Museum at Church Hill, Orpington, that remains open until 26 June, which displays photographs, programmes and depics the club’s proud history.

Cray Wanderers are the second oldest football club in the world, having been formed in 1860 - just three years after Sheffield Football Club.

The two clubs are trying to arrange a match between each other to celebrate their achievements during such time.

Cray Wanderers will ditch their traditional amber and black strip next season to play in chocolate shirts (with amber pin-stripes) for one season.

The main reason of opening the doors to the public is to raise awareness about the proposed 5,000 all-seater, all covered stadium, which is hoping to be built on wasteland at Sandy Lane, St Paul’s Cray - just a goal-kick away from the A20 - in 2014.

Mr Hillman took over as chairman back in 1995; the club moved to Hayes Lane, Bromley, three years later as their base at Oxford Road, Sidcup failed ground grading criteria for the Kent League due to a lack of floodlighting, and now the long-serving successful businessman wants to bring the club back home to it’s roots.

“The local community is really important,” Mr Hillman insisted, when he spoke to www.kentishfootball.co.uk during the two-hour press open-day at the museum.

“The Cray area is a working class area, it’s been a bit neglected throughout the last (number of years), similar to Cray when we left it.

“You go on the (club) website and our Back the Bid page where you see just how much the football club means to the community and how much it means to bring it back to the Cray area.

“This is all part of the ongoing procedure to get the club back to the Cray area and do a similar thing to Dartford, which is a massive success story at Dartford.”

Dartford Borough Council built Princes Park Stadium and on 11 November 2006, a capacity crowd of 4,100 watched the Darts play Horsham YMCA and the club have gone on with all guns blazing, winning two titles, and success at youth and reserve team levels too.

“I’ve been over to the ground with Dave Skinner (Dartford’s co-chairman) and taken the architects ” continued Mr Hillman, a builder by profession.

“We’ve gone through all the good bits of Dartford, most of it’s good, all the bad bits, they’re aren’t too many bad bits, and we’ve gone through all of it with Dave.

“Dartford have proven the case, instead of us having to prove the case. They were groundsharing at Ebbsfleet with 200 supporters, just two or three miles down the road, and then all of a sudden, back in Dartford, 1000-1500, booming, crime rate’s down in the town centre, so they have proven the case.”

Mr Hillman wanted to incorporate a hotel within his new stadium plans - but this is proving to be the stumbling block with planners at the Greater London Authority and Bromley Council.

“We’ve gone to the pre-application stage with the GLA and the London Borough of Bromley,” he explained.

“It’s green-belt, obviously it doesn’t look green belt land but it’s just a piece of wasteland. It is classified as green belt so that’s the big issue so that’s why we’re trying to get a happy medium so that’s where we are at the moment.

“But at the end of the day, we have to make a sustainable stadium and we need to build it, so we have to get the right amount of money on board to build it and obviously we don’t want to build a white elephant, so we want it sustainable, people using it, public transport etc.”

When asked about the cost, Mr Hillman replied, “Costs can range from anything from two or three million to twenty to thirty million so that’s the stage where we are at.”

Vice-chairman, John Woolf, was taken aback by the memorabilia on show at the museum.

“The history of the club for me is only five or six years, but when I look back and see just how old it is and where they’ve played and their traditions and the players that have played for them, it’s fantastic, it really is,” Mr Woolf told www.kentishfootball.co.uk.

Former Cray Wanderers players including John Allright, Ricky Bennett, Micky Simmonds, Sean Cooney and Andy Silk spent time at today’s event.

Mr Woolf also insisted that the Kent club must return back home.

“Back the Bid is very much the buzz word at the moment,” said the silver headed vice-chairman.

“We’re not going to get there with donations alone. We’re going to get there with help from the FA, charities, the local authorities and anyone else with deep pockets, to help us out a little bit.

“I think it’s certainly important for the people of the Cray area, who don’t have a club playing in this level.

“A lot of people that you speak to associate their leisure activities with the Cray area and with Cray Wanderers and their social time of the weekend playing football.

“The history about the rail workers forming a football club, which is fantastic, and I know Gary’s ambition is to bring Cray back to it’s birthplace and if you bring it back with a 5,000 all-seater stadium he wouldn’t be doing any bad, would he?

“If you can provide spectators a decent accommodation (the new stadium will be covered like Dartford’s Princes Park Stadium), a couple of bars, which is always handy for revenue, people will come back to the Cray area to watch football.

“It’s proven itself in Dartford and hopefully from averaging 200-300 - obviously we get the odd bigger gates when we get Dartford and we’re going to lose them now - but if we can get ourselves in a pretty senior position we’ll generate that kind of crowd no matter who plays us, we could play in front of 2,000 at our place.

“Gary is a builder as most people know so he has had a look at it from the professional side. He thinks some of the ideas are fantastic, the majority of them are fantastic.

“It’s environmentally friendly, the crime-rate of teenagers in the area has dropped significantly so all these things are for the community.

“I know football to some people, they’re a bit peeved with football at the minute, but generally it’s not a bad game for the local community to play and keep the kids of the streets.

“There’s thousands of kids that have played for Cray and let’s hope they’ll be thousands more in the future.”

Meanwhile, on-the-pitch, the club confirmed that hard-working striker, Leigh Bremner and solid central defender, Mark Willy, have both re-signed for next season.

Manager Ian Jenkins has now been at the club for seventeen years - both as a prolific striker and now as manager - and guided the club to fifteenth place in their first campaign in the Ryman Premier League last season.

Visit Cray Wanderers website: www.craywands.co.uk