Page 4 - Yate Town FC v Harrow Borough 051122

WELCOME

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to the South West Interiors Stadium for this
Southern League Premier Division South fixture versus Harrow Borough. We would like to
extend a very warm West Country welcome to our visitors today especially Steve Baker his
management team and squad, and the club officials and supporters who have made the
journey from the capital today. We hope you enjoy the day and have a safe journey home.

Today we start a new era with a change in the management team and the buzz around the
club that has been generated by the arrival of John Rendell. More of that later and the new
‘Gaffer’ will be writing his own introductory notes in due course; lots of other pressing
matters this week as you will appreciate. We must first acknowledge the efforts of Peter
Beadle, Stuart Fleetwood and Dan Gillespie all of whom have departed the club in the last
two weeks for new footballing challenges. Beads came to the club mid-year following the
sudden departure of Paul Michael. He inherited less than a handful of last season’s squad
and was therefore faced with the challenge of establishing a squad of players able to
compete in the Premier Division in very short order; basically he needed to get a squad of
16 players in place by mid-July. Beads, with help from Fleets and Gilly, achieved this with a
group of players of sufficient depth to complete an intense series of friendly matches to
identify those players to take into the season. Beads won his first match of the league
campaign away from home with a gutsy performance. We rode our luck a bit that day and
unfortunately after that Lady Luck deserted us. Narrow defeats and draws, three times the
result of injury time scores, followed but all too often we conceded too many goals. Beads
did take us on a brief FA Cup run and of course we are still in the Senior Challenge Cup. Alas
it is a mark of the man that he realised the precarious position the club sat in and put this
before himself, identifying the two week break in fixtures as an opportunity for the club to
reset and install a new management team. For this selfless act we must respect Beads and
thank him for all he did at the club in his brief tenure. We wish him well for the future, he
has accomplished far too much in his footballing career to disappear from the beautiful
game. We cannot ignore Fleets and Gilly both of whom served with PM and contributed to
last season’s success. They both worked incredibly hard throughout their time as Bluebells
and were the continuity as we transitioned managers over the summer and loyally stepping
in as interim management following the departure of Beads. Once again we wish them well
for well deserved future success.

John Rendell brings with him a new management team, but not unfamiliar faces to Lodge
Road. Paul Tovey continues to serve alongside John as his assistant and in the background
James Hicks will be the engine room of the team. Jonny Evans stays with us as Physio and
Gary Webb will assist as required. With the management all being local we hope that we can
inject a bit more community to the club and look forward to getting a spark back into the
ground and re-establishing that home advantage.
And so to today’s visitors. The Boro sit in the bottom third of the table with 15 points from
15 games, six clear of us but we have two games in hand. It doesn’t take too much
deduction to work out that this is another potential 6-point game if we are to get clear of
the drop zone. Boro results have been close and clearly illustrate that Steve Baker brings
with him a very capable and competitive squad. Although they have suffered defeat the
same number of times as the Bluebells these were very narrow results with the exception of
a 7-0 bad day out at WSM early in the season. Two victories more than Yate is the difference
including Chesham in the league and most recently Hayes & Yeading in the FA Trophy.

C’mon you Bluebells