Darlington Football Club's future has been dramatically salvaged for just their next three matches, hours after the administrator told the manager and players the club were going into liquidation. Supporters involved in the Darlington Football Club Rescue Group, which has been searching ceaselessly for potential deals to save the 129-year-old club, went to the stadium after that news broke, to plead with the administrator to keep the club going.
During a frantic morning, the group had scrambled together enough money, thought to be £50,000, to pay players, staff and the administrator, and keep the club alive for two weeks. Doug Embleton, the group's spokesman, said it had been "very emotional", with supporters crying outside the 25,000-seat arena in which Darlington play. He said it would now be a huge effort to get Saturday's Blue Square Bet Conference Premier game with Fleetwood on, and called for a large crowd to come and support the club.
Craig Liddle, a former long-serving defender and current caretaker manager of Darlington, said he was "devastated" when told by the administrator that the club was finished. "All the players and myself were devastated to think of all that history going down the pan," he said. "Then we had a glimmer of hope, and the club was saved just for the near future, which is massive. Saturday will be another rollercoaster."
On Monday Harvey Madden, of Rowlands Accountants, who has said since his appointment that there was very little money to keep Darlington going, made Liddle, the players and remaining staff redundant. At 11.30am Wednesday he told Liddle in a meeting that the club were going to be liquidated because there was no money to carry on.
Then Madden had a meeting with the players, at which he told them, too, that no solution had been found and the club was to fold. One of the players, James Gray, a striker capped at Northern Ireland Under-21 level, tweeted after that meeting: "Not the news everyone is after! So sorry to all fans! Clubs gone #gutted."
Madden was about to return to his office and issue a statement announcing the end of the club, formed in 1883, when, Embleton said, his group called Madden. Embleton and another group member, Shaun Campbell, then went to the arena to offer the money, which has been contributed by individuals, the supporters' club, and £10,000 from the supporters' trust.
A meeting was then held at the local Blackwell Grange hotel, where Madden agreed that if the money was in his firm's bank account by 3pm he would keep the club going through the home matches against Fleetwood then York City, and the away match at Hayes & Yeading.
Peter Barron, the editor of the local newspaper, the Northern Echo, which sponsors the 25,000-seat stadium built by the former owner George Reynolds, was at the meeting. Barron said it had been "impassioned" and even tearful. The local Labour MP, Jenny Chapman, who has been involved in the struggle to find a solution, was in touch with the meeting by telephone from Westminster and talking to the club's owner, Raj Singh. He put the club into administration owing him around £2m which he had spent in a failed bid to win Darlington promotion to the Football League.
A deal will need to be done with Singh, and the two investors who own the arena, Philip Scott and Graham Sizer, and, probably, the local authority, which has covenants governing use of the arena site – no supermarket will be granted planning permission – if a long-term future is to be secured for the stricken club.
Chapman said that if the club are to be sustainable it will need a more practical home than the outsized stadium Reynolds built, for which the club left their historic ground, Feethams, in 2003. "There has to be a move from the arena; the aim is some form of community and supporter ownership whose details need to be worked out," she said. "We are not out of the woods yet."
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