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Apology re Today's Postponement

Apology re Today's Postponement

Dan Bates5 Feb 2022 - 18:11
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GNE Football Secretary & Director, Dan Bates shares a personal and heartfelt apology.

Good evening everyone, I hope you are all safe, well and drying off after this afternoon’s unfortunate events. I wanted to take this opportunity to offer my sincere and heartfelt apologies to all those who were inconvenienced and understandably disappointed with today’s fixture postponement. We pride ourselves on doing things right and ultimately today that did not happen despite difficult circumstances.

We are always wary and considerate with travelling fans and indeed anybody planning on attending fixtures at Glossop North End, this has been shown in the past with precautionary inspections (the most recent being on January 15th), which passed, and games have been played without hassle. It has never been the intention to deliberately cause inconvenience or wasted time on anyone’s account, however today’s circumstances and the speed at which things changed meant we were ultimately caught out with the elements today.

If we’d have had the pitch inspected at 10:30 the result would have been game ON, and the general feeling would’ve been even worse had we turned people away having previously said the game was ON. Whilst the light rain forecast was noted, what couldn’t have been foreseen was the quick and the unexpected effect it had on the pitch in such as short amount of time despite the pitch undergoing its winter verti-drain just yesterday morning (Friday). There became a point in the day where we couldn’t have got an appropriately graded, local ref in any quicker than the match referee who was already on his way from Stockport.

Ultimately nobody wants games called off and I believe we showed a willingness to get the game played and put on a good afternoon for everyone, this was not snide, this was not deliberate and we went about today with all good intentions, but it wasn’t to be today. Once the decision was made by the match referee, David Burton, I had the embarrassing job of contacting the league to inform them of the postponement which was bad enough as it is, the postponement was reported via the Northern Premier League at 13:55 on our social media platforms.

We have already spoken with Bootle earlier this evening and a date for the re-arranged fixture will be announced in due course once approved with the Northern Premier League. We send our thanks to all the volunteers who did their very best to get today’s game played.

We send out our huge thanks to those of you who stayed for a drink in the clubhouse and made light of the disappointing and unforeseen circumstances. We hope to continue the existing positive sporting relationship between the two clubs and that we can make things up to everyone for the re-arranged fixture. No one is more disappointed than myself in todays events, we will learn from today and move forward. Many Thanks, Dan Bates (Football Secretary & Director)

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