Rival football clubs in compensation claim
Rival football clubs Thatcham Town and Truro City have entered into a
legal dispute following a cancelled match on January 3rd at the Waterside Park ground in Thatcham.
Offials from the Cornish football club Truro are seeking compensation of around £1,000 for making a fruitless round trip of around 500 miles to get to Thatcham and back.
The Truro football team arrived in Thatcham just as officials from Thatcham Town confirmed that the match would be cancelled due to a frozen pitch.
As the Truro team pulled up at around 1.15pm on the day of the match they were informed that they should return home as the match would not be played.
“We were obviously upset that we travelled all the way there when there was no way that the match could have been played,” said Truro vice-chairman Chris Webb.
“One part of the pitch was still as white as a sheet, the referee had no choice. There was no way on earth that the game could have gone ahead.”
To save them the expensive, time consuming and uncomfortable journey, Truro City officials argue that a pitch inspection should have been carried out much earlier.
They claim that had an appropriate pitch inspection been made at an earlier point then they could have been alerted to the cancellation before they set off for the match, or at the very least before they had travelled the full 233 miles to Thatcham.
The club’s football secretary, Ian Anear, said: “Thatcham rang us at 8.45am on the Saturday when we were approaching Exeter to say that they had had a call from their groundsman and that there was a covering of frost on the pitch, but they expected it to clear by kick-off time.
“We arrived at Thatcham at 1.15pm to be told that the referee had called it off. Even if we had received a phone call earlier about the match being off that would have made a difference.”
But football secretary for Thatcham Town, Patrick Horsman, defended the home club’s actions, saying that they did everything they could, alerting Truro the day before that there was a possibility the match would be called off.
“Truro were sent an e-mail on the Friday saying that we did not know what the situation was,” he said.
“We then phoned them at 8.45am on Saturday following contact from our groundsman, but when the referee got there conditions had worsened and he was not going to play it.”
Southern League secretary Jason Mills confirmed that Truro were within their rights to make a compensation claim against Thatcham Town, saying: "Any club who have travelled to a match and it is called off have the right to claim travel expenses."
The match has been rescheduled for Tuesday February 10th when Truro City will return to Thatcham and hopefully this time the journey will not be made in vain.
Updated on 1/21/2009