Their resignation seemed to put an end to any hope of playing in the next season, and also seriously questioned the future of the 143-year old club.
But Hayden Dando, the club’s former vice chairman and previous joint owner will be taking the club on in order to ensure a future for Hednesford Town Football Club.
The following is statement from Dando: “Earlier this year Graham Jones and myself announced our intention to leave the football club. I departed the club at the end of April formally, however, I hadn’t been working at the club for some time and during this time Graham spent a lot of hours meeting with interested parties and trying to get a deal completed that would ensure the future of the club.
“We thought we had achieved this until the intended buyer informed us and the owner of Keys Park Stadium that he would not be completing on the deal on the 25th May 2023. This left the club with just a few days to find a buyer and complete a deal in order to continue to play football which would have been impossible.
“I read with sadness the upset for supporters, volunteers, staff and the wider football community at the idea of Hednesford Town not being in a position to play football anymore and agreed it would be a travesty.
“Having spoken to my wife and our wider family I have made the decision to take on the sole running of Hednesford Town Football Club and its legal entity HTFC LTD with immediate effect. This will ensure the clubs place at Step 4 for the season ahead.
“The plan is to stabilise and run the club in a more cost effective manner in order to be in a position for the right person to take over the club and purchase the stadium, what this deal does is keeps us playing football and gives us time to find the person with both the finances and the ambition to take this great club back to where it should be.
“In the meantime I will be running it alone which I will not lie means that I will need support from the fans and the wider community in order to be in any way competitive. I have seen hundreds of messages of support from people in the area over the past week or so, so my simple words are come and support the club, host your parties at Keys Park in the chase suite, try and come to events we put on and above all come to games as without supporters to watch matches the club cannot function.
“The first thing to be open about will be the budget. Graham and myself spent excessive amounts of money on last season’s budget only to end up relegated, this won’t be the case this season as we will be working with a more modest budget, this is for two reasons, firstly I do not have the funds to cover a hefty budget alone and secondly I do not want the club saddled with any debt or contracts that would hinder the future for the club.
“We need to run this club efficiently and not be reliant on one source of funding that has become evident to all parties involved.
“We need the community to come together in order for this club to have a future, of course the long term aim is to find the right person who wants to come in and take over both the club and the stadium with the ambition to see the club reach its full potential but in the meantime I need everyone to pull together in order to make this club a success. I am not doing this for any kind of profit whatsoever, I am doing it to ensure that your football club still exists and has a chance at a future. I will also confirm that when and if the right person to take over comes along that the footballing element of the club will still be available for a nominal figure of £1.
“It has to be said that running costs at the club are huge of course and were a big consideration before I took this decision however with that in mind I want to say a special thank you to Steve Price without whom this deal simply could not have happened as the lease he has given the club has made this possible without which I could not have justified taking the reins without this agreement so a huge thank you has to be said to Steve for this.
“I also want to thank Graham Jones who will be departing the club has also worked so hard at trying to get this club into the right hands and honestly if it hadn’t been for Graham then the club would have ceased to exist a long time ago. Graham is and will always remain a close friend of mine and I have seen everything he has put into trying to make this club successful and I personally want to say thank you and good luck to my friend. I would also like to thank Terry McMahon who has worked tirelessly with Steve, Graham and myself over the last week to get this completed and to keep this club alive, if there is anybody that embodies what Hednesford Town is about it is Terry.
“I can confirm that Danny Glover will be staying on as the club’s player-manager and I would like to thank Danny for his incredible patience that has been shown in the face of what has been an unprecedented time, for Danny to have had so much thrown at him in a very short time in his first managerial role is something I don’t think many other managers could have coped with and his commitment to this club truly is something else so I am delighted that he has agreed to remain with the club.
“Finally, I have to admit something, I have made A LOT of mistakes at this football club and in life in general, I am enough of a man to admit that, however I ask every single person to get behind your club, not me, not a board of directors but YOUR football club. In time we want to find the right person to take over the club and the best way for us to get that is to work together to make sure that we can put out the most competitive possible team that we can, we all know that costs money but if we work together we will achieve this, we will keep this club alive and we will give it a chance at the future you all deserve. Basically if we have fallen out before or had an argument I don’t care let’s build a bridge, get over it and get this football club back on its feet as that is the only thing that matters right now.
There is much more to say and do, one of the things we will be doing is putting together a committee to help run the club, this will be formed of supporters as I feel it’s in the clubs best interests to do so, I will announce more on this in due course, I will also arrange some kind of meeting with everyone who feels they can help this club either in the short or long term and many other things to get the club going in the right direction as well as a fans forum to keep everyone up to date with the plans for going forward in due course”.
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