Presteigne St Andrews FC are grateful to Dale Tomkins for giving up his Sunday lunchtime to help out the club as we attempt to ensure the Reserves’ home match against Knighton Town can go ahead as scheduled on Monday 3 January.
Club chairman Alan Preece is among those officials who has been down at Llanandras Park on Sunday morning and has mixed news over the prospects for Monday’s game.
“As things stand [Editor’s note: 12.00pm Sunday], the pitch is perfectly playable but there are a number of other problems we are facing,” he said.
“The biggest of these is that we have a burst pipe in the changing rooms and so I have spent a good bit of the morning ringing around looking for a plumber.
“Fortunately Dale Tomkins has come to our rescue and is on his way down to the ground now to see if he can sort out the problem.
“Clearly we have to have the showers and toilets operating or we can’t stage the game anyway, no matter how good the pitch might be looking.
“I would like to put on record our thanks to Dale for helping us out at such short notice,” he added.
While the pitch is playable at the moment the temperatures are expected to drop well below freezing again on Sunday night and Alan says there might be the need for a further inspection on Monday morning.
“We will just have to keep an eye on things and see how they pan out overnight as the forecast is for it to get down pretty low overnight,” he said.
“Hopefully it should be ok, but we might well have to take another look in the morning.
“If there is a problem, then we will let everyone know through the website as soon as any decision is made – but no news on the site will be good news as that will mean it is ‘game on’,” he added.
According to the BBC Wales fixture list, the kick off on Monday afternoon will be at 2.00pm although quite why we have to kick off at 2.00pm when we have floodlights is beyond me… but at least we might save on electricity….