Board aim to guide Cowden to a new home

Published 11 Jan 2012 08:00 0 Comments

THE board of Cowdenbeath Football Club face a real challenge to guide the Blue Brazil to a new home and a successful future.

The club's financial director, David Allan, told Cowdenbeath Rotary Club, on Thursday, that while the team has been enjoying a fine season and currently leads the Barrs Irn Bru Second Division, it desperately needs to find a new home.

Mr Allan observed, looking at the club's presidential board, that several of them had served as Cowden directors and he was delighted to be given the chance to address the membership.

He outlined that the history of the club showed that their original home was North End Park, which was shared with greyhound racing.

Cowden moved to Central Park in 1917 and by the 1920s they had crowds averaging 9200 which meant that one in two of the town's population of the day were going to games. Today it was one in 50, he said.

The director explained that the club was very much part of the community in the mid part of the 20th century but in the last 25 years this had changed.

He told rotarians, "For the most part of the club's history it has been people from the town who have been on the board and have chaired the club but in the mid 1980s this changed. Tom Currie, from Stonehaven, was followed by Gordon McDougall from Edinburgh,and Gordon was certainly very much committed to to the club, but he did not really get involved with the people of the town. When he sold the club and stock car set-up to the Brewster brothers a few years ago, again it was people from outwith the town who were running it, but last year they indicated they wanted to take a lesser role.

"It was at this stage that the current structure was put in place which sees several Cowdenbeath people involved in the running of the club and our intention is to make Cowdenbeath a real community club." Mr Allan said that vice-chairman John Lints has played a key role in the moves to make the club a Community Interest Company as has director Neil Fente.

"We have a good structure who are all committed to making the Blue Brazil an intricate part of the Cowdenbeath community," he went on, "Stenhousemuir is the model we are following. The Larbert club has become an important part of its community and has been financially structured in the way of a social enterprise.

"We need the co-operation of the club's current owners, the Brewsters, to make this happen and we hope that we can achieve it. The bottom line is that we need to find a new home in the not too distant future and we are working hard to find it."

Mr Allan concluded, "It is a real challenge but we are talking about a club that has been part of Cowdenbeath for 132 years and we want to add a lot of more to that total. It is one of the few elements of the town left from the mid 20th century but our aim is to ensure that Cowdenbeath FC is around for a lot of years yet."

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