BOSS Liam McDonald has called for the Southern League to have a closer look at the procedure regarding the postponement of matches after his Redditch United side experienced a second wasted journey in the space of ten days.
Earlier this month the Reds suffered the frustration of reaching Devon only to see their match at Bideford fall foul of a waterlogged pitch and they endured the same woes again on Tuesday when a frozen pitch put paid to their encounter at Cirencester Town.
Many of the United squad had either arrived or were almost at Cirencester’s Corinium Stadium, whilst McDonald was half an hour’s drive away when he learned of the postponement at 5.10pm.
“I wasn’t even first to find out about it,” complained McDonald. “There was no text or anything from them (Cirencester), I only discovered it had been postponed when some of our lads got in touch with me.
“I appreciate nobody can control the weather, but common sense needs to prevail in these cases. It doesn’t matter if the referee has deemed the pitch playable at 3pm, it’s 7.45pm which counts.
“The fact their pitch had thawed out during the day but had then frozen again later on shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone. Everyone knew that was the forecast. When you’ve got numerous weather stations telling you this, we really need an early call to be made to save everyone a lot of time and money.
“It was the same at Bideford but with rain instead of frost. The league need to look at this and give clubs the chance to make an early decision based on forecasts rather than what the referee is saying five hours before kick-off.
“If it did turn out a postponed match could have been played, then everyone would accept that I think. Nine times out of ten, an early call would end up being the right one.
“We made the decision to drive down to Cirencester individually rather than use a coach, but even so I’ve had lads having to leave work early which costs them money for what ends up being no reason and the club will also have to pay them travel expenses. If we’d used a coach, Cirencester could have been looking at refunding us about £1,000. It’s ridiculous to be honest.”
