Last updated 16:14, Thursday, 20 March 2008

Now lessons must be learned from crisis, says Alan Irving

SOMETIMES it’s nice to be right, as we at The Whitehaven News were in being the first to say for definite that Whitehaven Rugby League Club had been saved!

For the second time in 16 years, the club were looking down both barrels of a serious closure threat until the 11th hour rescue package.

The Whitehaven News has been pleased to play its own part, having covered every match and every topic since Whitehaven’s inception in 1948, so it’s nice for Haven’s new chairman Gordon Grace to graciously acknowledge our support along with, more importantly, Washington International’s £60,000 gift which adds enormously to the package.

Clearly, it did no harm for this newspaper to reveal accurately the true extent of the club’s financial crisis (not wild speculation) perhaps providing a catalyst for others to take swift and necessary action.

Instead of placing the club in any further jeopardy, public disclosure has more probably had the opposite effect.

There’s no blowing of trumpets, but if anyone has to take the credit it is an organisation which few will have heard of. This is the West Cumbria Development Fund, which for a long time now, has served as Sellafield’s channel for aiding major community projects.

So, as I suggested when the crisis first surfaced, it’s essentially nuclear money which has proved Haven’s salvation.

And on top of this comes the secondary financial lifeline from main sponsors Washington, the American nuclear company – not a loan either but a £60,000 donation originally intended to help fund the new grandstand, but salvation comes first.

If Haven are not completely out of the financial woods – remember a loss of around £150,000 incurred over the last couple of years has still to be tackled full on – then it’s fair to say the wolves have been driven from the Boardroom door.

The first part of the rescue package takes the form of a £75,000 loan from the Development Fund, a loan that has to be repaid within three years and for which Copeland Borough Council has agreed to be guarantors.

This means that Whitehaven RLFC must exercise much tighter financial controls and the council, as a major shareholder in the holding company Whitehaven 1992 Ltd, will make absolutely sure because the local authority would really be in no position to repay such a sum if the club was to default.

So credit to Copeland BC, too, although the council knew full well that ‘no rugby league club’ would put the skids under the much-vaunted Pow Beck regeneration, or certainly for some time at least.

One of the key brokers has been councillor Tim Knowles.

Just as I started at Sellafield as press officer in the mid-1980s, Tim, in his capacity as works secretary, had been instrumental in persuading his BNFL masters to fund Haven a major sponsorship deal.

It didn’t always work out the way it ought to have done and, only a few years later, the club found itself in such financial trouble that it had to be bailed out by Albright & Wilson, Copeland Council and 11 local businessmen, including Haven’s new marketing director Mike Graham.

Let’s hope a lot of lessons have been learned. Nothing can be left to chance going forward.

Our comprehensive “flying the flag” feature this week examines all the pros and cons, so now it’s time to concentrate minds wonderfully on the playing side of things and winning rugby matches.

To say the rescue has brought relief to the Haven squad is perhaps an understatement because, once the financial fat hit the fan, it was obviously a big worry and distraction to the players.

Coach Paul Crarey was worried but did his best not to let it show. “The pressure is off now, a weight of all our shoulders,” he confided.

For him, it was like coming out of the frying pan at Barrow into the fire at Whitehaven. And he wasn’t joking when he told me: “I thought for a moment I was going to be out of a job again.”

Crarey has a proper vote of confidence from the “caretaker” Board to take the team forward, and Super League is still the dream three years down the track when hopefully Haven will have a stadium worthy of the name.

The trauma of the last few weeks has underlined how important rugby league is to the town of Whitehaven.

Once when Shaun Edwards, between jobs, was being linked with coaching Haven, the great man said to me it was an honour to have his name associated with a club with the tradition of Whitehaven – it makes you think.