THE news of the end of Halifax Town ("Farewell, Halifax Town", Courier, May 10) took a few days to digest.
Following the last game of the season discussion among supporters was of which players to retain and whether the manager should stay or go. The protracted takeover seemed a foregone conclusion. How wrong we were.
Fortunately a group of supporters immediately set to work to discuss the formation of a supporter-run club. This seems the only way forward and has for a long time seemed inevit-able for a club which has hobbled from one fiscal crisis to the next under incompetent, though often well-intentioned, regimes.
Bobby Ham and David Bosom- worth have been credited with keeping the club going for longer than it otherwise would have done, but how a takeover can go on for so long is beyond me and the punchline to this long-running joke is that it never did get completed.
The Courier Comment on the day the club went into administration was that it was a calcula- ted risk. Clearly it didn't pay off.
You will understand my surprise when I heard that the consortium were still pursuing their interest after the failure of the creditors' meeting. It seems they are attempting to get the club reinstated to the Conference for next season.
This seems a non-starter as the Conference is notorious for stringently enforcing its rules. All this is doing is wasting valuable time, something we are short of already.
I am not suggesting that the consortium are responsible for the demise of the club but for me their interest in the club remains unclear, probably due to their silence during the time they have been involved.
There is no money to be made at the club, as they have found out for themselves, and the understanding seems to be that they would not be interested at anything below Conference Premier.
Even if they were successful in this there is a lot of ground to be made up with the supporters after 20 months of silence and playing an ultimately unsuccessful game of Russian roulette with a club which means so much to its small but passionate group of supporters.
The thought of Halifax Town, a club which has spent the vast majority of its existence in the Football League, plying its trade in the lower echelons of the football pyramid initially struck me with horror.
Upon reflection, however, a club which plays at a lower level but lives within its means is preferable to a club in the Conference Premier which is perennially in crisis.
I am not suggesting that we would effortlessly gain the promotions necessary to return to the current level in quick succession but other clubs have shown that it is possible.
The two key things for me are that the name of the club is something like the original (no barmy ideas like Calderdale United) and that the club plays at the Shay.
Scarborough attracted crowds of around 600 in the division Brighouse Town will be competing in next season and they play at Bridlington so I would not envisage too steep a drop in crowds if we remained at the Shay and were playing in the Unibond Division One, though a steep drop should be budgeted for to avoid the financial pitfalls we are seeking to move away from.
While a supporter-run club is preferable, the priority is that there is a football club in this town next season.
Anthony Power

• The Football Conference formally expelled Town from the Blue Square Premier League last week. A spokesman stated that a Halifax club would have to be reformed from scratch, seek approval from the Football Association and then be allocated a league to play in. – Editor.