Penistone Church manager Ian Richards sees plenty of benefits in taking part in the Yorkshire Trophy.
The long-awaited Yorkshire Trophy kicks off tonight with Church visiting organisers Brighouse Town for the Group A battle – one of three group stage matches.
Spectators will be allowed to attend and Richards feels it the Yorkshire Trophy is good for his club for several reasons.
“When we got the announcement that we could play football but behind closed doors I wasn’t too enthusiastic about doing that,” Richards told Non League Yorkshire.
“What I thought was more important for our community in Penistone that we got juniors back playing.
“They’ve been back playing and it has been brilliant.
“The County Senior League arranged a really nice tournament for our reserves so it is good they have been involved in a competition.
“Out of the blue (Brighouse Town) Vill Powell got in touch to ask if we were keen on entering the Yorkshire Trophy. I said ‘yes because if I’m going to play any games now I want them to be competitive’.
“I didn’t want to play meaningless friendlies.
“Even though it got put back because of the roadmap I still wanted to be in it as off-the-pitch it allows our community to be back involved with the football club.
“We can have people watching. The clubhouse will be open so it will feel like the vibrant Penistone Church Football Club we are.
“It also allows us to get a small bit of revenue in.
“The important thing on-the-pitch is it allows us to play some meaningful football in a competition we are going to try to win. We can work on things for next season too.
“Because it is quite late in May it is also phase one of our pre-season.
“We’re going to do this tournament; hopefully do well in it and have three-and-half weeks off before starting pre-season on June 26th.
“I’m hoping the lads will come back to pre-season a little fitter.”
Richards has confirmed his plans for his squad for next season.
“In terms of us, our recruitment has been quite stable,” he said.
“We did our recruitment last season.
“Sam Scrivens has got the opportunity to go to Grantham Town which is a good opportunity.
“Jake Greatorex the goalkeeper we signed, he is training with Boston United.
“Those two have gone higher and hopefully they will get deals.
“Everyone else has committed to stay.
“In terms of new signings, I have only identified three players I want to sign.
“They are waiting to see how the summer progresses so I’m being patient on that front.”
Penistone missed out on promotion to the Northern Premier League by two places in the combined points-per-game tables for the aborted 2019/20 and 2020/21 Toolstation NCEL Premier Division campaigns.
Church also missed out in 2019 as the FA only allowed one club to win promotion instead of three because of reasons related to the long-awaited restructuring masterplan.
Richards has taken the latest disappointment on the chin.
“We had a sluggish start (to the 2020/21 season) and because we did well in the FA Vase we played fewer league games than everyone else,” he said.
“We won all three of our last three league games before the (second and third) lockdown so we were picking up momentum.
“It was an unweighted points-per-game system so it is not the most accurate system and under that system we were fifth.
“The season before covid we were clear runners-up to Worksop (and didn’t go up) so we’ve just been unfortunate.
“There’s nothing we can do about it, we’ve just got to put it right next season.”