ANNAN Athletic have promised they will never suffer the fate of fallen neighbours Gretna after taking their place in the Scottish Football League following yesterday's vote at Hampden.
Henry McClelland, the club's 49-year-old chairman, has been involved with Annan since he was a teenager and sold the pies when they played their first Scottish Cup tie against Stranraer in front of a record attendance of 1250 at Galabank back in December 1979.
That was the day McClelland began to nurture a dream of taking a club who began life in the Dumfries and District Welfare League in 1942 into the senior set-up of Scottish football, a dream realised just before 3pm yesterday when they were elected to the Third Division ahead of Cove Rangers, Spartans, Edinburgh City and Preston Athletic.
McClelland, however, is a man determined not to chase a dream too far or too soon. Annan's progress over the past three decades has been steady, based on the hard work of McClelland and his fellow committee members who have established the club at the heart of their town's community.
It is where they will remain with McClelland determined that the demise of Gretna, whose six-year surge from the Third Division to the SPL on the back of Brooks Mileson's millions proved fatally unsustainable, will not be repeated at Annan.
"If a millionaire came in to try and invest in our club, he would be shown the roads north, south, east and west out of Annan," said McClelland. "We would be lynched by the people of Annan if we sold the club to a millionaire.
"We are a totally different case to Gretna. Our business model is based on what we are and have always been. Our feet are firmly on the ground and that's where they will stay. We don't owe anyone anything and we don't spend what we can't afford.
"We hated seeing what happened to Gretna and we won't allow it to happen to us. We will live within our means."
Annan, members of the East of Scotland League since 1987, emerged victorious yesterday after three rounds of voting from the 29 incumbent SFL clubs finally saw them past the magical figure of 15 required to win.
They topped the first round with 14 votes, ahead of Cove Rangers who polled eight and Spartans who received five. Edinburgh City and Preston Athletic attracted just one vote each, eliminating them at the first hurdle. Annan again received 14 votes in the second round with Cove and Spartans improving to nine and six respectively. In the final head-to-head contest Annan triumphed with 17 votes to 12 for Highland League Cove .
The result is conditional on Annan erecting floodlights at Galabank for the start of the new season but McClelland confirmed they will be in place by the end of July.
David Longmuir, the chief executive of the SFL, said:
"In terms of their overall package, I felt Annan were ready to go when we visited them a few weeks ago.
It is now important for Annan and important for us as well that they do well in the SFL."
Pyramid plans offer fresh hope to candidates who missed outThe full article contains 543 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
