The Gas Trust has broadly welcomed the announcement that Bristol Rovers will groundshare with Cheltenham Town at Whaddon Road during the redevelopment of the Memorial Stadium.

The move is by no means ideal for fans given the time and expense that will be involved with an 80 mile round trip just for home games, and there remain concerns about the 7,000 capacity for some of the larger fixtures that we will be playing in League One next season. However, given the options available once Twerton Park and Ashton Gate were ruled out, the move to Cheltenham is we feel the best one for the club.

For a groundshare to work effectively there needs to be support for it from both sides, and in the case of Swindon the scale of the opposition was simply too vast for it to ever work. We feel that some of the scaremongering in the Wiltshire media about our support has been way over the top but the fact remains that the very public objections from fans’ groups, residents, the police, politicians and even Swindon Town players ensured that the project was never going to be viable. This may well prove to be a good thing, for anecdotal evidence suggested that there were significant sections of our core support who would not have travelled to Swindon given the problems at both Rovers-Swindon fixtures last year. We have never had such issues with Cheltenham Town and look forward to further developing our good relations with their supporters during our time away from Bristol.

Moreover, despite the reservations about the capacity, we feel that for the majority of our games out of BS7 Whaddon Road will be better suited to our needs given the campactness of the ground, the terracing behind the goal and the quality of the playing surface. In the case of the first two, it should be more conducive to creating the type of atmosphere that played such a key role in our success at Twerton Park and which will be a significant factor in helping achieve the key short-term priority of ensuring that we return to the redeveloped stadium as a League One club or better.

Against all of this, the Trust remains very concerned about the viability of the club while we are away from the Memorial Stadium. The club has run up millions of pounds in operating losses in recent years and it is only a year ago that the club’s Fans’ Director and the Chairman of the official Supporters’ Club were expressing serious concerns about the club’s financial control procedures. The move away from Bristol and the inevitable decline in average attendances and associated revenues is bound to place even further pressure on the finances of a club seeking to deliver the highly demanding goals of a successful League One side and a £30m stadium redevelopment project. The lack of any detailed information on how the stadium redevelopment project will be funded only increases these worries. In its April 2005 Seven Point Plan, the club stated that it intended to harness the talents and expertise of supporters to assist with the running of the club through the establishment of a number of advisory groups to work with the staff and the board of directors in a number of operational areas. A fully independent Stadium Redevelopment Advisory Group which monitors the progress of the redevelopment project and reports back to supporters on a regular basis would be an ideal way of enhancing communication channels with the club’s fanbase and allaying any fears which supporters may have on the viability of the project.

Finally, it goes without saying that the club needs to make it as attractive as possible for Gasheads to watch Rovers over the course of the next two seasons. The cost and time involved in travelling to Cheltenham will be significant – much more than it was for the trip to Bath twenty years ago - and this needs to be taken into consideration when setting both the matchday pricing structure and the range of season ticket packages available, especially where families are involved. The clubs’s fanbase has been significantly expanded since our return to Bristol and the recent trips to Cardiff and Wembley show the scale of support that there is out there for Rovers. An imaginative package of ticketing arrangements and assisted travel options will allow us to both capitalise on the current feelgood factor around the club and ensure that we keep hold of the extensive support that has been nurtured over the years during our time away. That is vital for the future of the club.