The Kernow of the Problem: how Truro City have had to travel further & further just to be at home this season

With four hundred mile round trips and frequent postponements, this has been a disaster of a season for a club who once held very high ambitions.

It seems extraordinary that this has flown relatively under the radar for so long, but there is a senior non-league football club who haven’t played a match in their home county, never mind their home city, in three years and who have recently had to switch to a ground-share in a town more than 100 miles from home.

They are two places above the relegation places in their division, with their latest landlords one place below them in the table. Both are within three points of the bottom four, and three-quarters of the league season has been played. It’s been a tough old decade for Truro City, but things weren’t always like this.

There was a time when it rained goals. They scored 437 in the league alone over the three seasons between 2007 and 2009, a scarcely credible average of 146 goals per season as the club won three league titles and three promotions in a row, jumping from the Western League Division One to the Southern League Premier Division. Two years later came a fourth league title in five years and a place in the Conference South.

But the collapse started almost as soon as they reached that level. On Tuesday 23rd August 2011, Truro lost 2-1 at Salisbury in the league. Two days later, they were presented with a winding up petition by HMRC over unpaid tax and National Insurance. It wasn’t the last that they’d receive that season, and over the 13 months the club would almost completely financially unravel.

That first season, 2011/12, saw them finish in a creditable 14th place in the Conference South, but events off the pitch were rapidly escalating out of anybody’s control. Property developer chairman Kevin Heaney was declared bankrupt and stood down on the 24th August 2012. The club collapsed into administration a week later.

It was touch and go whether they would even survive. When the administrators failed to pay a required bond of £50,000 to the Football Conference by the 11th October 2012, the threat of expulsion was very real indeed. But the Football Conference opted not to pull the trigger and held off, which turned out to be the right decision. A sale of the club was agreed, which was formally completed that December.

But while the decade since then hasn’t been as touch and go as that year was, the club’s position can hardly be considered to have been stable, either. Truro were predictably relegated in 2013 in bottom place in the table, but they returned two years later and in 2014 sold their Treyew Road home, though they were initially allowed to continue to play there.

But in 2018 they ran out of extensions and left, returning in January 2019, this only until 2021 before they left again, this time for good. How did this come to happen? How long have you got? The original plans for a Stadium for Cornwall were announced in 2005, and rejected. Revised plans were put forward and rejected. The Cornish Pirates rugby club came on board but further plans were rejected. They tried again in 2011, but again nothing concrete came of them. The matter rumbled on for more than a decade before finally being laid to rest, with new plans for a substantially smaller sports hub replacing them.

Truro’s first departure from Treyew Road came with a ground-share agreement at Torquay United. When they left for good in 2021, it was for Plymouth Parkway FC. But two-thirds of the way through this season that deal unexpectedly came to an end, and this time Truro were on the move even further from Cornwall, to share with fellow National League club Taunton Town.

This move came with several not-insignificant asterisks attached. Firstly, while Plymouth is a long way from Truro, Taunton is even further. It’s in Somerset, two counties over from Cornwall, and a 120 mile driving distance. For scale, that’s about the distance from London to Birmingham, or from Manchester to Oxford.

And it should also be borne in mind that this is the south-west of England, where transport links are at best antiquated and at worst close to non-existent. There is a direct train between Truro and Taunton, but it takes two and three-quarter hours and costs £76.60 for an off-peak return ticket. For a Saturday home match, you’d have to get the train at 10.55 to be there for 1.40, and if you got a train back an hour after the final whistle, you’d get off the train back in Truro just after 8.40 in the evening.

For midweek games, you can leave at 3.55 and get into Taunton just after 6.50, but getting home… your only option is to get the night train, which gets into Taunton at 3.35am and gets back to Truro a staggering three and a half hours later, just after 7.05 the following morning. It might be better to look for a lift back afterwards.

And this is for home matches. Either by car or train, it is unsurprising that few are even able to make that sort of time commitment, and with many away matches being even further away, it’s not difficult to see how this entire situation could break the club’s relationship with the supporters altogether.

On top of that, Taunton Town are a whole bag of neuroses themselves at the moment. They were served with a winding up petition in January over unpaid PAYE, which was later satisfied. The repeated postponements had doubtless hit the club’s already fragile finances hard.

But January was a bad month for the club in other respects, too. Six players left at the start of the month, issuing a statement in which they said that, “Fundamental failures at the very top of the club [are] leading to a situation where the club is unsustainable and the group of players has had to be broken apart.”

And on top of that, Taunton have also had substantial issues with their pitch this season, a matter which affects both them and Truro City. Frequent cancellations have led to a backlog of home fixtures, which is now a backlog of home fixtures for two clubs.

With this winter having been the way it has, there may even be questions over whether the pitch can hold up for the remainder of this season, certainly if the weather doesn’t start to substantially dry out, which is showing few signs of happening as of the third week in March.

It certainly doesn’t seem unreasonable to suggest that a dire need for ready cash was no small part of the reason behind why they accepted a ground share with Truro in the first place, even though the costs of this marriage of convenience are likely high for both parties.

Could a 3g pitch be the answer for Truro? Not in this case. The nearest ground to there capable of hosting National League South football is probably Dorchester Town, and that’s more than 150 miles from Truro, and they already have tenants anyway.

Truro do still have a home league match against league leaders Yeovil Town scheduled for Tuesday 11th April. This match had been due to be played on the 24th January at Plymouth Parkway, but was postponed due to a waterlogged pitch and was likely the catalyst for them leaving Plymouth.

But Taunton’s pitch has been no improvement. When the two clubs played each other in the league at the start of March (Truro’s home fixture), the match was moved to the 3g pitch at Gloucester City, a club so far from Truro that they play in the National League North. It was a four hundred mile round trip for home supporters.

Truro played their next ‘home’ match against Chelmsford City there too, the following Saturday night. They also attempted to play there against Eastbourne Borough, only for that match to be abandoned after 58 minutes after a serious injury came about to an Eastbourne player. Another fixture slot gone, and with the regular National League Season due to end on the 20th April, time now seriously starting to run out.

It’s easy to wonder how this entire mess came about in the first place. After all, it’s well-known that The National League has security of tenure rules which require clubs to have a lease for a certain period of time. The National League applies the FA’s Standardised Rules, in which rule 2.3.2 says:

A Club must either (a) own the freehold of the Ground or (b) as at 31 March in each year, have a lease of the Ground which does not expire until at least the end of the next Playing Season or (c) possess a written agreement for the use of the Ground which is acceptable to The FA and the Competition.

But this rule only really covers matters related to clubs being evicted from their ground, rather than in the event of one choosing to end a tenancy and just leave. Considering that there have been no sanctions against Truro, we can only presume that this move has been deemed to be within the current National League rules.

It should, of course, really go without saying that it is not a strong look for the National League that one of their clubs is playing their home matches so far from their home city. There are also questions to answer surrounding the league’s scheduling this season. As you may have noticed, the National League South season ends on the 20th April. This is a 46-match league season, and in addition to this the league has six-team play-offs.

Perhaps we have got ‘unlucky’ with the weather this winter, although climate change could mean that we have much more—and much worse—of this to come. It may be worth looking at next season’s fixture schedule to see if there’s more room to take postponements into account, regardless.

But back in the present day, what happens at the end of this season? The Stadium for Cornwall remained a good idea in theory, but less appealing in practice. However, Truro did finally achieve planning permission for a 3,000 capacity stadium in the middle of February.

Problem solved, yes? Well no, not quite. The National League need to know where Truro will be playing by the end of March, and Truro would have to submit a failsafe groundshare in the event that the new stadium isn’t ready in time for the start of next season, even though work on it did start last July. Currently, September is the date being given for completion. The race is on.

Perhaps the scaling back of the Stadium for Cornwall marks a shift back towards something more commonsensical for the county’s sporting future. Truro is a city of just under 20,000 people, and although the population of the county of Cornwall overall is just over half a million, transport links in this corner of the country make Kevin Heaney’s vision from almost twenty years ago of thousands of sports fans descend upon the club feel somewhat fanciful.

Truro is by its very location a long way from anywhere, and that essential geography cannot be changed. When we think of long distances in England we tend to think of north to south. But from Truro, the nearest other town with a population of over 25,000 is Plymouth, and even that’s more than 40 miles away, with a driving distance of 55. Public transport links are abysmal. Road links aren’t much better.

Ground-sharing hasn’t helped anybody. Moving from Cornwall to Plymouth to Taunton changes the players who will be available to the club. These players are part-timers, students and people with jobs. The distances also isolate the club from the supporters. It should always be an act of very last resort. Playing home matches at venues in Gloucester, Taunton and Plymouth in the course of one season should be unacceptable.

Frankly, the club have been messing everybody about this season, and this nomadic lifestyle cannot be allowed to continue into next season either; not just for the integrity of whichever league Truro City happen to be playing in next season, but also for players, other clubs and all supporters, especially the put upon supporters of the club itself.