The sort of sponsorship that would work immediately

[Dick Large]

We know that the most significant companies in Cumbria will not provide sponsorship / advertising revenue or any other benefit to 1921 because to put money into a place where it can be controlled by The Three is an absolute waste.

So here is my concept of sponsorship that could be done now, or at least when covid is under control. It gets around the above problem. A sponsor could buy something that would be genuinely useful to the club but which would not otherwise be bought. I envisage something which would help training / fitness / medical facilities but which is outside the scope of current parsimonious budgets.

But my favourite sponsorship would be for the travel costs of a reserve team and the costs paid to the officials of home reserve matches. It is clear that the club will not thus far consider having a reserve team in a league because it is considered to be non-essential and thus an investigation of costs has probably not been done. But when travel / officials costs have been covered there is very little other cost of a reserve team. We normally have 23 full time professionals, so the team would consist of the 4 or 5 first team bench players who got little or no pitch time in the last first team match plus the 6 other professionals. The most elderly / best of the club's youngsters could make up the remaining team / bench positions. We may of course get one or two concurrent suspensions / injuries to members of the full time squad but that creates opportunity for more youngsters to play in the open age reserve team. Of course they would probably be 'up against it' if the opposition just happened to be an entire squad of experienced rugged full time professionals but in that case we would discover something about any youngsters in our team.

We need our bench / squad players to be 'at it' and playing regular genuine competitive open age reserve football on a Tuesday / Wednesday afternoon. This is something that I regard as important. If there is a Tuesday first team match the reserve match would be played on Wednesday afternoon.