Page 7 - Deal Round Up September 2020

It had a 2,000 seater stand with bars, a restaurant and hospitality boxes, not bad for a club
that was in the Kent League!
Promotions followed and in 1993 in front of a crowd of 5,951 fans they entered Tottenham
Hotspur in a friendly.
Then the cracks started to appear. They had spent all the money from their former ground,
plus an extra million! This forced them to sell the ground back to the council and lease it back,
which they struggled to do. By 2012 they had moved out and into Woodstock Park where they
play today. The Bull Ground now has a Sainsbury’s on it.
Dartford
Sometimes crisis happens to non-league football
clubs which just cannot be avoided and certainly
Dartford have experienced this over the years.
The club was riding high in the late 1980s with
impressive league form and some good cup runs,
under the management of Peter Taylor.
With gates averaging over 1000 the future looked
bright at their Watling Street ground where they
had played since 1921.
But because of the disasters at Hillsborough and the awful fire at Bradford City the Football
Association brought in strict new ground regulations. As a consequence the club found itself
stretched by the costs of upgrading the old Watling Street facilities, but when neighbours
Maidstone United, on the verge of promotion to the Football League, were in need of a ground
to share, the money they offered to Dartford was ideally timed. The arrangement was working
well until the Stones imploded in 1992, leaving the Darts without rent and handing them the
£500,000 for ground improvements, which practically finished them. They had to sell Watling
Street, which is now housing and after groundsharing for many years did not move back to the
town until 2006, when they moved into the council built Princes Park.
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