WE'VE HAD TO RESTORE OUR PRIDE ON THIS PILGRIMAGE!

IT is seventeen years since David Newton walked into a public meeting at York Street and answered the prayers of a dying football club.

- CHRIS DUNLAVY

Boston United had just crashed out of the Football League with debts of £3.5m and were teetering on the brink of liquidation.

Sympathy, however, was in short supply. Shortly after winning promotion to the EFL in 2002, Boston were found guilty of falsifying salary details on player contracts lodged with the FA.

Owner Pat Malkinson and manager Steve Evans received bans (and eventually criminal convictions), but the club’s promotion was permitted to stand, to the understandable fury of a Dagenham side they’d narrowly pipped to the Conference title.

The stench of injustice lingered throughout their five-year tenure in the Football League, and intensified on the final day of the 2006-07 campaign.

After an 87th-minute winner for Wrexham condemned the financially-stricken Pilgrims to relegation, chairman Jim Rodwell entered the club into a Company Voluntary Agreement, cynically ensuring that the immediate ten-point penalty would be meaningless.

It worked, but only to a point. Though docked no points for the following season, the terms of Boston’s CVA precluded them from paying football creditors in full, a breach of FA rules that demanded a two-division demotion. The Pilgrims were heading for Step 2.

By the time Newton arrived at York Street a few months later, Boston were stony broke and despised throughout football, their name a byword for corruption and shameless deceit. Nobody would touch them with a bargepole.

Yet as Newton listened to the desperate pleas of supporters and employees, he was moved to help.

“I sat in bed that night thinking about what it might cost and how long it would take,” recalls the 65-year-old, whose company Chestnut Homes had previously sponsored the club’s shirts.

“It was quite literally on the back of an envelope. I came up with no more than half a million and no more than two years. The club would be back in the National League and then we’d be out.”