Ambitious chairman Tony O’Driscoll is in the process of assembling a new-look Hayes & Yeading United Football Club board after overseeing a complete overhaul of the previous regime this month.
Board members Nick Bell, Andy Corbett, Simon East, Dean Goodall, Derek Goodall, Nick Griffith, Trevor Griffith, Avril Radford and company secretary John Bond have all left their roles at the Conference South club.
O’Driscoll’s has been acting as chairman since last summer but has only just officially taken over from his predecessor after rubber-stamping his leadership with Companies House in early August.
General manager Derrick Matthews is the only other survivor from the old setup and will continue alongside the new faces O’Driscoll is working hard to bring into the Beaconsfield Road outfit.
O’Driscoll said this week: “If I’m honest, I’m not worried whether it [my position as chairman] had been confirmed or not. It makes no difference to me in terms of what’s going on, I suppose it does for the league, but it won’t make any difference to me day-to-day.
“We’ve got to add a few more board members and that will happen in the next week or so. It’s a clean start and we thank the guys who are leaving for the work they have done. I’m not blaming any one individual but the club wasn’t in the best health when I took over.
“I want to bring my own people in. All of the previous board members are still welcome to come to the games and some of them will. The people I want to bring in our football people and business people and hopefully they will be the right choice.”
On the field, things are also looking up for United manager Phil Babb’s side after a fantastic start to the new campaign with six points from their first two games, the latest of which saw H&Y cruise to a 3-1 victory over Concord Rangers on Saturday.
O’Driscoll added: “It’s been an enjoyable start to the season. Dean Inman, our captain and player of the year last season, was suspended for the first two games and we were fearing the worst. We thought anything we could get without him would be a bonus.
"Jokingly, we said ‘imagine if we get six points, he’ll have to stay on the bench’ and now it will probably probably happen! The boys have done ever so well and the back four have been superb. It looks solid back there.
“It was difficult for Phil because players want to know which league they will be playing in. When you can’t tell them that, they’re not going to wait. Once we did know where we’d be playing he only had a couple of weeks to recruit people and we had an awful lot of trialists down at the club.
"It was only really in the last week that he put it all together and they hadn’t even played together as a team until the first game. It makes it even more impressive.”
Hayes & Yeading will be hoping they can maintain their perfect start to the new Conference South season with another victory at Basingstoke Town on Saturday afternoon.
