BEWDLEY Town are bracing themselves for another barren spell of football as their Ribbesford Meadow ground struggles to cope with the current spell of wet weather.

Much of the ground remains waterlogged leaving beleaguered secretary Steve Godfrey to admit: “Unless the weather improves dramatically, I can’t see us playing at home at all in January."

Bewdley have already been exploring the prospect of staging their matches on neighbouring grounds, despite splashing - even though they splashed out between £5,000 to £6,000-worth of drainage work on the pitch during the summer.

Godfrey said: “People’s perception is that the River Severn causes all the problems but it doesn’t.

“The pitch surface has a layer of clay on top of sandstone. When the pitch is rolled it becomes compacted, the surface reacts like a sponge, leaving the water with nowhere to go.

“We targeted where we thought were the worst areas in the summer. Those areas are now in perfect condition to the point where you could walk across it in carpet slippers at the moment.

“But that only accounts to around 20 per cent of the playing surface, if that. The rest of it would require wearing wellies to walk upon.

"It would cost us in the region of £40,000 minimum to put the rest of the area right, which would involve ripping up the pitch. But we don’t have that sort of money.

“We’ve been looking to see whether we could get any grants to help us.

“Our chairman, Geoff Edwards, approached the Football Association for help but was told the level of football in which we play didn’t warrant the money involved, which as you could imagine, really went down well, especially as we are aware of other clubs at our level having five-figure fees spent on their playing surface.

“We’ve been having flooding problems with the pitch ever since 2007 and one season we finished up having to play 16 games in five weeks, which was ridiculous.”

“Switching our matches to other grounds does have a downside. Although we get to keep the gate money, we lose out on any revenue from bar takings in addition to paying for the hire of the pitch.

“We really do need some help, especially as this severe wet weather looks set to continue.”