The Isthmian League new season began at the weekend but missing from the South East division fixture list for the season will arguably be the most looked forward trip for many Kent travelling away supporters, the trip to Guernsey!

With Faversham Town due to have travelled on opening weekend, Mark Le Tissier, the Guernsey Chairman, has been talking to KSN; admitting that the Green Lions are just as disappointed as Kent football fans.

“I’m sure it’s disappointing for fans over there as its disappointing that we won’t be coming to Kent,” Mark told us, “we’ve made many, many really good friends down in Kent and in turn have enjoyed welcoming them to the island, but with the current situation being what it is, we simply cannot risk bringing the virus to the island. Unfortunately, we won’t be able to meet up this season but I’m sure that when we do get back playing and meet up again, we’ll make up for it!”

Mark explained that there have been just THREE new cases of Coronavirus reported on Guernsey since the end of May, a fact that the islanders are rightly proud of! “It’s a very close community here as you can imagine, and everybody worked really hard in Lockdown to do exactly as they were asked to do,” he said, “and we were very fortunate , we were able to control it and only “lost” thirteen people to the disease, sadly were all in care-homes.

“So, in the actual community itself, we actually haven’t lost anybody. But we know it’s still around and we still have to be very careful not to let it back in.”

“It’s all very, very difficult, people want to get back to playing football and we understand that; it’s a game that we all love and you just want to play of watch it but people can test positive and not even have any symptoms, that makes it even more difficult!

“But when teams have to pull out of matches and competitions, it does make you wonder if we are doing the right thing after all. I’m sure people are doing the right thing in that they want to play but we’ll have to wait and see in the coming weeks how it’s all pans out…

Mark then spoke about the response the Club had received following the announcement. “A couple of months ago we guessed what could happen and we started conversations with the Chairman of the League (Nick Robinson), and he was very helpful and said he’d support us wherever he could.

“And as time has gone on, the League’s board backed the decision and we’re very grateful for that , we love playing at this level and through no fault of our own, we find ourselves in a position that we cant play.

“Its great that we’ve been backed, The reaction on the island has been great – we released the news to our season ticket holders first and some have even offered to pay for a ticket for this season even though there wont be any football. We’ve had some fantastic backing, some fantastic messages of support from the mainland and all that makes us think that we’ve made the right decision.

“There have been some lovely messages on social media from across the League, there have been some personal messages as well! I must admit that there are certain things that I’m going to miss, one of them being the bottle of red wine that I have at Hythe Town; its those sort of things that I/we enjoy so much about coming to Kent, I do share a bottle with Martin (Giles the Hythe secretary) when they come here, it’s a shame but…”

It wont just be a case of putting the club on one-side until they can return. “We consider ourselves as a Community club,” he explained, “and now because we have more time to do things on the island, we’ll spend more time in schools and supporting a lot of charitable causes on the island. So, we will be doing a lot of that!”

“One of the big things that will come out of it is that this would have been our tenth season as a football club, and the break will give the Club a chance to take stock of where we are and what we’ve done and what we can do in the future and how we can make things better, all that sort of thing and we intend to engage with everyone involved in our club to see what we can do better in the future and hopefully it’ll help us come back stronger next season.”