Southern Community spirit driving Posset to great heights, says football chief Hughes

JAMES Hughes cast excited views over Portishead Town’s meteoric rise, while warning: “We can’t let it all go to our heads now.”

- Simon PARKINSON

Portishead Town's management team, from left, Sam Bendall-Weeks, David Hewitt, Kye Mountford (manager), Eamonn Daly and James Hughes

The club's director of football has watched spellbound as Posset have raced to the Southern League Division One South summit, flattening some of the section's strongest competitors in the act.

Portishead now follow up Saturday’s nailbiting 3-2 home victory over Winchester City, and Tuesday night's 5-0 mauling of Exmouth Town, with a trip tomorrow to take on a Shaftesbury side also very much in the promotion equation.

One of the club’s many local lads, and a driving force with others behind their back-to-back elevations from Western League Division One to their present lofty status, Hughes admits he too is pinching himself still at his club's swift and sudden emergence as a step 4 force.

The 44-year-old said: “This is my sixth year in the role of director of football, and people laughed when I put together back then a strategy which included reaching the Southern League by 2025.

“Td been asking the question, ‘Why aren't we bigger, given the size of the town?’

“For many years we'd been sitting comfortably in Division One of the Western League without looking like going anywhere. There wasn’t a plan, and there was no way, in most people’s minds, that we could outgrow our near neighbours Clevedon Town.

“We upset a few people as we began our journey forwards; we moved a few pieces, but all for the right reasons. Many people told me it was a pipe dream, even my missus, although she did back me 100 per cent. It's a dream accomplished, but also a big reality”

Hughes emphasised: “We can’t be the type of club run with one person financing it. We're a community operation and an enormous one, with somewhere between 1,100 and 1,200 playing members, some 950 of them juniors.