Vice chairman Peter Varney confirmed today that the club will be lodging a formal complaint regarding the match referee and match assessor in yesterday’s match at home to Bishop’s Stortford.
Varney told FleetOnline, “At 2.30pm our left back Joe Howe was injured in the warm-up. We replaced him with Aiden Palmer who was not in the original named 16 – as we are perfectly entitled to do under League rules. Bishop’s Stortford protested at the change and neither the match official nor the match assessor were confident enough to confirm our action was in accordance with League rules and decided to seek clarification from the Football Association.
“This caused a delay to the kick-off. Worse than that though is that Daryl McMahon was left in a ridiculous situation where he had legitimately named a replacement player for Joe but didn’t know whether he would be forced to make another change and so named Anthony Acheampong (pictured) as a second replacement player and changed the team shape which is far from ideal.
“This is not an acceptable situation immediately before kick-off and is very disruptive to team organisation. Daryl should not have to do this because match officials and assessors do not know the rules – and players getting injured in a warm-up is hardly an unusual occurrence after all. In my opinion match officials need proper coaching on rules like this that they are almost certain to come across from time to time.”
