The last few days have seen Annan Athletic being voted into the Scottish League, following the unfortunate demise of Gretna FC.

Highland League side Cove Rangers were runners-up in the voting, despite giving by what all accounts was an excellent  presentation at Hampden Park  on Thursday .

An article in yesterday's Press and Journal (Saturday 5th July) then gave a rallying call for a number of teams to consider  joining the Highland League to make up the "missing" 16th team required to even up the numbers.                                                                

 With all this movement the questions being asked are "what is the Jags position on this?" and "What is the "Vision" for the future  direction of the club?".

It has this week also been interesting reading all the various comments in the national press  from some of the club's applying for League status. The successfull applicants ANNAN ATHLETIC revealed that they had spent between £300-£400,000 on improvements in developing their Galabank ground, and SPARTANS said that there "had been more interest in where our funding was coming from, rather than what we are achieving with youth development in the Edinburgh area".

Commenting on this  subject Jags President MARK DUNCAN today said "Like all clubs we recently received a questionnaire regarding possible "pyramid" structure and replied  to this.  We decided on this occassion to keep our answers as brief as possible, we had previously  answered a questionnaire on a seperate subject, which we regarded as internal, only to find that others unfairly tried to use this against us which was both dissapointing and unfair, as all we had done was to give an honest answer".

"In regard to the comments made by the two clubs it certainly made interesting reading, especially when you consider what has been achieved in the last six years, when an even larger sum of more than £400,000 has been spent on improvements at our ground, with the building of the Function Hall, further improvements to the stand, creation of the new Sponsors Lounge and improvements to the  Referees changing rooms, etc."

"For the record, all of the funding for these improvements has come from ourselves, not one single penny has been received from an outside source or grant."

"On top of this a further £15,000 has also been spent on installing new floodlights, with money from the fundraising efforts of our own clubs supporters."

"When we came into  the club six years ago, it was at a time when there was a real possibility of it going out of buisness, the situation was really serious, and everyone has  worked tiredlessly over the last few years to bring the club up to a better standard both on and off the pitch."

"With the amount of time, effort and personal finance that has been invested I must say that we have been EXTREMELY DISSAPOINTED with some of the things that have gone on behind the scenes over the last year or so, in fact some of the things going on have been ridiculous."  

"If you look at what would be required to achieve status for the Scottish League, we have a club with a long and proud history (the club is 120 years old next year), massive ground improvements have  recently been made, we have a large and growing fan-base, a successfull team and we will have a full size all-weather pitch in the next few months, thanks to Moray Council, which would  allow us to go for "Community Club" status in the future."

"In the recent questonnaire we indicated that we clearly saw the long-term future of our club to be playing in the  HIGHLAND LEAGUE."

"If however things do not improve and changes are not made, then it may be that we will have to reconsider our position in the future.  This would in my opinion be a shame and would be a major loss for Highland League football.  You only have to look at the amount of supporters that our club brings to every away match for confirmation of this."