Town skipper Jon Walters says he was disappointed but not surprised to see his former club Chester City’s long-running financial woes lead to their expulsion from the Blue Square Premier last week. The 26-year-old joined the Blues from Chester, then in League Two, in January 2007.

Walters told the club site: "It's disappointing obviously to see the situation Chester are in. I'm not surprised though. There were signs of the problems they were having when I was there - people were getting paid late virtually every month.

"If you are only getting in a couple of thousand fans every two weeks to watch home games and from that you've got to finance away trips, pay wages and everything else - it's difficult to see how they can afford to cover their outgoings.

"I think a lot of the League Two and even League One clubs face that problem and it's only a matter of time before clubs start to go out of business.

"They introduced the penalty for clubs going into administration a few years back and that number seems to be on the rise. It's a worry for the game. When you see Premier League clubs like Portsmouth struggling, you know there is a real problem."

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WREXHAM_BLUE added 21:59 - Mar 2 Chester are (were!) in a strange position geographically in as much as they don't seem to have a big enough core support. The perception locally is that no-one seems to care. They've been badly run for many years with a ridiculous number of managers, not least Mark Wright 3 or 4 times if memory serves me correctly. A great shame that it has come to this for the real fans of the club. It strikes me as very sad to think that John Terry's wages for the week he was sunning himself on holiday would have made a massive difference to the finances of a club like Chester. Whilst I don't blame the players for the huge wages many command, the whole financial climate clubs have created is hardly sustainable at any level.

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