United Trust representatives Alan Steel, Frank Beattie and Norman Steel spoke to BBC Radio Cumbria on Friday evening about where the Trust is at present, the first part of those interviews, with Alan Steel, are transcripted here :
" First of all I don't really understand why we have had a bad press. The Trust has been obliged to go to court and undergo lengthy litigation on two separate occasions. Once to protect their shareholding which we have, we are now infact the biggest shareholder in Carlisle United. Then once to protect the biggest asset which Carlisle United have which is 110 acres of land in the middle of the town, and it was proposed that it should just be given away. We've been successful in both of those attempts.
" As far as being unpopular is concerned, we just get a bad press, a completely distorted picture has been painted of us, mainly by the local newspaper I have got to say. With the new owners coming in we are looking forward to a period where we can do whatever we can to help the Trust. To date, to be honest I don't think that anyone, or any organisation, has done more than us, to assist the club.
" We have put £800,000 in in straight cash to buy our shares and we have guaranteed the ownership of this piece of land for the club. Which in the future, in our view, and in a lot of other people's opinion will be worth millions of pounds. What we want to do now is get behind the club, every aspect of its fundraising activities which other Trusts have done. Even small Trusts like Ebbsfleet for instance raise £700,000, Oldham have raised hundreds of thousands of pounds.
" If you look around the country then most clubs these days have got a Trust and they spend their time working alongside the club and the people in the club doing whatever they can to raise money for the benefit of the club. That is exactly what we want to do. Hopefully the litigation, which we didn't appreciate and didn't want to get involved in, but we had no choice but to get involved in.
" Hopefully that is all behind us now and we can look forward with four new owners and ourselves, we are infact the biggest owner but we are not a new owner. We'd hope to work together for the good of the club, as simple as that. What is gone has gone, it is pointless raking about in the past, we are looking to do nothing else but to assist the club, that has always been our objective. Sometimes we have differed from the owners of the club and we are now into our fourth lot of owners since we started. "
" Sometimes what we thought was important, which has always been to the benefit of the club, that's the only thing that we think is important, the wellbeing of the club. Sometimes that has differed from the personal desires and objectives of particular owners at particular times, and we have differed and we have had to fight our battles. There has been no joy in that, we didn't want to do it, we gritted our teeth, we have got through it, here we are, let's have a crack, let's have a new start.
" The Trust started in South Wales, I was sitting looking at the rain out of the window one Tuesday afternoon and we had yet another bout of nonsense in the newspapers about Carlisle not being fit to have a football club. Michael Knighton saying that he wouldn't leave until he saw weeds growing on the terraces, those sort of quotations. I was currently working in the University in South Wales and even mentioning the fact that you were from Carlisle would cause laughter among any particular group of people, because of the goings-on at that time.
" I thought to myself, no more, this can't continue, I called for people together in the city who I knew had long histories with the football club, the most prominent of which was Kate Rowley, and the Trust started off from there. We kicked off with a meeting in 2001 in the Sands Centre attended by 1,200 people and we have gone from strength to strength.
" We need to be much better at communications, obviously we have been up against professionals with their own newspaper essentially who have printed a great series of articles throughout the years which have not been pro-Trust. We have been in touch and we hope that that now is going to change, there has certainly been no antagonism from our point of view.
" I noticed at one point we all suddenly became extremists, now I am surprised by that because we are extremely exactly, infact not extremely, exactly the same now as we were when we kicked off. If you read our brochure, the initial brochure, dating back to 2001, we are doing now precisely what we set out to do then, and we haven't changed one iota. So why we suddenly became extremists I don't know, I just don't know. "