The appointment comes as Enfield Town reach the halfway point of another season of struggle in National League South, writes Andrew Warshaw

Sky Sports presenter Michael Bridge has become a patron of Enfield Town FC's charity arm — Sky Sports presenter Michael Bridge has become a patron of Enfield Town FC’s charity arm

Sky Sports presenter Michael Bridge, born and educated in Enfield, has been appointed the first patron of Enfield Town FC’s charity arm.

Michael recently spent a morning integrating with the various Saturday football school teams – youth, disability, walking football – and presenting them with end-of-term medals. His role will be to support and help raise funds for the club’s registered charity work in the community.

“When the club approached me, it took me less than a second to say yes,” said Michael.

“It’s an incredible honour to be patron of the club’s charity projects. I’m very privileged to be able to travel to many places but Enfield is my home and where my heart is. This means an awful lot.

“We are blessed to have an amazing pyramid system and non-league football is the heart of the game so to be part of this community is a no-brainer. I’ll do what ever I can to give something back to this wonderful cause and this wonderful club.

“I used to follow the old Enfield and to come back as Enfield Town has, after being ripped apart and now to be playing in National League South is pretty unbelievable. I really hope they stay up in what is an incredible tough league with so many full-time teams.”

Meanwhile, at the halfway stage of the club’s second campaign in National League South, Towners boss Gavin Macpherson admits they probably should have more points on the board.

“In truth we’re slightly disappointed to be where we are, but there are well-chronicled reasons for that,” Gavin told the Dispatch ahead of the busy festive period when, at time of writing, Town were in the bottom four.

Top of that list of reasons was a crippling injury list which reached ludicrous levels in November when, coupled with suspensions and international call-ups, Town were at one stage without 13 players.

Seven consecutive defeats in all competitions told their own story. “The huge injury list hit us hard and was horrendous to manage, you cant keep bringing players in,” said Gavin. “But that wasn’t the only issue. Sometimes we’ve fallen the wrong side of results due to our own mistakes when our performances probably warranted more.

“On the plus side, we’ve been in most games against teams in and around the top of the table and have proved we can to go toe-to-toe with whoever we play.”

It’s a good point. Only twice this season (again at the time of writing) have Town been blown away by league opposition – the 4-1 defeats at Chesham and Dover. It’s a far cry from last term when they suffered a fair few sobering losses yet still managed to survive.

“Last season we probably couldn’t have had this discussion,” Gav continued. “We’re ahead of the points tally we had last time and we’d hoped to have added another three but for a decision by the referee to call off the Hampton and Richmond game [on 13^th December], which left everybody astonished.”

Rarely, if ever, has a postponement (the fixture has been re-arranged for Tuesday, 6^th January) caused such resentment. Both teams and managers were keen to play, only for the match to be called off because a minuscule part of the pitch was contentiously deemed unplayable, resulting in a heavy financial hit for the hosts.

It’s no coincidence that the aforementioned run of defeats was followed by three games unbeaten as players returned from injury, the highlight undoubtedly being the 5-1 thrashing of Farnborough.

“We recognise what we are, a club battling against the elements on-and-off the field more than ever,” said Gavin. “We had some massive players missing but we have a points tally in our minds and now we would expect to push on.”

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