CONFIRMATION that Dover Athletic are still walking a financial tightrope has came with the news that the Supporters’ Trust has had to step in to help pay this week’s wage bill.

With no home game for a fortnight, the club had not enough money to pay the players’ wages but have been able to meet their commitments thanks to a “significant contribution” from the Trust.

In a statement on the club’s website, a Trust spokesman said: “This shows what we can do, but it also underlines the current state of affairs. The Trust will shortly be making a payment to the club to assist with its obligations (of £12,500 a year) to the Creditors Voluntary Agreement. We will then be left with almost zero funds so we will be unable to step in again for some considerable time.

“We all realise that it does not make happy reading regarding the finances of the club.

But when we set out in attempting to secure the future of DAFC we were determined to let supporters know the truth regarding the state of the club

“When the previous board were in place it was a regular event for supporters to complain, and rightly so, that they were being kept in the dark.

“This hasn’t happened with this current board and we will continue to report to supporters what the state of play with the club is, whether good, bad or indifferent.”

Steve Cattermole, the club's finance director, said: “We’ve been saying for some time that we need to get gates in excess of 1,000, but recently we've seen this drop to around 700 to 800 which is bound to cause us a cashflow difficulty. This just stresses how important the Trust is to the running of the club."