Lorraine Rogers to take a back seat at Tranmere

Aug 27 2007 by Liam Murphy, Liverpool Daily Post

Lorraine Rogers

LORRAINE ROGERS is to relinquish day-to-day responsibilities at Tranmere Rovers, paving the way for her to start work at The Mersey Partnership.

Earlier this month, the Daily Post reported that Rovers chair- man Ms Rogers had been due to start work as TMP’s new chief ex- ecutive earlier this month, but it then emerged she had yet to agree terms with the organisation.

The protracted negotiations are understood to have centred on how Ms Rogers would split her time between Tranmere Rovers and TMP.

But her decision to stand back from the day-to-day running of the Wirral club would suggest that a compromise has been reached. She is expected to start at TMP tomorrow. She will become non-executive chairman of the League One club.

Writing in the club’s matchday programme, ahead of Saturday’s game with Brighton, Ms Rogers said: “When I joined the board in 1998, we had inherited some very serious financial problems from the previous regime.

“I felt as though I had been left holding the baby and had no option but to roll up my sleeves and get involved in the day-to-day running of the club.

“Now we have a greater degree of stability. Since 2002, we’ve had a chief executive, Mick Horton, who has been in football administration for 22 years, and our finance director, Richard Hughes, has been in football finance for 13 years. They are a very experienced team.

“Last month, we announced that we’re looking to make four new appointments in commercial and administration areas so we will have the extra resources we need for a level playing field off the pitch with other clubs of a similar size.

“We’ve moved on since the doom and gloom of those financial problems, and Peter Johnson and I both feel the time is right for me to hand over the day-to-day executive responsibilities to Mick and his colleagues and become a non-executive chairman.

“I will do everything I can to support and champion the club in this new role.”

TMP, a combined public/private sector body which has the lead responsibility for inward investment and tourism for Merseyside, originally said it expected Ms Rogers to split her time between the club and their job, but that raised concerns in some quarters about how it would be possible to balance both jobs.

It is a year since TMP’s former chief executive, Robert Crawford, quit his job after less than one year in the post.

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