GRAVESEND chairman Brian Kilcullen has warned that the club cannot sustain full-time football on gates of 618.

He was responding to the lowest attendance of the season for the 2-1 defeat by second-placed Hereford United.

Fleet fell victim to the re-arranged game clashing with live television coverage of Chelsea’s Champions League tie at Barcelona. Constant drizzle also kept fans at their firesides.

Before the start of the season, the club’s board of directors budgeted for home crowds of 1,250. The three home games before Hereford attracted crowds of 930 (Scarborough) and 698 (Crawley).

This contrasts with the season’s best 1,616 for the second of the club’s highly successful Friday night experiments against leaders Accrington Stanley on February 17. Since then attendances have tumbled sharply.

Mr Kilcullen said: "The Hereford attendance hurt me nearly as much as the result. The bottom line is that we cannot sustain full-time football on gates of just over 600.

"We have no divine right to expect people to come and watch us so we are going out into the local community and working hard on a number of projects to try and get more people through the turnstiles.

"We’re working overtime on developing our fan base and that work will continue. But when I left the ground after the Hereford game I felt very low and frankly wondered what more we had to do."