Former Island resident Palios says the League Two outfit was initially presented with a ‘perfect opportunity’ to use Jersey as a pre-season training base this summer, but upcoming changes to government travel policies have scuppered their plans.
The Merseyside outfit were in line to play Jersey Bulls at Springfield during their stay in July.
Championship club Hull City have also binned their plans to travel to Jersey next week.
Palios, the former chairman of the Jersey Development Company, said: ‘Jersey has a real opportunity to establish itself as a place for these kind of camps, as we’ve seen with the Lions tour. It’s not too far to go, people aren’t going to have issues with visas and we all speak the same language.
‘This year seemed like the perfect opportunity for us. We’ve got a number of new players coming into the squad and it would have been good to get them away for a pre-season trip for team building, as well as having an opportunity to play a game over there.
‘But obviously Covid is the problem and when Wirral was designated as “red” in the Covid lottery, the consequence of that was the players would have had to isolate for a week. When it’s a week-long trip, there’s no point in coming.’
Palios added that contact was made with the Government of Jersey to discuss potential travel exemptions, given the regular testing procedures adopted by professional clubs.
‘We did explore the possibility of whether they [the government] would be prepared to apply elite sport exemptions but the answer was “no”,’ she explained. ‘It’s very disappointing for us because we were really looking forward to coming over [but] we know it’s a complicated area.
‘Hopefully we’ll be able to pick this up again next year, when I assume things will be back closer to normality. It’s certainly something we’d like to make happen.’
More in Thursday’s JEP.
