THE Collie Eagles Football Club is close to folding because of a lack of local support.

At last week’s Collie Shire Council meeting, Cr Mark Pianta said the club was in trouble.

The topic arose when Cr Pianta sought council support to fix the balcony at the time-keepers box.

When councillors failed to carry the motion, Cr Pianta expressed his concerns for the club’s future.

“The club has only got a handful of people there running around. No one else is there to help the club,” he said later.

“If people don’t change their attitudes it might close down. But it might be good for a few years, it might wake people up.”

Cr Pianta said he was disappointed with old members who “just let the balconies go — they must just walk around with their eyes painted on”.

Cr Pianta said both balconies at the club were “buggered” but the time-keepers’ box was the worst.

“The balconies have been deteriorating for the last 10 years,” he said.

“They used to be painted every season. Usually someone would go paint them with rust paint but no one has done it.”

The balconies no longer conformed to safety standards and needed to be replaced, Cr Pianta said.

Things had not been the same since the Mines Rovers and Collie Football clubs had merged in 2001.

“All the people who wanted to merge the two footy clubs have walked away from it,” he said.

“It annoys me that all those people who were clapping and punching the air have walked away.”

The clubs were once rivals and after merging the players had to change the way they acted to each other. “That’s not going to happen overnight,” he said.

“What used to keep footy going was rivalry. That’s what used to keep it going, but now it’s all changed. They reckon it was supposed to bring Collie together (the merger) but it hasn’t.”

Collie Eagles Football Club president Peter Rowe said the lack of support was hurting the club.

“There are a lot of people who have had an enormous amount of enjoyment and success out of playing sport in Collie, but have put nothing back into the clubs that supported them,” he said.