Allen sensible in promotion bid

Chesterfield chairman Dave Allen has reiterated his desire to bring Championship football to the town.

Allen joined the board as major stakeholder in 2009, when the club was in League Two, and said at the time his aim was to get the Spireites up into the second tier within five years. It may have taken a little longer, but this season Chesterfield came close to realising Allen's ambition as they reached the League One play-offs. However, their promotion challenge ended in the semi-finals as they lost 4-0 on aggregate to Preston. Allen, who replaced Barrie Hubbard as chairman in 2012, insists he will not break the bank to get the Spireites to what he calls "the promised land" and has told Dean Saunders, who on Wednesday was introduced as manager following Paul Cook's departure to Portsmouth, he will have to work with a similar budget to that of his predecessor with an emphasis on youth development. Taking a swipe at local rivals Rotherham, who this season signed a total of 31 new players, including 19 loans, Allen said: "Dean understands the situation and what we are trying to achieve. "We can't have a manager who, like some managers not too far away from here, bring in new players every week and then discard them - we just can't afford that. "We've got to be right in what we do and we have to do things in a proper manner. That means not spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on players - this is a business. "This is also a club that has a new football ground which needs paying for, so there's a debt to be paid as well. I have to manage things properly and to that end we have a great youth team set up and a great academy, and a reserve team next year again. "We will get to the Championship, that's the promised land for this club. And we'll get there the proper way. I don't want to put a timescale on it, but we will do it. "We have actually over-achieved. The plan this season was to consolidate our position in League One and then try to get in the play-offs next season. That is still the plan, and maybe we can do even better. "I want us in the play-offs again. Last season, at the beginning, we thought it would be one of consolidation. But after the first dozen games or so we were doing very well, playing some superb football and it became obvious we had set our expectations too low. We knew we could do better than just adapt to the division. "Why can't we do that again? It will be a similar set of players. The budget will be similar. After this season that has to be the aim. We need to keep the club going forward."