FALMOUTH Town Football Club raised more than £2,000 after a highly successful evening with former professional footballers Tony Cottee and Tony Gale.

One hundred and four people attended the event at the Greenbank Hotel last week, which was priced at £300 per table of ten people, with the club aiming to raising enough money to buy a community defibrillator for their Bickland Park ground in light of the recent death of Wendron United chairman Kevin Williamson.

Williamson collapsed at Wendron's Underlane ground on February 9, with First Aiders using the club's defibrillator to revive him before Cornwall Air Ambulance took him to Treliske Hospital, where he died the following afternoon.

The event, which included a three-course meal, raffle and auction, raised around £2,340 from the evening, which is more than enough to fund a community defibrillator, which generally cost between £1,000 and £2,000.

Town have also been able to raise enough to donate £150 towards former player Dan Richardson's London Marathon effort in aid of MQ: Transforming Mental Health, after the deaths of former players Martin Day and Andy Morris, plus a further £150 towards Prostate Cancer Awareness in memory of former Falmouth managers Trevor Mewton and Ray Nicholls, who both died in 2017.

The raffle was well supported by local businesses, with Falmouth Golf Club donating a Four Ball Golf Voucher, Bang & Olufsen in Truro donating a pair of headphones and Toni & Guy offering a Hair Spa Treatment voucher, plus much more, while a game of Heads and Tails also contributed to the funds raised.

Other prizes included a bottle of Moet & Chandon Champagne and two pairs of match tickets for respective English Football League Championship clubs Nottingham Forest and Stoke City.

Attendees also enjoyed a Falmouth Town Legends table, which featured some of the greatest players to grace the Bickland Park turf, including Mark "Rappo" Rapsey, Tommy Matthews and Ronnie Burr.

Falmouth Town assistant manager James Miller, whose mortgage broker company James Miller and Associates sponsored the evening, became friends with Cottee and Gale after meeting the pair on holiday, with the duo offering to come down for the event.

Gale was a Premier League winner with Blackburn Rovers in 1995, while former West Ham and Everton man Cottee was the most expensive player to be signed by a British club when he joined the Toffees for £2.2 million in August 1988.