OTLEY Rugby Club will not be leaving its iconic Cross Green home at the end of this season.

Otley RUFC was hoping to move to a new site on Pool Road, where it intends to create some top-class new sporting facilities, by July, 2021.

The club had also hoped that the team would play their home matches next season at Bramhope-based West Park Leeds RUFC, while their new clubhouse and pitches were being built.

But the club’s relocation plans are linked to proposals to create a new relief road as part of the long-anticipated East of Otley housing scheme - and delays by Leeds City Council in submitting a planning application for the road means everything has now been pushed back 12 months.

Otley RUFC’s chairman Paul Mackie said: “Next season we are still going to be at Cross Green and, while the delay is disappointing, the chances and success of a relocation is now 95 per cent.

“The road that is the driver for all of this is going in for planning in October, our scheme will go in for planning in October and McCarthy & Stone’s scheme for redeveloping Cross Green will go in in October.

“They will all be heard together, and if the road gets planning permission, which it will, then the pack of cards all begins to fall over and we will start to relocate.

“I have been involved in this game for 40 years and when you are working with a load of partners, in this case Leeds City Council, Persimmon and McCarthy & Stone...they do things at their pace.

“But the positive is that the road has got the funding, it has now been designed, they have done their site investigations - and it is all better than anticipated.

“Also all the land has been bought, so to all intents and purposes the road is a goer, and that crystallises everything.”

The plan is now be for the club to have a ‘nomadic year’, playing homes games at West Park, in the 2012-22 season with the aim of holding its first match at its new ground in July, 2022.

Meanwhile, it has gained permission to proceed with plans to consider changing its status to that of a Charitable Incorporated Organisation or a Charitable Company Limited by guarantee.

No decision has been made yet and the issue is set to be discussed by members at Otley RUFC’s annual meeting in July.