BRIAN CAREY last night labelled Alex Hamilton's Racecourse regime "a joke" and threw his support behind Wrexham's prospective new owners.
The Dragons defender is upbeat about the future now a consortium headed by Surrey businessman Andy Smith has agreed a deal in principle to buy Hamilton's majority stake in the League One outfit.
And Carey hopes the arrival of the new owners will bring an end to a turbulent chapter in Wrexham's history, which saw the club fall into administration with debts of £4.2m last December.
Delivering his verdict on the proposed takeover, the former Northern Ireland international said: "It seems very positive. The one thing that's great is that we haven't got people around who don't want to be here.
"The people coming in seem as if they want to be here. The good thing is that Hamilton and (former chairman Mark) Guterman and people like that are going to get out of the way, people who have no interest in the place.
"Thankfully we can move on from that and get back to being a proper football club again because it's been a bit of a joke in the past couple of years, the way things have gone on.
"Let's look to the future and be positive."
When asked whether it would be good to see the back of Hamilton, Carey's response was an emphatic: "Absolutely."
Carey, who is Wrexham's Professional Footballers' Association representative, went on to pay tribute to the way the club's players and staff have coped with the uncertainty of the past two seasons.
He said: "The players have got on with it and dealt with wages being late and stuff like that. The manager has had to put up with not being able to manage properly. That applies right down the staff. We've had staff that are meant to be coaching, or doing the job of a physio, keeping the training ground alive - not being able to do their own job properly.
"It's a credit to them that the whole club is still breathing."
Carey has been sidelined since early October with a leg injury that has required a long period of rest and recuperation.
But the 36-year-old can at last see some light at the end of the tunnel and, all being well, he should be fit for a comeback in six weeks.
His experience at the heart of the Dragons' rearguard has been greatly missed - a fact backed up by the statistics which show Wrexham were conceding an average of just 1.2 goals per game when Carey was a regular. Denis Smith's men now have the second worst defensive record in League One and, as a result of the 10-point deduction that followed their move into administration, find themselves in the thick of a relegation dogfight.
"The femur which comes down towards my knee is bruised and the bone itself has been bleeding," said Carey. "You've just got to rest and let it heal. The next step is to get through a rehabilitation programme with the physio. Eventually if that's successful I'll get back into training.
"It's very frustrating because the club needs everybody fit at the moment."
* WREXHAM'S reserves yesterday lost 3-1 at Oldham Athletic in the Pontin's League, Marc Williams scoring the visitors' goal after five minutes.
