BROOKS MILESON'S umbilical attachment to Gretna Football Club is a bit like the logical extension of those intuitive identical twins who claim to feel pain when their sibling comes to harm. When the millionaire benefactor's illness deteriorated this week he left a sickly SPL club who were unable to pay their 60 players and staff, keep hold of their management team when a First Division club came calling, or even talk with any confidence about staving off liquidation, let alone administration.

Not until the patient returned home from Newcastle's Royal Victoria Infirmary on Thursday evening did Gretna FC begin to feel like a football club again. Talk of romance and fairytales is inevitable when discussing the tiny Borders club, but this week marked the end of Gretna's innocence.

With Mileson able to wield a pen again, the players will be paid tomorrow, and the shortfall made good in time to meet their mortgage payments in the next seven days, but one person is understandably keen to put a limit on the eccentric owner's involvement. His son Craig, who has been at his father's bedside all week, will make it his personal mission to keep his dad away from the club for the best part of the next month.

My main concern will always be my dad and helping him get better, he said.

All he needs is complete rest at the moment, to stay away from the club for the next three weeks. I will personally make sure he is not involved in any decision making, because I don't think he is up to that yet.

With his father hospitalised, and the only other authorised signatory having departed the company in the last couple of months, Mileson Jnr was powerless to prevent the mishap with the wages that occurred on Monday morning. Combine that with the departure of 14 players in the January window, and the departure of Davie Irons and Derek Collins to Morton, and it is little wonder talk of full-blown administration was in the air. But Mileson Jnr said last night that it had all been blown out of proportion and that his family's commitment to the club remains an ongoing one. I'll be here as long as it all takes, said Craig Mileson. I love it here, I work closely with Graeme Muir and Mick Wadsworth now, and we are just trying to move it all forward.

Concerns for the club were real enough for the SPFA to take a watching brief on events, but non-payment of a week's wages was unlikely to trigger administration in any case, and unlike many clubs in the SPL Gretna are not saddled with massive debt. Also unlike most of the other clubs in the SPL, however, they are tied to a £600,000 fee to Motherwell for the use of Fir Park, and have only a tiny local population to back them up. The Cumberland News may have been reporting that one third of the inhabitants of Carlisle wanted the borders redrawn to become a part of Scotland, but getting them to visit Motherwell for an SPL match is a different matter entirely.

Can any club in Scottish football at the moment say they have a long-term future when you see the crowd levels going in? asked the club's chief executive Graeme Muir. The total debt at Gretna Football Club last year was written off by Mr Mileson, so where other clubs might find themselves several millions in debt that is not a position that Gretna finds itself in.

Debt accrues to him, but he personally wrote it off last year, and that is the commitment of the man. That is why everyone has rallied this week.

Motherwell are our biggest creditor. The ground share is not a small undertaking.

Administration or not, there are those who will see the week's events as further evidence of the moral bankruptcy of the entire Gretna project.

Regardless of the difficulties of paying top dollar and struggling to get fans to travel up to Lanarkshire, trying to sustain an SPL standard side in a village with a population of just 3,000, these people would say, has always been fanciful in the extreme, and there is something inherently ludicrous in the way the club has broken the bank to assemble a squad to get themselves into the SPL only to dismantle it and replace it with young loan signings when they got there. Despite attracting approximately 50% of their local area to games, something has always been missing.

If you look at the history of Gretna a lot of the things that happened early on had to happen because it was the only way we could attract players to the club, said Irons after moving to Morton this week, citing long-term security and the potential of the club.

There is nothing else in Gretna, there wasn't a foundation, a history, there wasn't anything at Gretna. It was a bit like Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams. Build it and they will come'. Except they didn't.

For Irons, the concerns went back as far as what should have been the club's greatest moment of celebration, James Grady's late goal that fateful day against Ross County which won them promotion in the first place. We won the First Division and it was a case of where do we go now?, he said. It was a tremendous day, and one I will never forget, but it was also a day when you thought now we are in with the big boys and now we have to play catch up in terms of the infrastructure of the club, and in terms of the type of players we need to bring into our club.

It was when those players, or the ones identified by chief scout Ray Farningham were shown to lack the experience he felt they needed in the SPL that Irons felt he had to depart the club.

What you have seen at Gretna since March last year has been a massive turnaround in players, Irons said. I didn't agree with all of them, some of them I did, but I think there was a necessity to change things. Brooks had a look at the wage bill and had to try to reduce that, I perfectly understand that and I think it is a sensible thing to do in any business, but at the same time we are going into the SPL for the first time and I personally felt we needed a bit of experience. It wasn't forthcoming.

What I think could happen to them and what might happen might not add up, but having seen the good times at Gretna I think common sense would say that it isn't going to go on for ever. I sincerely hope things are stabilised quickly and they can move on, find a level which is workable for the team, and continue playing football in Gretna.

Director of football Mick Wadsworth who will take charge of the team for their two vital matches against Rangers this afternoon then relegation rivals Kilmarnock in midweek is regularly painted as the villain of the piece in all of this but points out, and not without some justification, that the week's events actually show the necessity of the work he has been doing.

If you look at it logically it is very difficult for this club ever to be sustainable in the Premier League, said Wadsworth, who also denies he foisted any players upon Irons. There is the dream factor here, but now it has gone really into reality time. What can we achieve? That is what we have been discussing for the last 18 months. What are we, where can we go? What can we do to make sure that there is a football club here in the next four, five, six, 20 years or whatever.

I have been cast as devil incarnate for much of my time here because of the things I have had to try and do here which have been difficult, and unpopular with many, but realistic, added Wadsworth, no stranger to administration and players going unpaid in his career. It has been a difficult time because the club has had to change, and to get through this sticky spell it still has to change. I really do hope people stand back now and think I understand a bit more what they have been trying to do'. We are trying to do things for the sustainability of the football club and try to get Brooks away from this ridiculous situation where he is constantly, constantly, putting money in towards the football club. His health and his wealth are the lifeblood of the club, and if either of them are interrupted, then it causes problems very quickly.