CHIEF executive Martyn Phillips has warned that the Welsh Rugby Union won’t pour money into a bottomless pit after getting the go-ahead to take over Newport Gwent Dragons and buy Rodney Parade.

The shareholders of Newport RFC approved the proposal at an extraordinary meeting at their historic home on Tuesday evening.

The governing body will pay £2.85million for the nine-acre site – the published £3.75million sale figure includes an existing £900,000 WRU loan – with the Black and Ambers receiving a cash sum of £600,000.

Phillips said in a post-meeting press conference that it was “the end of the beginning and we have to get moving”, and he revealed that near the top of their to-do list was approving the installation of a hybrid pitch.

The chief executive also stressed there are no quick-fixes and that the Dragons have to be a sustainable business given the Union’s responsibilities to clubs throughout the country.

“The reality is that we have got to get it to work. I’ve been at pains to make sure I don’t give any guarantees that I can’t live up to,” said Phillips.

“As much as this is a rugby entity, we have got to make sure that financially it’s sound. We couldn’t take significant losses year after year after year because we have a responsibility to 310 clubs, not just the two entities that play out of here.

“The best guarantee is that we’ve got to all get behind it now. Come and support the team, strengthen the squad, help Kingsley [Jones, head coach], start winning more games over time, then hopefully more people will come and support and it will be a brilliant atmosphere here.

“All that is there for us but it only works if we get behind the team.”

Phillips confirmed that the WRU will look to redevelop the northern end of the site, including the cabbage patch, in order to justify their outlay.

He said: “We are investing several million in that we hadn’t planned to, in terms of purchasing the ground.

“We can’t sustain forever that level of investment so the only way of getting an element of that back is to redevelop this end.

“We would look to do that over the next couple of years but that’s as far as we got [with discussions]. There are a whole range of things you could do here but, to make sure we are transparent, we do need to redevelop this to make the financial case stack up.”

Only Zebre finished beneath the Dragons in the Guinness PRO12 this season while they won just eight games in all competitions.

Phillips said: “We are not here thinking, ‘how do we get the Dragons to be competing for the PRO12?’, it’s about slow and steady improvement, building and being smart about how we do it.

“We definitely don’t want to set an expectation that we have got all the answers. The Scarlets and the Ospreys have been working for a long time to get to the levels of performance, models, systems and structures they have. We’ve got a lot to do to put that in place here.”

Phillips says the WRU are yet to decide who will sit on a new-look Dragons board.

He said: “What we have said consistently to the existing board is that all that really matters is you get the best-qualified board in place to execute the strategy that we build.

“We need to finish the strategy, then make sure the best board is there. We haven’t got to what that looks like yet.”