Posts Tagged ‘Portsmouth’

Leeds United And The Other 91 Basket Cases, Celebrated Too Early Special including Cardiff City, Portsmouth, Blackburn Rovers, Spurs and Blackpool.

Aug 19th, 10 / 12 Comments
 

This lad could battle and pass.

Sit down, shut up, sit down, shut up.

I’m going to start this “too early” special by highlighting something that isn’t. The Leeds United fans performance at the City Ground should get highlight of the season already, across the 4 divisions. Superb stuff from the travelling support whilst the country looked on via Sky. However, as is our want, we also seem to think we have found the formula to settle into the Championship from this game, something I question. Yes the resilience was impressive but there was also a clear lack of forward penetrative play. I struggle to remember us creating a chance that wasn’t a header from a dead-ball or cross, no passing into the box, no running on to flicks and lay-offs. For me we need to bring Howson and Kilkenny more into the attacking play and Watt and Sam need to spend a little more time in the box. As for central defence and particularly Collins, don’t even go there (stress free season, stress free season, repeat).

Meanwhile in South Wales our old mates at Cardiff City are prematurely anticipating the PL based on the loan signing of Craig Bellamy, arguably Manchester City’s player of last season (not definitely, Tevez might have something to say on that). Except what is this? The FL want assurances the signing is sustainable and Motherwell are suing the club over £175k owed over a year (that’s one month’s worth of Bellamy’s wages). Now I want to be fair here, clearing up after Ridsdale must be a right strain but if you’re going to brag about your Malaysian billionaire owners you should expect some grief if you can’t pay off the smaller debts. Anyway they still won’t go up, the idea of Chopra and Bellamy ever actually passing to each other is too weird even for this site.

Portsmouth will be lucky not to go down, it’s a disgrace they are not starting with minus points this season. Last week, as the CVA was bizarrely ratified in court, the pompay fans were talking about Chainrai investing to return to the PL, well that has been reigned in quick, it’s all now about selling when possible and him not even being Chairman. Loans from Stoke City, Kanu given an extended career, Nugent expected to provide the goals alone and any half decent asset joining West Ham United in their relegation destiny is the order of the day this season. When Sam “skid-marks” Sodje flies in for a trial the smell of L1 inevitability is over-powering. Shame for Cotterill in my humble opinion but you can’t fight kismet.

Meanwhile in Lancashire a new odyssey looks like unfolding at Blackburn Rovers. Ashan Ali Syed, a Indian billionaire, has a month exclusivity to complete a takeover and is already talking about £100m transfer pots (to be spent in January clearly in the same way Birmingham City were going to spend £100m last January…), trophy’s and a world wide support base. Ok given the cultural make-up of that old cotton town having an Asian owner seems a reasonable thing to me, except what’s that you say? He wants to sign David Beckham because “I saw him when he was at Manchester United and I liked him very much”! Oh dear, here we go again, money and common sense, not related to each other. With that kind of approach Blackburn may find themselves spending £300m and still having nothing but a Fulham style squad full of bubbling up expensively paid talent.

Of course with expensively paid talent comes expectation, like getting past your Swiss opponents in the qualifying section of the CL. Poor Spurs, once they went 3-0 down to Young Boys no amount of come-back will stop the comparisons with Everton and Newcastle United’s disastrous qualifying round exits from previous years. Redknapp talked about artificial pitches but the truth is that he, his players and the support assumed the Swiss side would roll over. Well I for one hope they park the bus in front of the goal at White Hart Lane and knock Levy off his perch with a 0-0 draw. It will certainly make it easier for him to sack Redknapp after his forthcoming date with the Old Bailey concludes.

Which finally brings us to Blackpool where to be fair a bit of premature celebrating is in order after that wonderful 4-0 win at Wigan (but I still maintain both Harewood’s goals were own goals). However, as always with this kind of thing, ying follows yang. The chairman resigns and again as is the way of things, despite putting the club in the top division for the first time in 40 years, the fans celebrate. Now I am given to understand there are a couple of good reasons to see Karl Oyston departing as a good thing (although as he is staying as CE and his dad still owns the most shares maybe reports of his demise are premature) but the idea this kills the cautious approach to players wages at Bloomfield Road is not one of them. If the Blackpool fans want to be in Hull City, Portsmouth’s and Burnley’s position, relegated anyway but with a double-trebled wage bill then as far as I’m concerned they are idiots. For me romance only touches you if you’re true to your football heart and bringing in a bunch of mercenaries is anything but romantic. Stick to the £10k a week, £500k a year is only an insult to the deluded.

Michael Green.

PS: apologies for the mistaken title, got mixed up…

The Other 91 Basket Cases

Leeds United and the other 91 Basket Cases: Chickens Roost Special Including Portsmouth, Southend United, Cardiff City, Hull City and Liverpool.

Aug 5th, 10 / Comments Off
 
 
 

 

Its not just a big day in the High Court for Portsmouth but also the whole of football.

I used to work for/with a bloke who just couldn’t bring himself to accept other points of view (he was a Tory and a pompous geete after all) and would utter the words “we are where we are” to announce a combination of his displeasure and lack of patience. Those words are actually very apt for football today as lots of significant things begin to happen, some hopefully for the better of the game. Starting with this sites mainstay Leeds United where yesterdays decision of the Football League to tie up its transparency rules with the Premier League leaves the secret owners, Mr Bates and his cohorts with a dilemma. They seemed to have pre-empted things by issuing a statement that made no sense what so ever (see here: http://clarkeonenil.co.uk/front-page/contributions-on-the-leeds-united-quagmire/leeds-united-explain-this-in-english-win-beer/) and of course being the manipulating people they are have co-operated with this: http://www.yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk/news/Leeds-United-Selling-the-Whites.6456514.jp to ensure a positive spin on things. What do you think the chances of the club claiming in 2011-12 no one person owns more than 9.9% of the club are…yes very, very high.

Meanwhile in the circus that is Portsmouth FC the High Court has to decide today whether to turn a blind eye to a massive tax fraud or to just let the person who put the club into administration just take it back all things forgotten. To me its a scandal already that Portsmouth won’t start the season on at least -15 points and its a bad reflection on the PL, the FL and the FA that it will take a Judge to protect decency and the public purse. We will know by this afternoon, one thing is for sure, if the whining about going under if the CVA is stopped persuades the Judge then their is no prospect of effective governance of the English game for a significant time to come.

Our next regular in this column is Ron Martin and the Jamie Oliver club of Southend United. One can only marvel at how a Chairman of a football club can make it a positive that it has been effectively taken over by Sainsbury’s, that it took numerous trips to the High Court to pay off HMRC debts and even though they still have another winding-up order next week they trumpet all this. Then it gets worse, because despite all this and two relegation’s in 4 years the local Supporters Trust spends its time praising Ron Martin! Sometimes maybe some supporters get what they deserve; enjoy your trip the Chelmsford City next season!

Whilst the Essex boys spend 12 years dreaming about a new stadium at least Cardiff City have one. What they don’t seem to have however is stable financial arrangements in the post Ridsdale world. Despite being owned (allegedly) by a multi-billionaire from Malaysia the club seems to still lurch from week to week. A transfer embargo remains in place, the PFA step in to pay ex players, the whole place stinks of a second Pompay, which would be nice. The more that comes out from South Wales the more it seems that a certain ex Chairman invested the house on promotion last season and came up short. Administration before Xmas is a certain.

To be fair to Cardiff, they will most certainly get to administration behind Hull City who quite frankly don’t have a pray and don’t deserve an ounce of sympathy. The wage bill they carry from the bloated squad of relegation that Brown put together can’t be wished away. Bullard hasn’t gone, Barmby is staying, Fagan won’t be shifting his overpaid lump out, its going to be carnage at the KC very soon. The two Pearson’s have a job on their hands just staying in the division this season, the harsh truth of Hull being a Rugby League town first and foremost looks like returning.

But for all the casualty’s of the next few weeks they will be the lucky escapes and the biggest symbal of that will be Liverpool. Their will be something teeth-grating about a club that burden’s itself with debt and then gets bailed out by another passing billionaire with sporting business backgrounds. Whilst I wouldn’t begrudge Roy Hodgson some stability what I would not want to see is Liverpool returning to the top 4 of the PL and thus joining unsustainable Manchester United, Chelsea and Manchester City in that permanent circle mind-boggling expense and income. Every football fan in the country from outside that 4 should support Arsenal to ensure English Football has at least one decently run club in its CL locker.

Michael Green.

The Other 91 Basket Cases

Leeds United and the other 91 Basket Cases, PR Special including Portsmouth, Southend United, Crystal Palace, Manchester United, Plymouth Argyle,

Jul 22nd, 10 / Comments Off
 

Your reading a pre 2010-11 archived article

 

They never learn do they.

It was never going to take long, the succession of cack-handed communications from clubs to fans and the outside world continues to astound. Take for example that world class proponent of peeing off the fan base, Mr KW Bates at Leeds United. Season still 3 weeks away but Ken is getting his form back early. Yesterday he not only insulted the whole of our foreign based support by calling them “so called fans” (this via Yorkshire Radio which regular readers will know is part of the club when a balance sheet is produced or a promotional drive is on but not when we go into administration) but also with the help of our newish Director of Commercial whatever, Mr P Bell, has devised a real humdinger of a rip-off, charging on LUTV for pre-season friendlies!! Well to be fair we expect no less.

Mr Bell of course came to us from that other bastion of integrity and financial propriety Portsmouth FC. The PR generated around that club has become legend already without them becoming expert in the burying bad news department. Not content with racking up legal fees and administration costs than could have covered the wages of the 80 people who lost their jobs, not content with plotting to return the Fratton Park club to the owner that put them in administration in the first place (now where have I seen that before?) not content with still paying Mr Storrie for being awful at anything they also generate a large story around not resigning David James (a goalie they couldn’t afford to pay anyway) to obscure the fact they are sacking their youth team players on mass! Good work boys.

Work, or other business interests, is what keeps some chairman from fulling focusing on the job in hand. take Southend United’s Ron Martin, a bloke so busy shoring up his wide range of Essex based property interests he can’t find time to stop HMRC calling the club “habitually insolvent”. To be fair all this activity means you can always find space for more, hence the trumpeting of Mr Martin being elected to the Football League board to represent League 2. What’s that you say The Guardian? He wasn’t elected as it was uncontested and it wasn’t the main place on the board but the alternate? Oh that’s just mere detail, a bit like the non building of Fossets Farm!

Speaking of detail the administrator at Crystal Palace seems to think that on Friday the club will sail out of administration and HMRC won’t do what they rightly did to Portsmouth and challenge it. Well maybe that might happen maybe it won’t. What might tip HMRC into appealing might be a nagging doubt in the back of the mind that the taxpayer is subsidising a property deal. Whilst their is no evidence that the new owners are not squeaky clean and with the best intentions they constantly refuse to confirm that Selhurst Park is the clubs home for the foreseeable future whilst at the same time saying without ownership of the ground no deal could be done. I think the Palace administrator might be in for a shock soon.

Nothing shocks me about Manchester United anymore, not even the brazenness of their financial operation. However credit where its due, they have come across a way of extracting extra income from shirts, use nick-names instead of normal ones. So Hernandez becomes Chicharito “little pea”. You can see where this will lead, Ryan Giggs becomes “little wizard” and Paul Scholas becomes “little ginger” and Wayne Rooney becomes “little sulk” and Gary Neville is a “little….” You get the rest.

Before the Glazers came along boardrooms in England were full of the likes of Sir Roy Gardner, presently stationed at Plymouth Argyle. Now its difficult enough to sell any positive message when you have just been relegated to League 1 and then give our old mucker Peter Reid the manager’s job (as an aside how bad were things at Home Park that Paul Sturrock runs off to Roots Hall?). Its even more difficult trying to defend a complex land and loan deal between Sir Roy and Sir Roy when one is the club and the other is a financial holding. Still to be fair, if they can mutter the words “We are trying to build a rational business-based future for Plymouth and people will have the opportunity to invest in either the football or infrastructure development activities of the club” with a straight face its perhaps just goes to show that the Ken Bates school of communication skills lives on.

Editor.

The Other 91 Basket Cases