Twohundredpercent

Meet Shaun Tuck, The Racist Non-League Footballer

Ian — Thu, 23 May 2013 11:48:14 +0000

We live in strange and occasionally dangerous times. The murder of a man in Woolwich yesterday afternoon was obviously a sickening event but the aftermath of such an incident is a time for cool heads, and much of the reaction of the political far right last night, namely in this case the self-defined “English Defence League,” reeked of the sort of opportunism that extremist fringe groups such as this thrive upon. They want us to be polarised, to feel as if we have to nail a flag to one of two masts in order that they can justify their fight. It is up to those of us that make up the majority to reject both extremes, and to show them up for the tiny minorities that they are.

You may well be wondering what this has to do with football. The answer to this is that we expect people involved in the game – clubs, officials and players especially – to occupy that middle or other ground and to represent their clubs in a manner which is inclusive and treats the name of that club with the respect that it deserves, and that applies to all footballers, no matter the level of the game at which they play. Shaun Tuck plays, for the time being, for Witton Albion of the Northern Premier League. Four and a half years ago, he received a written warning from the Football Association regarding his behaviour and was verbally warned by the police whilst playing for another Northern Premier League club, Marine, along with another player, John Lawless, who was sacked by the club over his behaviour during a match against FC United of Manchester.

Tuck, however, appears not be able to help himself in certain aspects of his behaviour and last night he posted a significant number of messages on Twitter, including some to the leadership of the English Defence League, whilst also proffering his thoughts on the subject of Islam as as religion. We reproduce them here, and ask you to bear in mind that, however offensive both the language and opinions contained within them is, they are merely a reproduction of what this player, who represents a football club and a community, was saying in public yesterday evening:

In another country we would be tortured an our families too!!.. We just get on with it, its fucking wrong!! Burn every single one of them.

I think its time for a RIOT!! Fucking horrible terrorist cunts… Can see house doors going in by mine tonight #20strong #armed & dangerous.

The B.N.P would sort this country out!! They get my vote every year… Make your own opinion of me, I stick up for my own #smellycunts

A lot of people on here sit on the fence!! But say everything I do behind closed doors… Shit houses you are. Just like the terrorists.

All the mosque’s in england now should be bombed or gassed out!!!… Or stormed by 50 lads machettes, swords the lot. An make a statement

Am raging in me loft here yno… Got the balaclava out, dusted down an ready for the meet.

I’d be going through there door mate an taking there kids head off an killing whoever was in site!!

To top it off… There in hospital getting treated for there injuries!! Did that soldier get treatment?? Let the smelly cunts die.

@EDLTrobinson @Official_EDL @EDLKevCarroll1 go fucking nuts!!! About time this country fought back.

the @Official_EDL are in woolwich now!! What I’d give to be there with them now #flop #flop #flop #curryheadseverywhere

@EDLTrobinson massive fan of yours tommy!! Any chance of a re-tweet?? Keep up the good work #EDL

Perhaps the biggest irony of this is that Tuck’s employers, Witton Albion, renamed their Wincham Park ground as “The Help For Heroes Stadium” last year in order to provide charity support for the charity formed to help service men and women injured whilst on active service for the British army. It has been reported that the victim of yesterday’s attack was wearing a “Help For Heroes” t-shirt at the time of this tragedy, but it is to be be hoped – indeed, we should expect, in all honesty – that this charity would seek to distance itself as far from possible from the sort of attempted mob rule seen in Woolwich last night, as well as other apparently racially motivated attacks on mosques in other parts of England last night.

A statement is expected from the club this afternoon. Tuck, meanwhile, didn’t seem to have picked up on the error of his ways in spite of being warned, albeit apparently in jest, by another former team-mate, Adam Farley, to “keep your head and don’t do anything silly”, retweeting a racist joke, whilst another Witton player, Danny Andrews, had his own comment on the subject, calling FC United of Manchester supporters who had objected to Tuck’s language last night “wankers” and “inbreds.” The Football Association have guidelines for professional players regarding the use of social media following a spate of unsavoury incidents involving players over the last couple of seasons or so. We will have to wait and see whether there is any further fall-out from this particularly miserable episode.

It should go without saying that yesterday’s events in London were a tragedy, and it would be remiss of us to not to remind ourselves of this. However reaction of the far right last night should serve as a reminder that there are individuals and groups who are champing at the bit to impress their prejudices and hatred upon the rest of us, and these people, and their supporters, must continue to be marginalised. Football clubs at all levels of the game have a responsibility to ensure that their employees represent their club in the way in which they wish to be perceived in the community at large. Shaun Tuck has had his say, and it is now over to Witton Albion Football Club to have their say on the matter, and Tuck will likely have to answer to them for the nature of the language that he has been using on social media of late. It is a harsh lesson, and one that he may well end up learning the hard way.

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The End Of Another Era… This Time, For Stoke City

Ian — Wed, 22 May 2013 19:03:55 +0000

All football clubs want to progress, but the truth of the matter is that not all of them can, and for many there is a glass ceiling of expectation at which further growth may just about prove impossible. What has been achieved at Stoke City over the seven years in charge that Tony Pulis enjoyed at the club has been little short of remarkable. A club that had not played in the top division of the English league system over the course of the previous two decades – and had spent more than one spell in the third tier during that period of time – won its way into the Premier League and, once there, stayed there, for year after year and with relegation only ever seldom a threat in the distance. Now Pulis has left The Britannia Stadium, reportedly by the sort of “mutual consent” that may or may not have contained the words, “if you don’t jump, we will have to push you,” and now Stoke join the ever-growing list of clubs that now face, depending on which way you look at it, either a new beginning or a period of uncertainty this summer.

Stoke City Football Club has spent the last six years defying the odds and upsetting the purists, and there is something admirable about that. The style of football that Pulis employed was out of kilter with the orthodoxy of the Premier League, which requires conformity with a certain set of standards that has emerged in recent years. This has allowed A Truth to settle over the club, one that perceives the club as being some sort of cultural backwater, in which thuggery is not just tolerated but encouraged, a place in which a different set of rules apply. Whether there is any significant degree of truth or not to this is debatable. The Ryan Shawcross tackle on Aaron Ramsey of Arsenal exists in a bubble of infamy all of its own, but to suggest that this tackle was somehow unique in the history – or even the recent history – of football in this country, in which the physical has always been valued over the artful, would be misleading, and there is a temptation to think that, in a culture in which any statistic can be used to reinforce any predetermined argument, Stoke City has become the smaller Premier League club that it’s okay to hate. Whether there is a justification for this is, perhaps, an argument for another day.

The truth of the matter is, however, that there are justified reasons for moving another manager into the hot-seat at The Britannia Stadium at this precise moment in time. Stoke City have spent a lot of money on players in recent years, and it might well be argued that the club hasn’t spent this money as wisely as it might. And with the money that clubs can expect from television money set to be dramatically increased again, perhaps it is time for a change in policy with regard to the way that the club spends its money. Twenty-two million pounds was spent by Pulis on Peter Crouch, Cameron Jerome and Kenwyne Jones, for example, and few of the players that Pulis did bring into the club left for much like the amounts of money that were spent on them in the first place. Stoke City has, therefore, managed to take on one of the highest “net spends” in the Premier League, has one of the biggest squads in the Premier League, and has very few young players coming through its ranks at present. Pulis has been keeping the ship steady, but the best managers – and this is a lesson that must surely be learned by owners in the wake of the retirement of Sir Alex Ferguson – evolve to the point of ruthlessness, and there is little to suggest that Tony Pulis evolved very much as a coach and manager over the course of his six years in the Premier League. Without changing as a manager, how much longer would he have been able to keep them in the safety of mid-table?

It might also be argued that there is, due to the extraordinary level of instability in the managerial job market at the moment, a huge amount of managerial talent that is available at present. Already, such names as Roberto Martinez, Gus Poyet and even Rafael Benitez are being linked with the now vacant position at The Victoria Ground. From the point of view of owner Peter Coates, it starts to look entirely rational to look elsewhere for a manager if the likes of Benitez – who has won the Champions League and won the Europa League last season – are suddenly available. It’s bound to turn the head of an ambitious owner, and the fact that coaches of this calibre are being linked with the job at The Britannia Stadium is proof, as if it were needed, of the transformation that the club’s profile has undergone since it became an established Premier League club. Perhaps, we might consider, there is a glass ceiling, a level beyond which Stoke City will not be able to reach. But if the club has managed this mid-table stability under one manager, a new broom sweeping through the club might yet be able to find room for further improvement in the terms of results and, probably all-importantly, the club’s league position.

So if there is a balancing act to be had at The Britannia Stadium, then it is a particularly delicate one. All of the clubs below the top seven or eight in the Premier League are considerably closer to relegation than they are to winning the Premier League or even finishing in the Champions League places, and the reductionist nature of much of the football that Stoke City played meant that perhaps Tony Pulis was always standing on a knife-edge with regard to his job, even if we take into consideration the biggest factor in his defence – those league final league positions. And for all that he did achieve for the club, if it is to continue to be stable in the middle of the Premier League then perhaps it is the time for somebody new to try a new approach. The one dimensional nature of Stoke’s game – particularly over the last couple of years – has probably left the team open to being, for the want of a better phrase, “found out,” and there were times last season when it felt as if they may have been. Few Stoke City supporters would deny what Tony Pulis achieved for their club and many may regret the fact that they didn’t get the opportunity to say goodbye to him at the end of the season. Time, however, moves on, and if Tony Pulis could adapt with those changing times, then perhaps Stoke City have made the right decision at the right time. And only time will tell whether they called this decision correctly.

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The 200% Review Of the Premier League Season

Ian — Mon, 20 May 2013 19:26:44 +0000

As the full-time whistle blew on the Premier League season, I wasn’t scrambling for my laptop and my big book of witticisms and wry observations concerning the last nine months of top division football. Instead, I was in the Capuchin Crypt in Rome, pondering over the blink of an eye that constitutes a human life through the medium of gawping at a series of rooms decorated with the skeletons of the monks that inhabited it for three hundred and seventy years or so. ‘We were once like you. Soon you will be like us,’ was the cheery motto of the place. It makes you think. And it made me think about the fact that I’d knowingly booked a long weekend abroad which meant that I would be absent for the gushing crescendo of the Premier League season. It had been booked a couple of months or so ago, and under differing circumstances I may have been frantic at the idea of missing out on this particular climax. As it was, though, it didn’t really matter. Manchester United had already won the league – not mathematically, of course, but we already knew this was coming a couple of months ago – whilst two of the relegation places had also effectively been decided since the new year, no matter what Harry Redknapp repeatedly told journalists who refused to call him up on his misplaced self-confidence.

As you may have already read elsewhere, the 2012/13 season was the one that finished almost exactly the way in which most people had expected, before a ball was kicked in August. Okay, there were a couple of minor surprises, but even these weren’t the cataclysmic events that we might have hoped for. Few would have expected Manchester United to canter to the title in the apparently effortless way in which they did, whilst Newcastle United’s relative slump towards the bottom end of the middle of the table was unexpected. Manchester City were humbled into second place in the table, whilst Chelsea ended up nowhere near the top of the table but did end up with the consolation of a European trophy, Arsenal won nothing for the eighth season in a row, ended their season doing precisely the bare minimum that would have been expected of them in August and celebrated as if they’d won every tournament they entered at the start of the season, and Spurs might as well amend their motto to read ‘Audere Est Perficere Quintum’ (with all due apologies for the cod Latin employed there) – ‘To Dare Is To Finish Fifth.’

If anything, the season that has just finished will be remembered as the end of a number of eras, the most notable of which was, of course, the retirement of Sir Alex of Ferguson after twenty-six years as the manager of Manchester United. This came as a colossal relief to a sports press that may have been somewhat panic attacks stricken at the fact that most of the interesting end of season stories were taking place some distance from their usual comfort zone, and his retirement was treated with a degree of overkill that put that which followed, say, Luis Suarez biting someone at work or Sunderland hiring a manager with Mussolini tattoos who claims not to be a fascist firmly into the shade. Manchester United supporters were left with the sort of hangover that one might expect after a twenty-six year long party (the first five years or so of which were the equivalent of turning up at a rave at eight in the evening and wondering whether now is too early to start scarfing down lines of ketamine), but the good news for their supporters is that their club has the means to continue trampling everything that comes before it underfoot and that if David Moyes does contrive, somehow, to fail in the job, they’ll have a ready-made scapegoat who they haven’t known for long enough to grow that attached to in the first place.

If Manchester United’s announcement of Ferguson’s retirement was a masterclass in stage management and stealth, the departure of Roberto Mancini from Manchester City was curious, largely because it was so badly handled by a club whose owners have put so much stock into being seen to do ‘The Right Thing’ since they took it over. News of Mancini’s departure from the club started to filter into the public consciousness on the morning of the FA Cup Final, which may or may not have had a direct effect on the mood of the players prior to their match against Wigan Athletic but can hardly now be considered to have been, well, helpful. There followed a mournfully silent couple of days whilst the world awaited the inevitable, and with nature abhorring a vacuum as much as it does, this time was filled with idle gossip and speculation before what was, by the time it was finally announced, the least surprising press release of the season was finally issued. Mancini may have had the last laugh with his full page advertisement in the Manchester Evening News, but much as at up the road at Old Trafford, the Manchester City steamroller is likely to keep rolling on.

Then there was Chelsea, who had finished the 2011/12 season as London’s first ever European champions, a sticking plaster big enough to entirely obscure the fact that they had only finished the league season in sixth place in the table by the end of that season. Roberto Di Matteo, however, was hired as the club’s manager in a curiously – and arguably uncharacteristically, for Roman Abramovich – whim-like manner during the summer, and he only lasted for as long as the club stayed in that competition. Rafael Benitez was appointed to replace him on an interim basis – insert your own ‘as if there’s any other sort at Stamford Bridge’ joke here – and immediately, really immediately, found himself the target of the ire of the club’s supporters for, depending on who you believed, some sort of slight while he was the Liverpool manager, not being good enough to fill Chelsea supporters’ sense of entitlement, or, umm, being Spanish and a little on the tubby side. He finished the season having taken the club to the highest league position that it could reasonably have managed, considering the position it was in when he took over and having delivered the only European trophy that he could have managed from the point at which he took over.

Herein lays a significant problem at the heart of the Premier League. On the one hand, not everyone can succeed to the extent that supporters would wish, and it often feels that the supporters of all clubs feel as if theirs should be the ones to buck that trend. The mathematics of this don’t add up, of course, and the ensuing hysteria that is forthcoming when this lack of fundamental understanding becomes apparent is similar in tone to fingers scratching down a blackboard. Arsenal were in crisis when they were in fifth place in the table. They finished fourth and celebrated as if they’d won the title. Aston Villa had their obituaries written during the winter and then rallied to the lower mid-table position that we might have expected in August. At the top of the table, everybody thinks they deserve a place in the Champions League, yet only four clubs can do it, and at least one or two of those places are effectively sewn up before a ball is kicked at the start of the season. At the other end of the table, meanwhile, Tony Fernandes was so certain that Queens Park Rangers deserved to hold onto their place at the top table that he allowed Harry Redknapp free reign over the company cheque book throughout the month of January. He failed, and now those big wages have to be balanced against an income feathered only by parachute payments rather than the fill benefits of a vastly plumpened television contract.

Ultimately, the Premier League will start next season in a curiously uncertain position. It markets and prices itself as a premium product. Of that, there can be no doubt. But can a premium product in a sporting environment afford to be as stultifying as the last few weeks of the season that has just ended has been? If increased revenue means increased inequality – and it has done in the past – the likelihood of the biggest getting bigger still while the rest watch them disappear into the distance remains a distinct possibility. There were many moments of joy to be had this season, but few of them came in the league that has a stranglehold over the vast majority of money and attention that flow through English football at present. It may be that there are no hints that the Premier League can take from Wigan Athletic winning the FA Cup, Swansea City beating Bradford City in a League Cup final mercifully devoid of the chest-beating and bombast that accompanies so much modern football, or the life-affirmingly frantic ends to the season in all three divisions of the Football League. It may be that these were a combination of freak results and that football below the Premier League will return to normal next season, but if it doesn’t turn out to be this way and the Premier League continues to congeal on the basis of who has spent the most money, it may well be that the image of the self-styled Best League In The World continues to suffer reputational damage. And as the summer starts, talk has already turned to how the the biggest can consolidate their positions… by hoovering up the best playing assets of the rest.

There are ways in which the Premier League could deteriorate further, of course. It could end its collective negotiations for television rights – see La Liga for an example of the disastrous effect that had on anything like competition – or it could revert to thinking aloud about gimmicky concepts like Game 39 – note the coverage given to the idea of Chelsea and Arsenal playing off for third place if they finished the season with identical records for a hint to the extent to which that particular corpse is still twitching – but this was the season in which the pure drama was to be seen elsewhere, and it is to be hoped that the uncertainty of this summer, brought about by some big leaps into the unknown by some of the division’s biggest players, leads to a more entertaining season than we have witnessed this time around. Top division football has for several years had a question mark hanging over it, one of whether it is the sheer brute force of money or personality that drives those who succeed in it. If the answer turns out to be the former, we can expect more of the same, but if it does turn out to be the latter then we may be in the middle of a transitional period for the Premier League, and that may be no bad thing at all.

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Coventry City’s Summer Of FUD

Ian — Sun, 19 May 2013 09:41:26 +0000

‘Fear, Uncertainty and Distrust’ is a phrase with its roots in information technology, but it has become increasingly used elsewhere to describe a culture in which companies play sophisticated – and sometimes less than sophisticated – psychological tricks in order to force their will upon others. It is difficult to interpret the statement issued yesterday by the chief bottom feeder at Coventry City, Tim Fisher, which states that the club is now to seek a short term ground-share while it seeks to build a new stadium ‘in the vicinity’ of the city as a result of its ongoing dispute with the owners of its presumably soon to be former home, the Ricoh Arena, as being ‘FUD’ of the first order.

Yet as this announcement was made, one thought sprang immediately to mind: if we set to one side the convoluted nature of company ownership that has made establishing exactly who is doing what at this club, why is Fisher making pronouncements at a time during which the club is supposed to be in administration? Theoretically, we might think, Fisher and his fellow SISU compadres should be having little to with the running of the club at present, so how tame, exactly, is the administrator that they appointed to run it?

There is little of any great surprise regarding yesterday’s statement, of course. SISU have a history of grandiose public statements in which they seek to portray themselves as wounded parties in a saga that is difficult to regard as anything other than being one that is primarily of their own making – consider, for example, their very public moving of club shop merchandise out of the Ricoh Arena just before Easter, which led to a period of ‘will they, won’t they’ concerning whether the club would complete the season at the stadium which has become such an albatross around the club’s neck. Let us, however, take Fisher at his word that he is serious in this exercise in throwing his toys out of the pram this time, and consider the finer details of yesterday’s statement.

“People have to understand we do not posture, we do not threaten, because that is not how you do business, you only do business in good faith. Always.

Says the man whose company is currently seeking legal proceedings over the terms of a deal between Coventry City Council and ACL, the company that it part owns and which owns the Ricoh Arena, in January which allowed for a remortgage which allowed ACL to set to one side the worst of the financial difficulties that it was having at the time, difficulties which were largely due to the club’s non-payment of rent due over the previous few months or so.

“We have started the process of procuring land so that we can shift the new stadium build forward at a pace. The stadium will be in the Coventry area in accordance with Football League rules.”

If this process has already begun, it would be reasonable to suggest that Fisher had no intention of keeping the club at the Ricoh Arena beyond the end of this season. As for the phrase ‘in the Coventry area,’ well, that is striking mostly for being a very vague description. What does Fisher mean by this? Has the club identified a site within the city of Coventry itself? Otherwise, this loose definition could mean anything. Might he define ‘the Coventry area’ as ‘anywhere in Warwickshire?’, or perhaps, ‘anywhere in the West Midlands’? It’s impossible to say because, as ever, the only way in which a SISU statement can reasonably be interpreted is with the assistance of several grains of salt.

“That long-term vision has us playing in the Coventry area in a new stadium that will be designed and delivered in three years.

Well, no-one can fault his ambition, at least. Three years to gain planning permission for a new stadium, purchase the land upon which it will stand and then get it built, however, feels like a time span that has been plucked out of thin air, especially when we consider that his company would, were it to be built in Coventry itself, be dealing with the very organisation that he is currently taking legal action against. How quickly, would it be reasonable to assume, would Coventry City Council jump to help out a company that has treated them in the way that SISU has in recent years? Unless, of course a planned new ground would be built in an area that would stretch the definition of ‘in the Coventry area’ beyond what a majority of the club’s supporters would tolerate. Planning permission cam be a slow and tortuous protest at the best of times, and SISU could hardly be considered to have spent the last year or so developing good relationships with the sort of people that can get these processes hurried along.

All this will be in full consultation with the fans – starting with the upcoming forums.

Well, good luck with that. If the general opinion of those posting on supporters internet forums such as Sky Blues Talk is anything to go by, Fisher would be lucky to get out of any meetings with supporters groups alive and without a noose fashioned from a sky blue and white scarf tied around his neck. The club’s supporters trust has also come out as being openly hostile to the move, as well. SISU would be better equipped to build these sort of bridges had their behaviour since taking control of the club not been so successful in burning them in the first place. Posts on the first page of Sky Blues Talk at the time of writing include the titles, ‘Picketing’, ‘Not One Penny More’, and ‘New Club?’, which says about as much about the current mood of the club’s support as probably needs to be said at the moment.

Meanwhile, the Coventry City Supporters Trust have issued a statement on the very fact that Fisher is issuing edicts of this nature while the club is supposed to be in administration which summarises the eyebrow raising nature of all of this so concisely that we reproduce it here in full:

When Coventry City FC Limited was placed into administration Paul Appleton of David Rubin & Partners LLP was appointed as joint administrator. This means he is in charge of the business. This is established in law.

We are therefore confused about why Tim Fisher, former Chief Executive of Coventry City FC, and who we believe is still employed by Coventry City FC (Holdings) Ltd, appears to be exerting such influence over the actions of Paul Appleton, particularly around the future of the club at the Ricoh Arena.

We are currently seeking legal clarification of this understanding, as we are concerned that Paul Appleton is not acting in the best interests of the creditors of Coventry City FC Limited.
Ultimately, the decisions made by Paul Appleton and David Rubin and Partners LLP are about the future not of an ordinary business, but of a community asset; a Football Club that has been part of our City, its life and its community since 1883.

We take the current threat to the future of our Football Club extremely seriously and will not sit back whilst it is buffeted by the demands of a small group of self-interested, selfish individuals who have no interest other than themselves and their short-term investment concerns.

We call on The Football League to investigate this relationship, that the integrity of their competition is protected, and the Football Association also stand firm on this threat to our Football Club and our national game.

Quite how or even whether the unholy mess that Coventry City Football Club has become can be untangled is not a question that can be answered easily with a positive. With SISU continuing to spin, the location of the club’s Golden Share, which is the key to its membership of the Football League, seeming to be as elusive as it has been since the argument over which company held it flared up in the first place, the club now apparently homeless and with plans for a new stadium, for all of their bullishness, still but a twinkle on the horizon, it seems that as much as the put upon supporters of Coventry City Football Club can hope for for the foreseeable future is yet more fear, uncertainty and distrust.

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David Beckham And Feeling Middle-Aged

Ian — Sat, 18 May 2013 11:51:07 +0000

For those amongst us in our early forties, it’s a disconcerting thought. We have reached an age at which there is a generation gap between us and adults younger than us. A forty-five year-old in 2013 may not feel middle-aged but there is no question that he is, and perhaps there are young adults who now view David Beckham in the same way as the young football supporter of the early 1960s may have regarded the dotage years of the career of Stanley Matthews at that time, as one of the last surviving relics of a bygone and musty age that will not be seen again. In some respects, though, it is tempting to regard Beckham as the end of an era. His may well have been the last generation that grew up believing that international football was somewhere near to the pinnacle of a professional footballer’s career, something to aspire towards rather than merely a pain in the backside which had the handy compensation of increasing the value of one’s endorsement contracts. It was almost touching to see him, into his late thirties, still eager to play and prove himself for the England national team or even the British Olympic team, and it’s difficult to imagine that, say, Wayne Rooney will share such enthusiasm for it ten years from now.

Before we get too tangled up with the notion of Beckham as some sort of arch-patriot or as some sort of defender of traditional values, though, it is worth considering the extent to which he was utterly atypical for a British professional footballer in the twenty-first century. When his time came at Manchester United, he left for Madrid rather than, say, London or Newcastle, and saw out the end of his career in Los Angeles and Paris, a sort of cosmopolitanism wholly at odds with the former team-mates from Old Trafford who never strayed that far from the comfort of the familiar that was Old Trafford and Alex Ferguson. His globe-trotting may not always have been spectacularly successful, and his move to Real Madrid in particular, coming as it did at the height of the club’s “Galacticos” era, which had something of the feel of the Weimar Republic about it, never quite came off, although he did win one Liga title there, to go with his two MLS Cup successes with LA Galaxy and, if we’re generous, considering the peripheral role he played there, a Ligue 1 medal, which came ten days after his thirty-eighth birthday. Along with six Premier League titles and a Champions League win with Manchester United, a career record of championship titles in three different countries, each with very different footballing cultures, is certainly worthy of note.

As a player, David Beckham the footballer was far from being a playboy footballer of any description. Prior to their grand falling out, Alex Ferguson frequently praised his dedication to working hard, and the fact that his playing career ended at the top, at the age of thirty-eight, is proof of the benefits of the work that he put in at the training ground. If he had limitations as a player and was capable of becoming anonymous in games when things weren’t going his way, he did as much as you could ask a professional footballer to do – he made the very best of what he had. Some would criticise him as “over-rated” (a word not only foisted upon on him, but also pretty meaningless as anything other than a soundbite or a short cut to actually having to explain your opinion on him), but while it would be difficult to build a case to argue that he was one of the greatest all-round players of his or any era, it is surely not overstatement to suggest that his right foot, both from crosses and from free-kicks, may well just about have been the best in the world for several years just before and after the turn of the century.

Then, of course, there is the small matter of the celebrity. It goes without saying that, while David Beckham was far from the first celebrity footballer (such claims have been made going back further than the aforementioned Stanley Matthews), his was a level of fame that eclipsed any that had preceded him. The modelling work, the footballer as clothes horse, the hair grooming products and the Spice Girl wife painted a picture of him, but to an extent this was a misleading one. This level of fame, however, led inevitably to a degree of vituperation thrown in his direction, most notably after his sending off for England against Argentina in St Etienne during the 1998 World Cup finals. Despite the fact that the “victim” of his kick, Diego Simeone, later admitting to trying to get Beckham sent off by overreacting to Beckham’s momentary rush of blood to the head, a moronic element, egged on by a tabloid press that we would describe similarly were it not for the fact that they knew exactly which buttons they were pushing, hung effigies of him woth a noose around his neck outside pubs in London. He could have been forgiven leaving this country altogether that season. Instead, he ended the season providing the two corner kicks from which Teddy Sheringham and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer scored to win the 1999 Champions League Final against Bayern Munich in Barcelona.

Perhaps it is impossible to get any reasonable sense of perspective on David Beckham as a professional footballer. The sideshow created a fog that was almost impenetrable, and the “brand” that surrounded him was most likely a reflection of the times during which he played rather than of the player or the person himself. We may never know how much of the branding was orchestrated by his PR People, and how much of it was genuine, and the result of this is that his personality is a blank sheet onto which anybody can project anything. A great player? Some might think so. A beautiful clothes horse who could hit a decent dead ball? Others would certainly to agree with that. For those of us of a certain age, though, his retirement marks another step towards the passing of an era, an era during which we were all considerably younger than we are now, and this may inform the nature of the eulogies that have been written about him over the last few days… including this one.

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Interference From Above For The Football League Over Money

Ian — Sat, 18 May 2013 08:25:44 +0000

The irony of any rows between the Premier League and the Football League concerning the way in which money be paid in parachute payments should be paid out of the vast reserves of cash that the Premier League now accumulates from the sale of television rights is that the very reason for the formation of the Premier League in the first place is was to avoid a great deal of “solidarity” in the first place. Times, however, have changed a considerable amount over the course of the last two decades, and the financial gap has grown to such an extent that parachute payments to the clubs that were relegated from the Premier League became a necessity in order to save them from themselves.

The level of these payments, however, has become a cause for concern. In March, a letter from the chairman of the Football League, Greg Clarke, revealed that from next season, clubs relegated from the Premier League will receive £23m in the first year after the drop (a £7m increase on the current levels), £18m in the second year(a £5m increase) and £9m in the third. By way of comparison, clubs in the Championship who do not get parachute payments currently receive £2.3m a season, League One sides £325,000 and League Two sides £250,000 in what are known as “solidarity” payments. It has been proposed that those payments are increased by just five per cent under the new offer, meaning that clubs relegated from the Premier League would be receiving ten times as much as those that hadn’t been fortunate enough to have as little as one season in the sun.

That the Football League should be jittery about this sort of increase in funding at this particular time is understandable. All three divisions of their competition had a degree of competition running through them that the Premier League, which finishes its season this weekend with practically all of its matches meaning little to nothing, cannot offer. Indeed, the more cynical amongst us might even pause to consider whether there might be some sort of deep-rooted – quite possibly subconscious – desire to make the League as uncompetitive as theirs is. The evidence, over the last few years in the Premier League at least, has been that there is a clear correlation between the amount of money that a football club has to spend on wages and transfer fees. The Football League has, in comparison, been less predictable and more egalitarian.

The result of this has been acres of good publicity for the Football League in recent weeks, and this hasn’t reflected particularly positively on the Premier League. Recent events off the pitch – the retirement of Alex Fergsuon, the sacking of Roberto Mancini and the apparently interminable stories concerning the future of Wayne Rooney – may have papered over a few cracks, but the truth of the matter is that the Premier League has been a stultifying place this season. It is highly likely that the four clubs that will assume the Champions League places for next season will be the four that most would have predicted for most of the season, whilst the three clubs relegated don’t contain any names that would have caused anybody to raise their eyebrows either. As a business, the Premier League is ruthlessly efficient. It seldom resembles a sporting event these days, though, and if people start seriously start asking the question of whether it is still offering the level of entertainment that they might reasonably be entitled to expect from a product that is now priced very much in the “premium” bracket, then that mask of ruthless efficiency might just start to slip a little.

None of this, however, has prevented Richard Scudamore, the Premier League’s all seeing I, from getting involved in the small matter of how the Football League manages its own financial affairs. The League proposed two ways in which the financial gap between those clubs relegated from the Premier League and the rest in the Championship might be narrowed. They have suggested that clubs relegated from the Premier League could no longer receive the £2m a year that these clubs would currently receive from the League’s own comparatively meagre revenue from television companies, and that could instead perhaps be redistributed amongst the other clubs in the Championship that are not the beneficiaries of parachute payments. The second was a proposed salary cap, limiting spending on wages to £16m for relegated clubs in the first year, an amount which would then reduce to £10m the next season, and again £8m for the one after that. Scudamore’s response to that was to email Clarke and state that if either of these proposals were to see the light of day, the current offer of “solidarity money” would be withdrawn to be further reviewed.

Therein lays the nature of the relationship between the Premier League and the Football League. The Premier League holds the financial whip hand, whilst the clubs of the Football League have had to come to terms with an increasing gap financial between the top division and the rest. The Football League does, however, have one nuclear option that it could apply if the Premier League continues its intransigence. Momentum is not with the Premier League at present, for perhaps the first time in two decades. MPs from both sides of the House of Commons have expressed their disquiet over the extra money from its new television contract being frittered away through a “culture of greed” at the top of the game, and they have also called for a proportion of this money to be shared more widely on investment in the game at its grassroots level, as well as on increased funding for supporters’ organisations. It has been suggested before that there are now some Football League clubs who are so exasperated by the Premier League’s attitude over the redistribution of money that their only option might be to pull up the drawbridge and let the Premier League sail off into the distance alone.

Where such a scenario might end up, however, would be anybody’s guess. It seems unlikely that, in the even more unlikely event of this happening, that the Premier League would just continue as a single, twenty club division with all clubs below about sixth or seventh place in the table being little more than cannon fodder for the elite. Might the Premier League seek to encourage the clubs of the Championship to set up a Premier League Division Two? Might it split into two divisions of ten, moving towards the sort of league system that we have seen for the last four decades in Scotland? Nobody can say for certain, and it remains likely that eventually realpolitik will prevail and that some sort of agreement will be thrashed out, but the very fact that there are now clubs who would even consider such extreme action demonstrates that tensions exist which may well be further exacerbated should the Premier League continue to force its will onto the leagues below it. For now, perhaps, it should merely suffice to suggest that perhaps Scudamore should be looking at the amazingly tight season that the three divisions of the Football League and trying to work out how he might bring some of that excitement back to the Premier League, rather than giving the impression of trying to force the same sort of financial disparity that blights his organisation and stifles competition therein onto the Football League against their will. We might hope that common sense will prevail. In the vainglorious world of professional football, however, such a quality frequently seems to be thin on the ground.

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The Friday Cartoon: The Return Of The Incredible Lovejoy

Ted — Fri, 17 May 2013 09:02:40 +0000

There was considerable praise heaped on BT this week with the news that they will be offering live Premier League football to their broadband subscribers from the start of next season. While it is tempting to consider this to be a loss leader – and a very expensive one at that – there is no such thing as a free lunch, and BT viewers will not only have to suffer the sight of Michael Owen as a pundit – we think we can guess how that is all going to work out – and the return of Tim Lovejoy to our screens with a programme that will almost certainly involve men sitting around in ill-fitting replica shirts performing the little known performance art that is “banter” to what will doubtlessly be a delighted audience at home. While we wait to find out exactly which senior executive of the communications giant it is that Lovejoy has compromising photograph of, here’s the brief story of how the presenter obtained his super-powers in the first place.

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The FA’s Betrayal Of Doncaster Rovers Belles

Ian — Thu, 16 May 2013 18:49:39 +0000

Last summer, the arrival of the Olympic games in London meant an unprecedented spike in interest in the women’s game in this country. Although Hope Powell’s team couldn’t get any further than the quarter-finals of the competition, crowds were healthy and there was considerable optimism that the interest might lead to increased interest in the FA Women’s Super League (FAWSL) when it restarted at the end of April. With little competition from the men’s game this summer and plans for expansion into a two division league with eighteen semi-professional clubs, perhaps this was an opportunity to catch up with the women’s game in other countries, such as Germany, where women’s football is considerably more developed and is all the healthier for it.

The Football Association’s handling of the expansion of the FAWSL, however, has already attracted widespread criticism and the story of how they are managing to make such a hash of it all is now threatening to overshadow that anything that the teams themselves could achieve on the pitch, with perhaps the most famous club name in the history of women’s football in this country being on its receiving end. In a short press release issued on the twenty-sixth of April, the FA confirmed that next season’s FAWSL will not be including Doncaster Rovers Belles, who will be relegated at the end of this season regardless of what happens on the pitch and replaced by Manchester City Ladies. The club that inspired the BBC television drama Playing The Field, that was the subject of the Pete Davies book “I Lost My Heart To The Belles” and has frequently been described as the most famous and recognisable names in women’s football in England, are, it seems, no longer wanted.

The place that Doncaster Rovers Belles LFC holds in the history of women’s football in this country is one that cannot be overstated. Founded as Belle Vue Belles in 1969, Doncaster Belles are the most storied club in women’s football in England. Six times winners of the FA Women’s Cup and twice winners of the FA Women’s Premier League National Division, the Belles were merged into Doncaster Rovers FC in 2003, in time for the formation of the FAWSL – of which the club was, naturally, one of the eleven founder members – two years later and, while the club hasn’t managed to recapture its glory days of the 1980s and 1990s – the club lost just one league match in the fifteen years between 1978 and 1993 – on the pitch, it has remained a proud member of the top division since then. Other clubs – most notably Arsenal LFC – have eclipsed the Belles on the pitch over the last decade, but this is a club that should, we might have expected, have a special place at the heart of the game.

Had the club been relegated from the division, of course, there would have been little arguing with. Past glories are no guarantee of success and the meritocracy is at the heart of the entire concept of league football. The FA’s decision, however, seems to have had little to do with events on the pitch. No explanation was given in the original press release – which was issued, with no apparent sense of irony, after just one match of this season’s FAWSL had been played – and those that have subsequently raised this with the Football Association seem to have been palmed off with identikit emails which make superficial references to “Financial and business management”, “Commercial sustainability and marketing”, “Facilities” and “Players, support staff and youth development,” without offering any specifics relating to how the decision to relegate the Belles specifically was actually reached.

The identity of the club that will replace them next season offers a hint to the FA’s reasoning behind their decision to make such a bizarre and unfair decision. Manchester City LFC was founded in 1989, but this club has never played in the top division of women’s football in England, whilst last season was its first in the current second tier, the FA Women’s Premier League National Division, which ended in a mid-table finish. There is no footballing justification for allowing this club to leapfrog into the top division at anybody’s expense, an error of judgement which is compounded by the decision to make this news public at the very start of the season. The FA might have reached this decision and then delayed making it public until the end of this season, in case Manchester City managed to win the FAWPL. If the decision had still been made for non-sporting reasons, it wouldn’t have made it any less morally reprehensible, but it might at least have been prudent. As it is, the decisions made, the rationale given for them being made and the timing of them reeks of little but administrative incompetence.

This wasn’t the only way in which the FA has managed to blot its copybook over this expansion, either, with Lincoln Ladies FC having also been franchised, this time to Nottingham where they will start next season as Notts County LFC with the current Notts County LFC becoming “Notts County Ladies Development Football Club” from next season, whilst Nottingham Forest LFC, who were only relegated from the FAWPL at the end of last season, were denied entry into the FAWSL. When the FA allowed the transplanting of Wimbledon FC to Milton Keynes eleven years ago, they at least had the partial fig leaf of having palmed off responsibility for having made the decision to an “independent three man commission.” They have no such excuse this time around.

Doncaster Rovers supporters, meanwhile, have been angered to action by this decision and a poll has been set up by the fanzine Popular Stand – whose articles on this subject have been invaluable in putting this comment together – which can be signed by clicking here, and perhaps there will be something positive to come from the debacle, if Rovers supporters get behind the Belles, as it has suggested that some, perhaps many, will at this weekend’s FAWSL home match against Everton. The Football Association should not be let off the hook over this matter, after all. Their arguments, about infrastructure and finances, are predictable and they are not entirely without merit, but the traditions of a sport are important, and this club is part of the tradition of women’s football in this country. To override that in favour of another club with deeper pockets sends out a very negative message about how they may run women’s football in this country in the future, though, and, at a time when the women’s club game stands at the possibility of greater interest than it has ever seen before, image is important to women’s football in England. If the Football Association choose to run it with the worship of mammon as its guiding principle, they may well find that crowds continue to be hard to come by.

Produced with the invaluable help of Popular Stand, whose two part series on this episode can be seen here and here.

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100 Owners: Number 73 – The Bhatti Brothers (Wolverhampton Wanderers)

Ian — Wed, 15 May 2013 06:35:05 +0000

At the end of last season Wolverhampton Wanderers became the first club to be relegated in two successive seasons from the top division of English football on two separate occasions, and while younger supporters continue to scream for the heads of owner Steve Morgan and Chief Executive Jez Moxey, older supporters may be forgiven a chill running down their spine as they contemplate the fact that things could yet get worse for the Black Country club before they improve. After all, they have been here before before. At the end of the 1983/84 season, the club began a precipitous drop that ended with Wolves playing in the Fourth Division of the Football League, but the 1980s were not supposed to be like this for a club that had tasted huge, if sporadic, success in its past. The 1980s started with grand schemes and big ideas, but within six years the club would be approaching bankruptcy for the second time, playing at a ground that that three sides closed for being unsafe.

For younger readers, it is worth a reminder that, at the time, Wolverhampton Wanderers FC was still considered, especially by those of a certain age, to be one of England’s great clubs. In the five decades leading up to 1982, the club had spent just three years below the top flight, won the First Division championships three times (and were its runners-up on a further five occasions), the FA Cup and League Cup twice each and even reached the final of the UEFA Cup once, in 1972. By the end of the 1970s, however, Molineux, the club’s home stadium, was in need of upgrading with one stand in particular, the iconic Molineux Road Stand, being in desperate need of renovation. The introduction of the Safety of Sports Grounds Act finally proved to be the tipping point for this stand, in 1978 plans were drawn up to replace it.

The club purchased seventy-one terraced houses on Molineux Street and set to work on its replacement, which opened in August 1979. The John Ireland Stand was impressive, with 9,500 seats and forty-two executive boxes, but it was also, at a cost which has been reported as being as high as £3m (more than twice the record British transfer fee at the time of its opening), ruinously expensive. The end of the stand’s first season brought the League Cup to Molineux, but this proved to be a false dawn at the start of a new decade and by the end of the 1981/82 season the club was facing relegation to Division Two and the very real possibility of bankruptcy. That summer, former Aston Villa owner Doug Ellis had called in the Official Receiver after an audit revealed the club had run up debts of £2.6 million. It was suggested that Ellis – along with another star of this series, the former Walsall owner Ken Wheldon – wished to buy it on the cheap from the Receiver, but with the club less than thirty minutes from extinction, both they and a group led by a certain Sir Jack Hayward were beaten by a consortium fronted by former player Derek Dougan.

The former Molineux legend Dougan was installed as the Chief Executive of the club, but Dougan was merely the public face of the takeover. The powers behind the throne were the financiers of the deal, two Saudi brothers, Mahmud and Mohammad Bhatti of the company Allied Properties, and whilst Wolves were indeed saved in the summer of 1982, just four years later the club would be in an unprecedented state of decay, with the Receivers at the club’s door for a second time. Their first season saw the club return to the First Division in second place, but the following season saw the start of a heady decline, failing to win any of their first fourteen matches and finishing bottom of the table at the end of the season, despite causing the surprise result of the season in winning away to the champions – and soon to be European champions – Liverpool in the league in January 1984.

Off the pitch, meanwhile, the club rapidly sank back into decline. The Bhatti Brothers had pinned their hopes on a massive redevelopment of the Molineux site, which is in easy walking distance of Wolverhampton town centre, but the local council rejected their planning application, at least in part because of their desire to build a supermarket on land adjacent to the ground which was then determined to be used for “leisure purposes only,” although it has subsequently been suggested that even if planning permission had been granted to the brothers, they wouldn’t have been able to borrow the money to see the project through. Derek Dougan, meanwhile, left the club in January 1985, leaving the increasingly disinterested looking Bhatti brothers in control of a club that was plummeting towards the Third Division of the Football League. In May of that year, they finished bottom of the Second Division, with just eight wins from forty-two league matches.

The following season, however, things only went from worse to catastrophic. With debts starting to mount as a result of the brothers having difficulty servicing the debt for The John Ireland Stand and with investment in the team cut to the bone, the team, by now under the managership of former chief scout Sammy Chapman, was labouring in the Third Division, and Wolves conceded seventeen goals in five matches in the month of September alone as crowds plummeted to an average for the season of just over 4,000 people. Worse still, two of the Molineux stands were condemned in the sudden rush towards some degree of ground safety that followed the Valley Parade fire of May 1985, leaving the ground with only two open with one of them, the ruinous John Ireland Stand, thirty yards from the pitch with a blank expanse of grass in front of it. At the end of the 1985/86 season, the club was relegated yet again, this time into Division Four of the Football League, having finished the season in twenty-third place in the Third Division.

Throughout these two seasons, discontent understandably had been growing amongst the club’s support. Former manager Bill McGarry had returned to Molineux in September 1985 but quit two months later, saying, “I am not going to be party to the killing of one of the finest clubs in the world,” whilst supporters would later protest alongside those of Walsall – it was feared that their owner Ken Wheldon wanted to merge the two clubs – in the town centre, whilst a protest meeting attended by seven hundred people at the Wolverhampton Civic Centre would end with agreement that the best way forward would be to encourage creditors to take out a winding-up order against the company that owned the club, forcing it up for sale again. The Mayor Councillor of the town at the time, George Howells, said at the time, “If the Bhattis could see Wolves off and develop that sacred piece of turf at Molineux for their own interests, they would do it.” The meeting was also attended by, amongst others, another former Wolves legend, John Richards, and Councillor John Bird, the leader of Wolverhampton Council and the man who would eventually be one of the main forces behind saving the club.

In July 1986, with the club facing extinction, the huge South Bank terrace at one end of the ground was also closed on safety grounds by the local authorities. It would be those very same authorities, however, that would come to rescue the club. On the second of July 1986 the official receiver was called in at Molineux again, and this time the situation seemed even worse than it had four years previously. The club had debts of almost £2m, a level of debt that was hopelessly unmanageable for a club on its way into the Division Four of the Football League, but again a last minute rescue deal was put together to save the club. Wolverhampton Council, led by Councillor Bird, purchased Molineux along with land surrounding the stadium itself, while a local property development company, Gallagher Estates Limited, in conjunction with the Asda supermarket chain, agreed to pay off the club’s outstanding debts if planning permission was granted by the council for a superstore on the land adjacent to the stadium, while the Molineux Hotel – a grade two listed building which the club owned and had previously used as a social club but had been derelict since 1979 – and the club’s Castlecroft training ground were sold off to the council for £1.1m.

Mahmud and Mohammad Bhatti were finally shuffled out of Molineux after four years, then, and somehow or other Wolverhampton Wanderers was saved for a second time. The club failed to win promotion straight back into the Third Division – they lost in the play-offs to Aldershot at the end of the 1986/87 season – but at least a little pride had been restored in the club. A new striker, a local lad by the name of Steve Bull, signed for £50,000 from rivals West Bromwich Albion in November 1986 and started scoring at a frightening rate, and in 1988 and 1989 the club won back to back league titles to get back into the second tier of the English game by the end of a roller-coaster of a decade. Thanks to the intervention of a man who had been previously been thwarted in his attempts to by the club but would go on to become its benefactor for many years, Sir Jack Hayward, Molineux was restored to being one of the most modern stadia in the country at the start of the 1990s, even if the team has never quite regained the glories of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

The fate of Wolverhampton Wanderers Football Club in the early to mid-1980s was in many respects a parable for the times. The club had been required to spend money that it didn’t really have during an era before television money offered a financial buffer to clubs in the top division on a new stand because so little improvements had been made to its ground for so long. Against this backdrop came the Bhatti Brothers, who seldom seemed particularly interested in anything but an end game of redeveloping Molineux and profiting from it, but they were eventually undone by the continuing decline of the club on the pitch, a decline which was hastened by the general malaise that was spreading rapidly across the whole of English football at the time. And perhaps it was, albeit in a perverse way, appropriate that this decline should have been mirrored at one of its great names, a founder member of the Football League in 1888 and a club which just six years before its near demise in 1986 had been lifting a major trophy in the Wembley sunshine. The collapse of Wolverhampton Wanderers served in some respects to warn the wider world of the shocking state in which English football had found itself by the middle of the 1980s. The start of next season will go some way towards indicating whether the more recent decline of this club has been arrested, but older supporters of Wolverhampton Wanderers will already be aware that when a football club is in a downward spiral, things can always get worse before they get better.

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Birmingham City: Peter Pannu Posts – Part Two

Mark — Tue, 14 May 2013 06:26:30 +0000

Right, where were we… ah, yes. Peter Pannu, whingeing about, accurate, press coverage. The bits below about the BIH AGM last Friday are but the tip of a curious corporate iceberg. So, this article is to become a trilogy. Good, eh?…no…wait…COME BACK… And just in case I didn’t give due credit in part one, immense credit is due to the Blues Trust and the Often Partisan website for their amazing hard work on this matter, which makes Pannu’s attitude to them all the more contemptible.

Email to the previous auditor

A subsequent report regarding the previous auditor, BDO UK, is also misleading regarding a perceived “threat” said to have been sent to them. Again this report was based on the leakage of confidential internal documents from HK by the same party. The club is seeking legal advice on the theft and usage of internal confidential documents and may take appropriate action against those involved.

The Birmingham Mail’s joint investigation with the Blues Trust and website ‘Often Partisan’ uncovered an email sent by Pannu on March 15 2012 to one of the staff of the club’s then auditors, BDO, which included the line “I am not bothered with your BS anymore. Once the audit is over, I will deal with u personally.” The investigation uncovered lengthy correspondence between BDO and the BIH board, signaling BDO’s intent to take the matter to the police if BIH did not respond satisfactorily. The board apologised for a “misunderstanding” and, perhaps inevitably, claimed the words were “taken out of context entirely”, suggesting that Pannu meant to type “deal with your ISSUES personally.” How he missed out nine letters entirely…and what “BS” really stood for…remains unclear.

BDO partners, not having been born “yesterday,” were having none of that but chose sarcastic euphemism as a more proportionate response than police involvement. They maintained the words “presented a serious threat” but “(accepted) that the email was perhaps not meant in the way it was written.” If Pannu “had given more thought to the email before sending it, he might have changed the words to something less threatening.” Pannu, though, hasn’t “given more thought”, to judge by his ‘threat’ to “take appropriate action against those involved” with the “theft” of the above documents and their “usage.” And, again, his attempt to discredit the “report regarding the previous auditor” merely confirms it veracity.

It was open knowledge within the group that since the previous auditor, Edwards LLP… were removed by the previous directors in charge in HK and replaced with BDO UK, BDO HK being the parent’s auditor, there was some strain amongst the parent and the subsidiary. This became worse upon my appointment as the director in the UK as I was unhappy with the delays in the audit in HK and in the UK and the escalating costs associated with it. Add to that the pressures from the footballing authorities for the late filings that led to an embargo. We then had to work hard to have that lifted.

I wished the leakage also demonstrated, which unfortunately was not reported, that I was pushing the previous auditors to probe into the Xtep deal vigorously and complained about the lack of funds coming into the club and on other matters that I felt required more probing. To be fair to BDO UK, they did seek answers from those concerned in HK but nothing was forthcoming. I was only fighting hard for the club’s interest and trying hard to bring in more funds. These were mentioned in the YE 2011 audit reports and the single director mentioned in the audit report, and as quoted in the captioned press article, was myself who queried the Xtep deal and the arrangements.

Pannu has three discrete roles. As vice, then acting, chairman of a club in a worse state on and off the pitch than when he arrived in October 2009, he has been a failure. As CEO and MD of BIH since September 2012, he has been less of a failure. And the Blues Trust and Often Partisan have rightly made the distinction. Pannu is clearly involved in a company power struggle – one which he is winning if his convincing re-election to BIH’s board is a guide. But few Blues fans are well-informed enough about that struggle to make definitive comment. BIH has undoubtedly been poorly governed, though by whom is still to emerge. But as consultant to BIH, which is in at least as bad a state as the club it almost wholly owns, Pannu has been a failure too.

There has been no ‘threat’ made to anyone and the reference in the email, and as explained to BDO, related to dealing with an internal inquiry at the BDO HQ upon my return to the UK. The report in the paper is completely out of context.

How far “out of context” the, undisputed, phrase was could easily be demonstrated by publishing the entire email. But Pannu’s reference to internal inquiries seems irrelevant… maybe even “BS.”

I suppose this sets the matter straight now. I am glad to say that we have re-appointed Edwards LLP as our club’s auditors and as a result YE 2012 and other accounts are now all published efficiently. Upon my appointment in HK as the MD/CEO in September 2012, we have within a very short period of time chased up and published three sets of accounts which were stalled for the last few years. This is absolutely vital for the group’s survival, for the resumption of trading and for any disposal of the club. If the fans want the club to be sold, this is step number one to be done, which we did, to secure the necessary approvals from the shareholders and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

There isn’t much “if” about whether fans want the club to be sold. The fact that it hasn’t been, when Pannu told fans last June that “prospective buyers are continuing to maintain a close rapport with the club,” is one of the supporters’ major frustrations. The fact that it couldn’t be, when Pannu told fans about potential buyers’ close rapports last June, is more than frustrating.

Piece on Mr. Liu Xingcheng

I have no comments regarding this personality and simply wish the fans to note that he is married to Mr. Yeung’s ex-partner’s sister, a de facto brother-in-law, whose family stayed at Mr. Yeung’s house in London and his kids went to school in the UK, all courtesy of Mr. Yeung. Mr. Yeung now has a new wife and a family and I do not wish to get in to domestic arguments amongst them.

So we can go now?

Suffice to say that…

That’ll be a ‘no’ then…

…Mr. Yeung is initiating legal actions both in China, Hong Kong and in the UK emanating from their past domestic dealings. Mr. Yeung is also concerned that his frozen assets in the UK may have been dissipated whilst he was stranded in Hong Kong and he is looking at that as well.

One “domestic dealing” Pannu “failed to clarify,” “chose not to disclose” or “unfortunately did not report” was that Liu “took his investment in BIH as payment for a debt owed by (Yeung).” These “past domestic dealings” could involve quite a number of “legal actions.”

Mr. Liu is most welcome to attend the shareholder’s meeting on the scheduled date. It will be a good time to highlight to him how we have made sure that the club is still afloat over the last two years in this environment and how we have made enormous progress in HK to get the accounts out to ensure the value of his shares is still there.

It is unclear whether Liu attended the AGM. But his promises to “vote against” Pannu’s re-election and urge others to follow suit, appeared empty or ineffective. Pannu was re-elected by an almost North Korean landslide vote – with only 7.11% of shares cast against him. Liu’s shareholding was reported in the Birmingham Mail last month as exactly twice that figure. Yet Often Partisan has produced evidence (i.e. a copy) of Liu’s vote against all AGM resolutions, and correspondence to, presumably, Liu’s solicitors from “attesting officers” (solicitors appointed to verify legal documentation) claiming that “our client is not in a position to act on the said voting instructions” because “you have so far not acknowledged that your client” is Liu.

And Liu also transgressed a BIH board ruling that “no shareholder was entitled to attend and vote only against the Resolutions at the AGM.” The series of 92% votes in favour suggests shareholders were perfectly entitled to attend and vote only FOR AGM resolutions. I would welcome guidance as to whether this is as breathtaking as it sounds. But whatever credibility Liu lacks (such as his pledge to vote against Yeung…who wasn’t up for re-election), Pannu’s idea that ensuring “that the club is still afloat over the last two years” is worthy of pride or praise lacks at least as much, especially coming from Blues’ “vice-president of finance” when it nearly sank in the first place.

As far as I know, having met him in China and in the UK, Mr. Liu does not speak any English and I want to compliment the UK press for being able to speak to him in Mandarin and to get his points across accurately, I hope, as reported.

Nowhere is Pannu’s sneering superiority more evident than in this sarcasm-dripped paragraph. The implication is either that the quotes are fiction, or that the supporters who obtained them couldn’t organise an efficient translator. Pannu does them an insulting disservice. A number of supporters made considerable and admirable efforts to travel to Hong Kong to speak to BIH stakeholders, including Mr. Liu. Below, Pannu complains that fans haven’t “(looked) deeper to identify the core issues and not just what appears on the surface.” And yet, when some have done precisely that, all he can muster in response is arrogant dismissiveness.

Progress report on the sale

Mr. Yeung had procured an interested party from China and is personally leading the discussion there. I would have preferred someone from the UK, even a Bluenose owner, but it appears we are not making as much headway there as I would have wished.

Currently, Mr. Yeung is surely doing nothing of the sort. His long-awaited trial in Hong Kong’s district court on money-laundering charges began on April 29^th. If he isn’t fully-focused on that, he could end up in more trouble than he already appears to be. And if Pannu really would prefer “someone from the UK, even a Bluenose,” then “not making as much headway as I would have wished” is galactic understatement. The only domestic interest in Blues was the “mystery consortium” fronted by “Bluenose” Gianni Paladini, whose credibility deficit rendered Pannu’s sneering arrogance and dismissiveness somehow appropriate.

The clearance of all the outstanding accounts will make a disposal easier and I am hopeful we can find some new owners who can take the club forward as the fans very much deserve a change. If there are any updates they will be posted here but for those who prefer the other media reports, please carry an open mind when reading these and await clarification on our official site.

“The fans very much deserve a change.” Well, he got that right.

I understand owners at other clubs, for instance, just to name two, Wolves and Leeds, are facing a similar outpouring of passion from their fans. This is football and the drama is part and parcel of the game and we gladly all accept it. However, at some point I wish the fans can carry a cool head and look deeper to identify the core issues and not just what appears on the surface.

Pannu’s examples of supporter unrest could not possibly be more ill-advised. In trying to brand fans as superficial hot-heads, he cites one club where mistakes off the pitch have led to consecutive relegations on it and another recently owned, and still influenced by, Ken bloody Bates. This should not be football. The dramas surrounding people like Bates should not be “part and parcel” of the game. And I know English is not Pannu’s first language (I’m not criticising his linguistic skills, which are far better than mine, just noting as another example of his arrogance that he hasn’t let a sub-editor near this statement). But I have not the first idea what he means by “we gladly all accept it.”

PART THREE, later this week: Pannu posts, patronises and puzzles again

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