Victor Meldrew As ever these debates are polarised.
We as fans never know the truth and never will.
I don't believe that the club HAD to repay the overdraft-£6.5 million is not massive when there are such assets as the ground itself,the hotel and of course that mysterious £7 million or so spent on infrastructure.
If there was some honesty around we might have heard that the chairman wanted the o/d cleared for his own personal eventual gain-are none of us brave enough to accept the truth?
It really gets to me that exceptionally wealthy people like to create smokescreens-it's often the seedy world they operate in and so often (like politicians) they are afraid to tell the truth.
If the chairman had come out and said that he had become pissed off with not enough return from the club,he would arrange sales of £10 million of assets and we would go with what we have got by employing a cheap manager who has already worked with our young players and hopefully would bring out the best in them I wonder what the fan reaction would have been.
Would the fans have respected the honesty ?
Maybe.
Now what we have is a situation where £2million was spent in an area where we were not too badly off because presumably as some kind of sweetener to Rodgers, and to some extent to the fans,it showed that the club is prepared to invest blah,blah,blah.
My post is muddled but so is our club-£10million in,£3million out and we end up with a hotch-potch of players with no plan,some experienced but too old,others inexperienced and too young.
Vision in his normal stance of defending the club to the full with the rare caveat of saying that it is not quite working out as some kind of insurance(as we stand 3rd from bottom and on the slide) and SDR as ever suggesting that everything is wrong at our club are the polarised views,one seemingly well-reasoned but lacking the emotion of most normal fans and the other full of emotion but with no sense of reason.
My stance is that I feel a bit conned-the usual talk of promotion but not providing the ammunition.
The chairman got 2 managers in McGhee and Coppell who worked wonders with peanuts and (as shown in that sick documentary)is,like many wealthy people,paranoid at the thought of losing that wealth so takes panic measures.
We look like a relegation side with old lags like Rasiak,Howard and McAnuff,all nearly men who have slipped further and further down the ladder after starting off brightly at other clubs.
The kids really haven't (yet) looked anything better than ordinary and without changes possibly in manager and definitely in the playing staff I see us playing 3rd tier football next season.
Some people don't seem to think that matters but wait and see what our stadium is like when each week there are only 8,000 fans there and we are hoping for a decent cup draw or progress in the Johnstone Paint Trophy-for those that haven't been there before it isn't great fun especially when any player with a semblance of ability gets sold (remember Neil Webb and Kerry Dixon).
As said earlier these are mainly ramblings of a disillusioned old man wanting to get a few things out of his system but more than anything I detest the deceit that I feel has crept into the upper echelons of our club.
Just about perfectly sums up the way I feel as well. I don't mind the club being honest with us. But the fact that they only do so when forced (such as the recent financial statement) or spout rhetoric about ambition in the weeks prior to season ticket renewal deadline just shows contempt for the fans (or customers).