Verbal

Trust me, even the thought of you being even half-right is punishment enough. The very idea goes against nature - a bit like a snake with legs. I like the 'false praise' nonsense, by the way. Quite funny. Back on topic, has Keegan EVER managed successfully (or unsuccessfully) without huge bundles of cash at his disposal? I seem to remember that his rescue act at Fulham in the old Second Division happened after Fayed took over. Best kept miles away - unless the newly rumoured 'overseas' owner is the Caliph of Harrods.

Just curious, Reg - what will it take to make you question your certainty that Pearson is such a poor manager? I agree it's not proven, although the case for the defence is looking a lot stronger. But you elevate it to a 'myth'. Why? Does logic not apply in your parallel universe? Tell you what. Let's agree now. How about a top-six finish next season with Leicester, and you agree to eat humble pie? Sounds fair to me. One thing I will happily agree with. I'm pretty sure Pearson would have struggled had he stayed at the club this season. But that's because Lowe and Wilde are to safe stewardship of football clubs as Little and Large are to cutting-edge comedy. Pearson did indeed get lucky - but not in the way you think.

So not a troll after all, but a Trogg. Don't buy it though - the only things that make Reg's heart sing these days are UFOs and crop circles. Unless... Maybe someone should try pulling Lowe's face off to see if there's something green and reptilian underneath. Anyway, I've met Reg and he's a very pleasant chap (if a little obsessed) - so can't be the same...

It's just a heads-up to AIM that the PLC is history and the shares are worthless. Any prospective bidders are arguing over the football club alone. I'd call that good news, as far as it goes...

So let me get this right. The worst season in the history of the club just ended a matter of days ago. The club has been relegated for the second time in four years, fallen into administration and picked up a points penalty that may yet increase. And we may not even have a club to support if events conspire against us in the next few days. But your idea of what our reaction should be is: Oh well, never mind. Mustn't grumble. Actually we have plenty to learn. How many of us, for example, fell for Wilde's hopeless incompetence dressed as fan-friendly flag-waving? When, after much hesitation, Leon Crouch finally sided with Wilde to bring Lowe down, it had an awful lot to do with fan pressure. Of course, even if we'd been able to see the awful consequences, we were at the time between a rock and hard place. It was clear to most at the time that Lowe's stupid 'big ideas' (I think he really thought he could change the face of football) never stood a chance, and his pompous mendacity and utter hopelessness, combined with a toxic refusal to listen to common sense, risked driving the club further into oblivion. Which, in the end, actually happened. So with hindsight, what SHOULD we have done? Tough question.

But who sells the season tickets? When the holding company fell into administration, Lowe/Wilde staked everything on arguing to the Football League that the club itself was still trading normally. If the club sells season tickets, then it's hard to see how the Insolvency Act applies. And if that's the case, why didn't they sell tickets earlier? Couldn't just be a question of how to price them - for the Championship or League One. Could it? It didn't stop Norwich, for example...

Okay, got the Linn Sondek (an absolute steal at £250) - but what are the good but not stupidly priced amps and speakers these days? (There used to be a Far Eastern company called Rad that produced great, cheap amps, but I think they must have vanished by now.)

The problem with Marc Jackson isn’t so much that he’s a Walter Mitty so much as that he’s the master of unintended consequences. If it’s really true he’s involved yet again, Fry has to watch out for what now seems to be his modus operandum. Groups of business people get cobbled together who are sold on the idea that the club is an absolute steal. They sell back to Jackson the idea that they can put the money together to do it. The net worth of these guys is such that a bid from their consortium looks roughly plausible. They may even pass a ‘proof of funds’ test. But due diligence cuts both ways. As the scale not so much of the investment as the sheer quantity of cash needed upfront becomes clear, foot temperatures plummet. The ‘steal’ is a financial basket case, and the ‘bid’ starts to crumble. MJ then does a 'tommac' and starts bleating on forums. Tempers rise still further - to the point where people stop talking to each other, or slag each other off on local news shows. Meanwhile, as the circus plays out, rival bids have had time to cool, or have found the price unintentionally jacked (so pun intended) by the supposed competitor, to a point where a deal becomes less and less likely. More time passes – and, hey presto, the rival bid, and the takeover, melt away. I HOPE to hell this doesn’t happen – and that Jackson for once has someone standing behind him who’s the real deal. In the surreal world of Southampton Football Club, you never know. But with the form Jackson has, I’d be amazed.

It all seems to be on a bit of a knife edge to me – and utterly dependent on the new owners, assuming we get them, making a long series of decisions that are absolutely right. As it stands, it seems that one bid has been received and there’s the prospect of two others. Unless any of these consortia are big-money philanthropists, the winning bid will come in around the £10-15 million mark. That’s enough money to clear the overdraft, pay the Inland Revenue their £2 million, settle outstanding debts on stage payments (for example, I’d expect another £400,000 on Morgan Schneiderlin to fall due at the beginning of the season), service the rescheduled debts on the stadium (probably halved to £12 million but at a high-ish interest rate), and pay the administrator’s fees (comfortably six figures), and set about putting a first team together for next season that will haul us back into the Championship. The new owners would then have to take some unpopular decisions – about the £1m per-annum costs of the academy, and the need to downgrade it to a youth team (still the kind of structure that delivered the Wallaces, Le Tiss, etc); as well as the need to generate short-term income from player sales (inevitably with the sale of players we’d have liked to keep). Against the backdrop of many of the best players leaving the club, the new board will have to find a really creative way of selling season tickets – aiming at least as high as Norwich and their figure of 18,000 and rising. Part of that will be to do with pricing. But more important even than that will be the appointment of a manager capable of lifting the spirits of everyone to do with the club. ALL of this will need to be done within weeks, otherwise the vital task of rebuilding the first team will start way too late, and we’ll be left scrambling for players who were not what we would ideally have wanted and come at an inflated price. If, and only if, the new incumbents have chosen the manager well, he’ll come with a list of players who will be the next Jason Scotland or Keith Fahey. And that manager will have the tactical skill, stamina, Churchillian inspiration and sheer bloody-mindedness to see us through the trench warfare of League One. (Already, he sounds closer to a superhero than the kind of manager you might expect us to snag in League One). Compare our situation to Leicester’s last season, and you really see the huge scale of the task. Leicester went down with a chairman prepared to pump £10 million into keeping the club and team together, many of their good players stayed to fight it out, the club started on zero points, and they had about the same numbers through the turnstiles as we did this year. The margin for error for a points-handicapped team in League One is worryingly small: we need to perform somewhere near or at play-off standard to be sure of safety in a league that relegates four teams a year. If all this happens – and it requires an awful lot of decisions to be the absolutely right ones – the paradox is the new owners will have one of the biggest bargains in British football on their hands, and the club will return to the Championship, restructured and making a small profit, ready to make a push for the promised land of the premiership. But right now it’s a bit like staring over the edge of a high cliff and seeing that the prize at the bottom has to be claimed within the next five seconds.

That’s one question I might be able to answer. And the clue is in Lowe’s recent interview with Jeff Randall on Sky. He accused Fry, the Barclays manager, of being ‘a fan’. The usual interpretation of this remark is that Lowe was implying that Fry over-lent to the club, then was suddenly forced to switch off the tap. But there is another way of reading this - that Fry had serious reservations about Lowe’s mad experiment, and told him so. Fry may also have been aware that FlyBe’s relationship with Lowe was also deteriorating as one disastrous result followed another without the slightest alteration in the (surprisingly expensive) diktats of the ‘Dutch revolution’ (I’m not sure that this was the direct cause of friction, or whether it was just yet another case of Lowe royally ****ing people off .) As one pillar after another seemed to just come crashing down, Fry probably thought it prudent to shoot across the club’s bow with the reduction in overdraft. I’m not clear whether this was a decision he made independently, or whether it was ‘referred up’, owing to Barclays’ potential exposure to PR damage as a major football sponsor. In any case, Fry’s first decision led inexorably to the second (administration), because the club found itself caught between a rock and a hard place: without the prospect of player sales, and with faltering gates, it could only stand a chance of staying within the limits of the reduced overdraft by healthy early sales of season tickets. But Lowe/Wilde couldn’t realistically (or possibly legally?) go for a club-saving sales push because of the clear and present danger of relegation, and the even worse probability of administration. Towards the end, the bills would have been mounting so high that the club could have faced accusations – and legal action – of trading while insolvent. In the end, Lowe/Wilde were hoist by their own ‘total-football’ petard. The tantalising questions are: Did Fry ‘the fan’ take the actions he did to force Lowe out? Or was it a bigger corporate decision to sink the club? The one question I doubt very much Fry was concerned about was the idea that’s been floated often recently (and just repeated by Lee Dixon on tonight’s 'Match of the Day') – that huge quantities of cash generated by player sales in the last few years have ‘disappeared’. Aside from the vast overspending initiated by Lowe's partner, Fry would surely know that Lowe – despite his rhetoric about the need to make drastic cuts – refused to take the axe to what he regarded as both his brainchild and a source of ready cash in the future: the Academy. The academy seemed to represent the essence of what, for want a much better word, you might call Lowe’s ‘philosophy’ – it was the instrument by which he’d change the face and finances of football, at least for medium-sized clubs like Southampton. Maintaining full academy status costs, by all accounts, somewhere north of a million pounds a year. The real rationale for the ‘Dutch revolution’, in my view, was that it would actually speed up the production line of young home-grown talent – which in turn would generate not a healthy first team, but yet more player sales. This would also explain the Schneiderlin purchase – made in Lowe’s own presumed certainty that Prost could only be right in saying he’d uncovered a gem, and that the player could be traded on at a healthy profit. Ditto, the purchase of Holmes, Smith, Molyneux, Gasmi and Forecast. (I’m afraid the signing of Pulis defies ANY logical explanation.) In the real world, however, Lowe could have spent considerably less money filling gaping holes in the first team with young, but tried and tested lower-league players – and winding down the full academy into something more akin to a straightforward and much more affordable youth team. What Lowe wanted was an alternative economic model for running a profitable, publicly listed football club. In reality, he’s turned us into an impoverished version of Crewe Alexandra. *Apologies for yet another War and Peace. I’ll go away quietly now!

How much is down to him, after the whole shambolic, vitriolic, incompetent wreckage of the season just ended? ‘Quite a lot’ would be an understatement. I think we’re entitled to measure him on his own claim, and those like Sundance Beast/Nineteen Canteen, who made the claim for him on here last August about “Rupert and Co to getting on with the job of rescuing the club.” And I’m sorry if you feel bad about people blaming Lowe – but the real inquest into the last disastrous year hasn’t even begun yet. Look where we are. The team has just handed us the worst season’s performance in the club’s 125-year history. By far! In the boardroom, The Lowe era has ended with the ultimate poison pill: the holding company in administration, unable even to pay the Inland Revenue (which may yet help drive the club out of existence), and a ten-point penalty carried over into next season. I know we’re all prone to bouts of optimism – as I was at the beginning of this season – but let’s not kid ourselves: assuming we make it to the starting blocks next season, the penalty ensures that if we make the tiniest mistake, let alone the catalogue of ridiculous decisions that have just passed, we could sail straight into League Two. Frankly, the Football League should seriously think about coming up with a point-BONUS scheme – in which any club having to endure being led by such demonstrably appalling characters should have ten points added before the start of the season. The Lowe disaster should also be a lesson to the Football League – it needs to come up with ways to ban people like him ever running a football club again. (The idea that he might still be sniffing around the club is actually shocking.) The inquest into Lowe and his cronies will only really get going when people on the inside of the club start to talk about what was really happening over the last twelve months. And based on previous experience, I suspect the reality will easily outdo the worst anyone could have made up on here. We’ve yet to understand the full extent of the deceit and spin that surrounded the ‘sacking’ of Nigel Pearson. And we certainly still don’t have a clear idea of how it was possible that Lowe could railroad Wilde into signing up to such a profoundly risky venture that the utterly bonkers ‘Dutch revolution’ was recognised to be well before the start of the season. We’ll get to find out the details of how the Dutch comedians came to the club, and the extent of the damage they did, particularly to young players’ morale. We’ve yet to get first-hand accounts of the tactical chaos that swamped the Poortvliet part of the season, and the evident determination of Wotte to repeat those mistakes. And the consequences of the fact that, unknown to almost all of us, the two were evidently at each other’s throats pretty much from the off. We’ve yet to get an adequate explanation for the player-buying policies – how on earth we ended up with Gasmi, Pulis, Forecast, et al., players we neither needed nor could afford. (All we’ve got so far is wide-eyed incredulity – but surely Lowe had to justify his crazy decisions to SOMEONE.) And not just that – what was the thinking (in the loosest sense of the word, I suspect) behind splashing a seven-figure sum on a young player in the process of slowly sinking on the French leagues…and where the hell did the money come from? Then there’s the flip-side of the coin: how exactly a number of senior players were frozen out, and may even have received threats (along the lines of: You’ll never play for Saints again…), as the Lowe/Wilde regime evidently sought to impose their ‘revolutionary’ will on the first team. (And to what extent this too eroded morale within the club). We may even get to hear about the full contents and author of the infamous ‘peace-in-our-time’ letter that Lowe waved at the AGM – or even that it was a fabrication. But more importantly, why, with the first team in freefall, was no serious action taken around the time of the AGM to arrest the awful decline of the first team, either with a new manager and/or loanees. I also suspect there’s more to the relationship between Lowe and Wilde than has come out so far – because however you look at it, it’s an alliance that has never made any sense. As Wilde nurses his pile of worthless shares, does he still think he did the right thing? He should have the guts and moral sense to tell us. All of this and much more needs to be well understood by all of us, because we all have a stake in this club – especially now that we’re by far the main source of income for the club, should it make it through to next season. As Karl Marx once said: ‘Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.’ Actually we’ve already just done that!

Since you bring it up, it would be a little bit less like fingernails on a chalkboard if you'd stop repeating Sundance's habit of spelling 'allegedly' with too many 'd's. Thanks ever so politely much.

So now you're supporting a boycott of the club? Consistency isn't really your strong suit, is it? And perhaps you'd like to explain your personal animosity towards McMenemy. You're "just a ST holder", who's nonetheless demonstrated a comical ignorance of the history of the club, so how do you know anything about McMenemy - other than parroting what you imagine to be Lowe's antipathy?

I think you're missing the point I was making. Crouch was talking nonsense - literally. For Mawhinney to use this in the way he did either demonstrates negligent ignorance or a political predator's taste for the kill. Or both. The fact that the chief adminsitrator of a football authority should revert to the low-life he was as a politician doesn't exactly fill me with confidence, at least (I speak as someone who had to deal with this guy in a former life). The bigger picture is that Mawhinney needs to find an alternative to the points-deduction penalty. It may have been endurable when the economy was such that it could sell more than one car a month. But in the worst economic crash since the Depression, a lot of other clubs are going to find it hard just to stay in business. And with Mawhinney continuing blithely down the points-deduction route, it's a bit like running a marathon where the judges run out like lunatics every so often to trip you up. Even the justification for the points deduction betrays an act of spectacular political cowardice. Ostensibly it's to stop clubs overspending and gaining advantage over their rivals. The reality - about which Mawhinney knows absolutely nothing - is that clubs in the lower leagues have for years now suffered from the trickle-down effects of the ludicrous salaries paid to premiership players. The cost of just 'staying in the game' and attracting players who can perform at Championship or League One level has always been affected by this. And badly. But you won't hear a peep out of Mawhinney about the real source of the trouble. The other aspect of political cowardice has been pretty well illustrated by the sanctions against both us and Luton. The additional penalties heaped unfairly on Luton because of the underhand irregularities of a previous regime should have resulted in bans on those involved being involved in football. But no - thump the club instead, a much easier target which can't fight back with lawsuits. Similarly, if Mawhinney were actually serious about his suggestion of financial mismanagement, ban Lowe and all the others from running football clubs. Will that happen? Of course not. I suspect Mawhinney is savvy enough about self-protection that he doesn't want to risk the lawsuit from a litigious Lowe. This isn't an argument that can be reduced to 'the rules are the rules...' There's also an unhealthy dose of cowardice, self-preservation, spite, and nauseating political opportunism. In an economic crisis where many clubs face going to wall, what we need is a football administrator with the wit and imagination to steer League Football through these dangerous times. What we've got is Mawhinney - a simpering Thatcherite acolyte with the imagination of a brick.

I don’t understand what Crouch means by the claim that the PLC was set up to avoid the points penalty. I’m sure someone knows the dates better than me, but I thought the PLC was formed in 1997, in the reverse takeover. The points-deduction system wasn’t introduced until 2004. So how can the holding company possibly have been set up to avoid the penalty. And was Crouch even there at the time? Whatever the rights or wrongs of Mawhinney’s decision to deduct points, his sleazy delight at finding that quote from Crouch suggests the craven, slimeball politician in him is alive and well. According to David Conn ('The Beautiful Game? Searching for the Soul of Football'), holding companies were actually set up as a way for club owners to bypass an FA rule that was supposed to protect clubs from asset strippers. Sound familiar?)

Barclays have a long and undistinguished history of being rubbish. Lowe laying into Fry (the bank manager, not the administrator) personally was probably unfair though. I doubt he took the decision off his own bat. At the very least, it would have HAD to have been 'referred up' because of Barclays' substantial sponsorship in football, and for the invariably negative publicity that would go with a decision that, when it's played out, could yet destroy a major football club. I suspect there is much more to Barclays' decision than a local bank manager panicking, and the real reason may dribble out in time. I personally wonder whether Southampton have been set up as an 'example' - a shot across the bows to other football clubs. Southampton were an easy target (on this line of thinking) because we had a deeply unpopular, demonstrably useless chairman, a split fanbase some of whom were already half-begging for admin, an infrastructure more in line with a Prem club than League One hustlers (PLC status, the academy, Staplewood, etc), and an impending financial crunch after relegation. If any of this is true, the warning was presumably: downsize or else. Lowe was never going to axe his sacred cow of a youth academy, and would have carried on defending its costs to the detriment of the first team for years to come. Nor could the costly (£250,000 pa) running costs of PLC status ever be sustained by League One economics. So the bank, realising there was nothing really to lose, brought down the axe. Again, I emphasise, this is speculation. But the whole affair does raise some pressing questions... By the way, while watching Lowe being bowled puffballs by Jeff Randall (of all people), I just wished Randall was well enough informed to counter Lowe's accusation that all the financial trouble started after he was toppled in the 'going Wilde' revolution. Randall really should have asked rosy cheeks how on earth he therefore chose to ally himself with the architect of the club's ruinous finances.

I can only assume that you haven't read your own thread. Plenty of reasons have been given for not going down the PLC route again. I'll add two more to the ones I listed above. 1. The annual cost of maintaining PLC status is, on the club's own admission, around £250,000 - the equivalent of one month's running costs in the Championship, and much longer than that in League One. 2. What really democratises a club is not PLC status - where have you been! - but relegation. The further you fall, the more you depend on schmucks like us coming through the turnstiles.

If Salz is involved, the household name (to Fry anyway) will be Rothschild.

Can I nominate this as the worst takeover thread EVER?

It says you last edited this at 5.57pm. Would that have been in 1997?

That's exactly what I'm saying - he won't be able to do that this time.

If this is true - and it's a big if - Lowe won't be able to pull shareholder strings in the way he's done in the past. And he's certainly not coming back as a big investor himself, with WH Ireland being credit crunched into substantial losses, and in such a state that it's broken the golden ' confidence' rule of stockbroking that you keep your infighting out of public view. Which means Lowe will only be able to come back if the successful consortium decides that he is more important to the club than the need to build a team capable of rediscovering how to win games, and to reunite a deeply fractured and disillusioned fanbase which, next season, through the turnstiles, will be key to the club's survival. If we're going to get a consortium that would make that decision, we're screwed anyway.

1. There's an awful lot of information that 'private' (limited liability') companies have to make publicly available. Anyone who runs their own company would be well aware of this. 2. You can 'get heard' within PLC structures in much the same way that independent voices are heard at a block-voting TUC conferences - in other words, in no meaningful way, or simpy not at all. 3. What you're proposing sounds like the very thing you say you don't want - a fragmented shareholding.

I'll probably join the 'let it go' club at some point. But just for now... I frequently met Mawhinney in Norwich in the 80s. Then he was just 'Dr' and one of a number of colourless characters in East Anglia who'd flown into their seats on Maggie's coattails. (By 1983, the whole region, which had been a Labour stronghold, had only one MP who wasn't a Tory - Clement Freud.) Mawhinney was part of the East Anglian 'mafia' that included John Major and John Gummer. What they lacked in intelligence and charm they made up for with a nasty political vindictiveness - and not always directed at people who could defend themselves. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the ten-point reduction, I personally find it hard to believe that Norwich wouldn't have been foremost in Mawhinney's mind - and given the glaring opportunity for a conflict of interest, it would be better if he made his position clear. I bet he won't, though.

I'm sure that if Crouch comes back - and it seems he is - he'll want to dispose of Wotte. But this will hardly be on a par with Lowe/Wilde's ditching of Pearson - although I expect some on here will want to to say otherwise. Wotte's record with us aside, he has absolutely no idea what it takes to succeed in League One. Hopefully we'll go with someone who knows how to build a side in much the same way that Swansea have done, and Hull before them. In any case, the takeover needs to happen NOW, because the rebuilding - which will be root-and-branch - needs to start asap. We can't afford to wait until the end of the summer to discover a team able to survive the drop into League Two.