Last Saturday,
Aldershot Town beat local rivals Woking 4-2 at Kingsfield in the FA Trophy, to keep alive their hopes of a double of the Trophy and the Conference championship. They've lost just once in their
last thirteen games and are currently seven points ahead of second-placed Torquay United. Should they get promoted at the end of this season, they will take their place in the Football League
sixteen years after the original Aldershot FC became the first Football League club to fold in the middle of the season since Accrington Stanley, some thirty years earlier. Curiously, Aldershot's
renaissance coincides with the redemption of Spencer Trethewy, the former "property developer" whose recklessness acted as the catalyst for the original club's closure.
The original Aldershot FC, it's fair to say, never really set the world alight. They reached the FA Cup Fifth Round in 1980 (losing to Everton after a replay), but only spent a few seasons
above the Fourth Division in their fifty years in the Football League. In 1987, they raised many eyebrows for charging a £9 admission fee (a pretty huge sum at the time) for an FA Cup Third Round
match against (then First Division) Oxford United. They won 3-0, but less than 2,000 people were there to watch it. They were promoted into Division Three the same year, and this is where their
problems started. They started paying Third Division wages, but were relegated two years later with a considerable number of players still on Third Division wages. Suddenly, their debt became
unmanageable, and by August 1990, playing in front of sub-2,000 crowds, the company that owned the club was wound up at the High Court with an outstanding debt of £490,000.
Enter, stage left, Spencer Trethewy. The nineteen year-old described himself as a "property developer", drove a sports car, and rolled into the Recreation Ground waving an affadavit
underwriting the club to the tune of £200,000. He appeared, famously, on "Wogan". Unfortunately, though, all of the promises were built on fresh air. By the time Trethewy left the club, they were
in free-fall both on and off the pitch, with crowds now both well below 1,500, the Inland Revenue and the banks circling, and the team just off the bottom of the Football League. They didn't own
their ground, so all of their debts were unsecured. The banks and the tax man pulled the rug from under their feet. Even with the sales of players such as Tony Lange to Wolves for £150,000 in
1989, David Barnes to Sheffield United for £52,000 at the same time and Steve Claridge to Cambridge United for £50,000 in February 1990, and a potentially lucrative FA Cup Third Round match
against West Ham United in 1991, the club was now haemorrhaging money. The final straw came on the 25th of March 1992, when the club was finally put out of business and resigned its position in
the Football League.
Aldershot wouldn't remain without a football club for long. The club was reformed that summer as Aldershot Town, still playing at The Recreation Ground, and in the Ryman League Division
Three. It took them eleven years to get promoted back into the Conference. Trethewy, meanwhile, was imprisoned for two years for fraud in 1994, after a series if incidents at top London hotels.
Exactly what he has been up to since his release from prison isn't exactly clear, but Trethewy has clearly built himself up to some substance again, as this report from last year seems to indicate. He has resurfaced at Combined Counties League side
Chertsey Town, where has had a beneficial effect on the club after taking over from previous incumbent Roy Butler. There will be still be many at Aldershot who will shudder at the idea, but the
question remains of whether this particular leopard has changed its spots.
For Aldershot Town, the future isn't necessarily as rosy as one might hope - they still don't own The Recreation Ground, which
(the last time I went there, at least) could at least have done with a lick of paint, and this means that their financial structure is built on thinner ice than it might otherwise be. Having said
that, though, an FA Trophy win this season could net them at least £100,000 and promotion back into the Football League could be worth more still. One would hope that they are managing themselves
a bit better this time around than they were in the early 1990s.
This short film is about their closure.
Voting For Christmas
Friday, 01 February 08, 07:19 PM
It is a most peculiar read, coming across as being more like an advertising pamphlet than giving any real information to MyFC members to enable to them make up their own minds on whether to vote in favour of or against the proposal to buy the controlling share in Ebbsfleet United. The opening section confirms that MyFC are to buy a 75% share in the club, and explains that the legal firm DLA Piper have carried out due diligence and create documents and, somewhat confusingly (given that they name the legal firm) an anonymous accountancy firm to carry out due financial diligence. They also state that they are unable, for legal reasons, to publish the results of the due diligences in full.
It then goes on to discuss how "numerous" clubs contacted them with a view to setting up a deal, and that, when everything boiled down, three choices were on the table. Irritatingly (though I'll do some scrabbling around on the grapevine and see what I can find out), the other two clubs aren't listed publicly, but it does say this much: "The former would have been too much of a gamble, and relied on a very significant upturn in membership to work, whilst the latter was eventually discounted on the basis of ongoing issues with the stadium". I think I know who one of them was (a Conference North club, once of the Conference, with a famously small support), but the other remains a mystery. There are a number of clubs that have ongoing issues with their stadium - which one could it be? York City? Barnet? Cambridge City? We may never find out.
Next, it's onto the sales pitch. What is noticeably missing from the "plus points" listed to MyFC members is what the benefits or potential benefits are to existing supporters of Ebbsfleet United. We see a lot about how good it will be for "the club" (ie, the new and existing owners) and how good it will be for the local area (the club sponsors, Eurostar, aren't mentioned by name, but they must be thrilled with all the news coverage an area that they have recently poured millions of pounds into is now getting). There are also a couple of interesting references to Ebbsfleet's tatty but homely Stonebridge Road stadium. In one breath, it is described as "small, but [with] bags of character", and that it "can apparently be fairly easily upgraded to league standard if the club is promoted" (almost all Conference grounds are practically League standard, by the way - a rash of clubs didn't get promoted from it in the 1980s and 1990s after falling foul of the Football League's regulations and the Conference reacted to this by tightening its own rules so much that, for a while, you had to have a better ground to get into the Conference than you needed to get into the League), but in the next it talks loftily about "the fact that the local area is being re-developed means that there is a good prospect that a new stadium will be built for the club, free of charge".
Hang on a minute. "There is a good prospect that a new stadium will be built for the club, free of charge"? I thought that this was poor, impoverished Ebbsfleet, with no cash, small crowds and desperate enough to try anything to keep themselves alive. What is becoming apparent is that there is more to this than had originally met the eye. There is a lot of talk about "regeneration", "opportunity" and, of course, "highly confidential". There's a lot of talk about property, generally. Interpret that as you choose. It continues in this vein for several more paragraphs, along with some almost incomprehensible guff about having three different tiers of shares, plenty more about what a great opportunity this is for MyFC and with practically nothing about what will be for the best for the people that really matter in this whole, sorry circus - the supporters of Ebbsfleet United.
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What On Earth Is Going On At Liverpool?
Friday, 01 February 08, 07:17 PM
This season's major trend has been a very singular type of managerial sacking, involving "intolerable pressure" building up in the media, directors and owners panicking,
and a manager's job becoming basically untenable, regardless of whether he deserves to be sacked or not. In some cases, it was undignified to the point of being embarrassing to watch, such as
at Chelsea, where the boardroom politics, the despotic ownership and the ridiculous amount of control given to senior players were made public. At Newcastle, Sam Allardyce did the impossible,
in becoming a figure of public sympathy for being ousted through a mixture of supporter ignorance and an owner that seems to be too eager to please said ignorant supporters.
Now, at Liverpool, the position of Rafael Benitez seems to have been undermined still further by the actions of their owners, George Gillett and Tom Hicks. It
has become apparent as the season has worn on that Liverpool are not going to mount a serious championship challenge in the Premier League. In fact, if anything they seem to have taken a
backward step since last season, and are currently playing like they have more in common with the likes of Everton, Manchester City and Portsmouth than they have with Chelsea, Manchester United
and Arsenal. The money that was reported to be delivered to Benitez to further strengthen his squad doesn't appear to have been forthcoming, and now there are worrying rumours coming from
Anfield regarding a need to restructure the club's finances ahead of the construction of a proposed new stadium in Stanley Park. There are some Liverpool supporters that are starting to sound
increasingly alarmed, to the point of drawing similarities with the beginning of the decline of Leeds United.
The problem at the centre of Liverpool's current difficulties is the funding of their take-over last year. As with Manchester United, Liverpool were subject to
a leveraged buyout, meaning that Gillett and Hicks utilised stock market rules to purchase the club for a fraction of its actual value. At the time, Liverpool's supporters were very supine
about it all. Stars and stripes flags were waved at Anfield. The new owners were more than happy to lap up the praise when they got to the European Cup final in May, even though they'd had
precious little to do with it. This season, their big summer signing Fernando Torres has carried them single-handedly through the season. They made a dog's dinner of getting through their group
stage, losing to Besiktas and Marseille in a group that they should have had sewn up with games to spare. In the Premier League, they have slowly and consistently fallen further and further
away from the top three since the start of the season.
The major problem for Liverpool FC is that they simply cannot afford to not qualify for the Champions League this season and, indeed, every season for the
forseeable future. The buyout of the club cost £300m, which has been loaded against the club itself. On top of this, one of Gillett and Hicks' first acts when they took over was to promise to
build a new stadium, at a cost of a further £300m. Liverpool were already said to be £80m in debt at the time of the buyout. Gillett and Hicks are said to be trying to restructure the club's
finances through the banks, but this in itself is an expensive business. A recent report in the Daily Telegraph put the cost of the restructuring at £15m, and the cost of the new stadium has
already risen to £400m, with £20m having already been paid to architects.
In the beginning, Liverpool's supporters were open to the idea. Broadly, they supported Gillett and Hicks against their rivals in bidding, Dubai International
Capital, who represent the interests of the ultra-wealthy Maktoum family. Gillett and Hicks said the right thing. However, leverage buyouts are done for one reason. To buy something that is
considered under-valued in the market without putting much investment in and sell it on at a profit. DIC may well have the funding to underwrite the club's debts, but they have already stated
publicly that they don't much want to pour money into a black hole (and why, indeed, should they?). The danger, for Liverpool, is that they could end up hundreds of millions pounds in debt,
unable to service so much as the interest payments on debts that they may already have unnecessarily run up.
At Manchester United, supporters were already protesting before the Glazer takeover. It might not have been enough to prevent the buyout there from going
through (although anyone looking at the end of year figures coming from Old Trafford will be able to tell you that journalists stating massive profits there simply hasn't read the full story of
how they've been massaged), but their disaffected supporters at least have an alternative. Liverpool supporters might just find that things could get a lot worse for them before they get any
better.
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Saturday Night On Sunday Morning
Friday, 01 February 08, 07:12 PM
West
Bromwich Albion have been playing some reasonably attractive football this season, but, to paraphrase The Streets, my God, don't they just know it? ITV ran something of a eulogy to them on
"Championship Goals" this morning, in which they came across as a deeply unlovable bunch, from the supporters interviewed before their match against Cardiff City yesterday afternoon (one of whom
had, "Boing Boing Baggies" tattooed across his thick neck, the other of whom said - without a trace of irony - "We're the Arsenal of the Championship". ITV then showed the highlights of their
match, carefully adjusting their voice-over to put a spin on what was going on on-screen. Cardiff supporters can feel somewhat short-changed by the fact that they were reduced to bit-part players
in one of their best away performances of the season, whilst the fact that it looked like a deflected shot and an own goal that "earned" Albion a point after Cardiff had deservedly gone 3-1 up
was airbrushed out because it didn't fit with the script. I've always had a thinly veiled dislike of West Bromwich Albion, and this didn't help my viewpoint.Elsewhere, the big matches of the day were a pair of Yorkshire derbies. Sheffield Wednesday beat Sheffield United 2-0 at Hillsborough in the lunchtime match yesterday, in an almost embarrassingly one-sided match. Wednesday took a first half lead and battered away at the United defence. The visitors rallied briefly at the start of the second half, before a Marcus Tudgay volley doubled their lead and killed the game stone dead. Good old Bryan Robson, eh? He's surely headed for the sack (United, having been relegated from the Premier League on the last day of last season, currently sit in fourteenth place in the Championship, justifying, in my eyes at least, their relegation last season), but we can at least thank him for turning them into one of this season's more entertaining soap operas. The other Yorkshire derby came at Elland Road, where Leeds United played Doncaster Rovers in the league for the first time in fifty-two years. Brian Stock's free-kick was enough to settle matters, in a result that seriously dents Leeds' automatic promotion chances (they're three points off second placed Carlisle United, but Carlisle have two games in hand on them). With recent defeats at Oldham and Swansea, it's tempting to think that the wheels are coming off the Leeds promotion bandwagon, but they're out of administration and have been spending predictably heavily in the January transfer window. Still, the lottery of the play-offs could yet condemn them to a second successive season League One.
Things could yet get worse for Leeds United, if rumours doing the rounds that Kevin Keegan is eyeing up Dennis Wise to be his assistant at Newcastle United prove to be correct. On current showing, Keegan is going to be needing all the help that he can get, as Newcastle played out a dreadful 0-0 draw against Bolton Wanderers at St James Park last night. The highlight of the match came about fifteen minutes into the second half, when the TV cameras picked up and honed in upon a man wearing a black and white crown, along with the grumpiest facial expression I think I've ever seen. Keegan's going to need more than the force of his personality if he's going to turn this bunch into anything any good.
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Coventry City 4-0 Liverpool
Friday, 01 February 08, 07:10 PM
Here's a video from December 1983 of Liverpool (about who's current woes I have quite a lot to say) coming up against what I can only presume was an unexpectedly feisty Coventry City side in the First Division. Commentary comes from a pre-histrionics John Motson.
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On How The BBC Got It So Very Wrong
Friday, 01 February 08, 07:07 PM
Earlier this week, apropos of nothing, really, I sat down and watched the 1979 FA Cup Final between Arsenal and Manchester United. It was like a breath of fresh air, and a
reminder of how good the BBC used to be at broadcasting football. I've watched their recent coverage, however, with increasing dismay but they managed a new nadir last night with FA Cup coverage
that lurched into the realms of farce, leaving the corporation looking like your trendy uncle at a wedding, wearing a medallion and asking the bride's friends if they've seen The Blurs play
lately.More or less anyone with any nous could have told you that Manchester City vs West Ham United game was going to be terrible. Manchester City are the kings of the 1-0 win, and the first match between them at Upton Park last week was an absolute shocker. Yet again, though, the BBC failed to see the wood for the trees, ignored one of the stories of the round (in the form of Conference South Havant & Waterlooville playing Swansea City for the right to a trip to Anfield after the two sides played out a bad tempered first match at the Liberty Stadium) in order to put the names of two Premier League clubs in their Wednesday night schedules. The match kicked off in a half-empty and disinterested City Of Manchester Stadium and, my word, it stank the place out. This feeling that something altogether more interesting was going on elsewhere was further emphasised by the
regular score updates coming from in from Westleigh Park, where reports were coming in that Havant were two up and that Swansea had missed a penalty. Guy Mowbray, the commentator, sighed audibly and almost expressed that he would sooner be anywhere else.
This was kind of forgiveable, considering the BBC's record in just picking the wrong match. What was singularly unforgivable was their decision, at half-time, to ignore what was going on in Hampshire in favour of a brief look at what hadn't happened in Manchester followed by a twelve minute long hagiography of Kevin Keegan and a thinly-veiled job application from Alan Shearer. It was at this point that I switched the television off and put the radio on to listen to the Havant vs Swansea match on BBC Radio Wales, via the awesome power of the internet. I wonder how many other people did the same thing? All you needed was an internet connection, and off you went.
I wasn't disappointed. The second half of the Havant & Waterlooville vs Swansea City match was absolutely pulsating. It was like being there, with an insane Welsh commentator who sounded as if he was more or less on the verge of a heart attack for the whole of the second half. Swansea had shots cleared off the line, hit and post and the bar and, in the end, Havant won by four goals to two to earn (and, by that, I mean earn) a trip to Anfield in the Fourth Round. It was an absolutely magnificent match, and a credit to both teams. Not that you'd have known much about it if you'd kept the television on BBC1 all evening.
As a quick aside, I'll be writing a weekly column about non-league football at the esteemed Pitch Invasion from now on. The first one is already up on there.
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On The Top Ten British Rivalries