Eddie Hitler

Yep, it's been runied by the inclusion of premiership reserve teams and this should be protested so that it returns to its original format. Well done the 5,000 Rovers' fans who stayed away and it's a shame that the other 1,000 didn't also stay away to make this point.

I'm not of Atyeo / Bradford vintage but both Rovers and City do have lots of fans who really dislike the other club and if encountering those people is your personal experience of Rovers (even recent stories say about them giving grief to somebody's wife and somebody else's seven year old for wearing City shirts) then I can understand the vitriol. My personal experience of them is decent football fans who just happen to have grown up blue so I agree with you other than in condemning fans whose personal experience is very different to both mine and yours.

Hard to tell at Plymouth; they have got onto a firm financial footing and actually made a profit last year but the driving force behind that has been the Chairman James Brent, soon to be stepping down if he hasn't already, who ran it in a Dunford type way of watching the pennies and turned it around from its administration. His was a fairly reluctant takeover and he said he would sort them out financially and then step down to concentrate upon his own business and he did sort them out and has now stepped down. Staynes would have been supporting this and working with him so would get some of the credit.

Superb sir!

Plymouth is too out on a limb IMO to ever achieve serious success; players aren't keen to go there either. Not that I wish to do so but if I was going to buy a west of England club that had the potential to go places with money spent then it would be Swindon: cheap because it is going nowhere but Div 4 at present, no local rivals and a history of past success (the Hoddle years). Rovers has a big and more successful local rival in us which it would cost an absolute fortune spending on ground, training facilities, and players for any buyers to raise them above us into being the top football draw in the Bristol area and really start building crowds sufficiently to turn a profit. That absolute fortune would be much better spent elsewhere. Though if the rumours about the construction company are true then it is another buyer seeing value in a prime patch of development land which happens to have some footballers trot about on it every other Saturday.

Memorial Ground £15m as development land. Net liabilities excluding this are currently minus £11m. So net assets of £4m disappearing at the rate of £2m per year. Tick tick tock.

They are having a laugh at £10m. Drag it out for another two years at £2m a year losses until the last asset has been drained from the club and anyone throwing a pound coin onto the pitch will be deemed to have made a formal takeover offer.

Cheers. I wasn't screaming "source!!!" btw; I was just interested in what was being speculated rather than from where it was derived.

Any flesh on those rumours? I'm not asking for links / evidence just the general tenor. There was talk that Wael wanted to retain a stake to have a continuing involvement rather than entirely sell their ?94% shareholidng and this was a sticking point in negotiations.

I'm not having a go but there are two reason this thread is so prominent: The vast number of ludicrous pratfalls emanating from that club. That all Rovers' threads get merged into this one and have done so for ?five years All clubs' fans talk about their local rivals.

She can't tell you can she though; data protection and all that nonsense. Even if he was bang to rights and received an official caution she wouldn't come on here and say it. I suspect she ripped him apart and he wet himself with fear but no further action as long as he stops telling such awful lies. Guns spiked as far as that peddler of shite is concerned.

No, obviously she hasn't. However had he not been told off then Henbury "loudmouth" Gas would have been shouting it from the rooftops.

Most likely, yes!

That opening post is on the money in many respects though and is equally applicable to pretty much any club; certainly applicable to us. I really don't remember people expecting so much or hearing any real negativity unless there was an actual crisis. I'm not saying that OTIB is full of moaners; far from it there are a lot of excellent and generally positive posters. We don't however seem any more to just enjoy it on the simple terms that we used to enjoy it; and I include myself within that very sweeping statement.

Yes, absolutely. All above board; nobody "stole" the ground it was agreed in advance. And of course biter bit when it came to Nick Higgs and Sainsburys.

I can't see that being discussed on the gas boards but I know you have your sources Harry so I'm not doubting you. Maybe you should pop over and break the news to them! £5m sounds about the mark; another two years' of £2m a year losses and make that £1m and not £10m.

When you have only been a league club since 2015 even a meaningless midweek cup game in that London is a source of fresh wonder.

I can't find my previous post on it but whilst these were the headline losses for those years they both contained big write-offs of previously capitalised costs relating to the stadium sale and UWE; so money that had been spent prior to their ownership but which had been (at the time) reasonably capitalised. When it was clear that it wasn't going to happen then these costs were correctly written off but they aren't going to be an ongoing loss.

It's £2m and a lot of that is money spent on either trying to get a property transaction to work or (as recently suggested) sell the club which means a London office and lots of consultants and suits. Scrap all that and the loss instantly drops below £1m; it used to be about £600k a year IIRC so they should be able to get it down to that. The club isn't worth very much at all given the annual loss and the lack of assets but they do still have their own the ground, albeit mortgaged to the hilt, so take that on and pay the interest on the loan that they take on and it won't be seized and sold. I don't think it's beyond saving at the moment or for the next couple of years; but the position is steadily getting worse and is going to consequently take much longer to recover.

No, but it does whisper stability. Exeter is a great example. In the early 2000s they were the showbiz club - directors included Uri Geller and Michael Jackson (yes, that one)* - before inevitably collapsing and being rescued by their supporters to comfortbaly reside in th emiddle upper fourth division for years. * http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/2088831.stm

A warning to us all; whiIst I know that Henbury looks to be about sixty he is actually thirty two.

There will always be a buyer for a football club if the price is right: supporters consortia who will pool their cash to stop it ending as happened at Exeter, starry eyed optimists who are convinced that they can succeed where everybody else has failed (see their current ownership!), or successful local businessmen who accept that it will be loss making but see it as putting something back into their community (our own Lansdown fanily, the Dunfords). Though the canny ones will let it go into administration first so that they get it on the cheap; as Mike Ashley did with House of Fraser.

Claims on their board that the club is up for sale on the QT. Colour me surprised given that at the current rate of cash "burn", £2m a year, so that even allowing an uplift of the ground valuation to £15m there will be no net assets left by the end of this calendar year* The sale must be that "fiancially viable" option that Wael kept going on about. Hopefully (as I don't want them to go pop) the buyer will be a local businessman like Dunford who doesn't come in thinking that they are a combination of a "can't lose" property deal and a future Chelsea but instead realises that Division Three clubs lose money and his job is to minimise that loss. * negative £9.9m net assets June 2017, add £12.5m uplift to stated £2.5m valuation of the ground means £2.6m of real net assets at that date or 15 months' of spend at £2m pa from 30 June 2017. So 30 September 2018 but allow an extra few months for the player sale money.

Private Widdle

Summed up nicely by a poster on the gas forum that isn't infested with halfwits: aughan Joined: June 2014 Posts: 448 Aug 12, 2018 8:09:48 GMT via mobile Quote Post by vaughan on Aug 12, 2018 8:09:48 GMT If you want to know what type of interview this was, please Google the famous Paxman / Michael Howard interview from years ago. The irresistible force against the immovable object in the form of all valid options that can not be disclosed. Wael understands that we need a radical solution ref ground. Thank God for that. My take on this hasn't changed. Wael is committed to this, but Dwayne Sports are now saying that he is on his own. Hani has bought his son a train-set but will not fund his trains getting onto the rail network. The result is evolution. Some new carriages and the odd shunter for the goods yard. I hope that all viable options include looking at outside investment to move us forward. Otherwise, our supporters will be like the Railway Children hoping for our new Stadium to appear out of Wael's steam. http://gasheads.org/thread/7651/waq-interview