trousers

Tell someone to start selling season tickets pronto.

So, does that mean that if the board had walked when faced with the ultimatum of the Bank putting the holding company into administration we (SLH or SFC) wouldn't be in administration now (and thus facing this 10 point penalty)?

Yep. Very good point IMO. If 'the powers that be' were confident that putting the PLC into admin wouldn't attract a penalty then the date becomes largely irrelevant. In which case, they might as well have done it before the League's deadline as a "just in case it goes tits up" measure. Unless, of course, Lowe & co and no say whatsoever in which date Barclays pulled the rug.....

http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/

Posted by a Derby fan a few weeks ago:- http://www.saintsweb.co.uk/forum/sho...093#post246093 Empathy from an unexpected source......... Rams fan in peace. Your situation is indeed very similar to the one we were in a few years back. We were £24M in debt and the Coop bank pulled the plug on the holding company. This is a replica of your current situation. Three men, later to be branded the 3 amigos by Rams fans bought the club for the princely sum of 3 pounds. They secured a £15M mortgage on Pride Park (the ground was all bought and paid for long before that), ostensibly to reduce the debts and to satisfy the Coop Bank. The "mortgage" was from the Panamanian ABC Corporation (who also lent cash to QPR and nearly bankrupted them too). The 3 Amigos ruled the roost for some two and a half years, permanently telling us that the debt was declining and that the club was trading at break even. In that time we were forced to sell Huddlestone and Rasiak for paltry sums in order to pay interest on time and the debt rose from £24M to around £54M. Again we were on the brink of extinction. Seven lifelong Derby fans who are also successful businessmen ploughed some £30M into buying out the 3 A´s and reducing the debt slightly. That consortium took the club back to the PL but couldnt (or wouldnt) finance the buying of the 6 to 8 genuine PL class players we needed to make a fight of it. Consequently we had the disaster that was known as the 2007/2008 season. Just over 18 months ago we got a new Chairman of Football, Adam Pearson, who had been responsible for getting Hull into shape. He came in and negotiated with the GSE group to take the club over. It is a consortium of many American and Canadian businessmen, most with a successful background in American Sports as well as in other business ventures, one of them was one of the founders of Yahoo. They took over and we are doing OK. We now have Nigel Clough at the helm who has got us playing proper football again and what looked like a disaster season looks like being saved and we can build from there. The debt will, in June, be down to £15M, the mortgage on the ground, and that debt is manageable. In my lifetime (and I'm mid 50's) I've seen the Rams on the brink in the early 80's, early 90's and again for the past 5 seasons...... it's not nice having to face the prospect of your club going to the wall. Boards come and go but we Rams, and you Saints, were always there before them and will be there when they have long gone. I know some of what you are feeling, I empathise with you. I hope the club survives to fight another day and would love to see you stay up by by getting all 3 points at the Tree Huggers on the last day of the season to send them down in your stead. As one of you said earlier, we are a precedent but...... after the 3 amigo deal there was Leeds and Boston who went into Admin once they knew they were already down. That caused the Football League to plug that particular loophole and to add the caveat that they held the right to scrutinise anything not covered by the rules and still take action against a club if the League thought it was warranted. What happened at Derby hasn't been "outlawed" by the League but they do now have the legal right to act differently should they so choose. I hope they don't break the precedent. Good luck.

Time (pun intended) to check out last week's directors box photos...

Thanks a bunch for blowing my cover. I've been trying to convince people for two years now that it's a rare and precious talent....

Ah, yep. Got it now. My bad.

Anyone want to change their answer? Run-a-round....NOW....

Alan Parker?

Is he a British citizen based in Switzerland or another nationality?

Maybe someone left a certain due dilligence document on the club's photocopier....?

If Dubai Phil manages the last ever home team at SMS we'll at least be left with a cracking quiz night question for years to come.

What's wrong with him telling the truth? We've either broken a Football League rule or we haven't. Saying that we spotted a loophole and did something about it doesn't alter the actual circumstances. IMHO of course.

It's OK. We can let most of them go under the trades descriptions act I'd have thought....

+1 The rule is a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

I tend to agree - the points penalty punishes the fans more than it does the management. That said, there needs to be a punishment of some sort for financial mismanagement otherwise unscrupulous clubs would buy players they couldn't afford to try and gain an advantage over clubs who manage their finances more prudently. However, I'm not sure if the Football League have the jurisdiction to financially penalise the individuals running the clubs as I guess it's not strictly speaking "illegal" to over commit a company's spending which is why they resort to the 'easy option' of penalising the fans. Dunno.

He must be. Fry clearly said that the Football Club directors (plural) were in discussion with lawyers. Given there are only two directors of the Football Club Jones must, by definition, still be on the Football Club board.

Ok, we won't

It can't (IMHO of course)

In his Sky Sports News appearance earlier, Fry was rightly banging on about the fact that he was Administrator of SLH and that the directors of the Football Club are discussing their next move with lawyers etc. Surely then it should be the Football Club directors on TV defending the Football Club's position rather than someone representing SLH? How can it help our case if the directors of the subsidiary of the plc that is unaffected by the administration situation never show their faces (let alone earlobes)? Get David Jones and/or Ken Tointon in front of the media to show people that the Football Club is indeed being run under separate management. No?

No, it wasn't just you. He couldn't have looked more chuffed with himself if he'd tried.

Poll? (seriously)

:confused:

Grinning inanely....