Cod Almighty | Diary
Diary - Tuesday 20 September 2011
20 September 2011
Your Guest Diarist could go on for ages this morning, but a big piece of me just wants to write about the match tonight, so let's start there folks. The Shouty manager has honoured Town fans with a free to view preview where he tries to tell us that although Town were plain dismal on Saturday it was really more a case of it being a special type of dismal that is not far away from being a good performance. If you take away the complete inability to prevent crosses and then defend crosses; if you stop thinking about the complete lack of desire to be first to the ball and make tackles; if you ignore the total lack of cutting edge up front; if you just clear your mind of those things, then actually we were alright.
And how 'bright' the lads looked in training last week! At least the fifth manager in seven years to say that about six different Grimsby squads.
Kettering have had as mediocre a start to the season as Grimsby: their best performance a battling ten man draw at Gateshead. But then they've been thumped at home more than once, they've lost away at Stockport, at home to Fleetwood etc. So, just the same as us really. We even have no less than six players who have pulled on the Poppies shirt (McKeown, Artus, Makofo, Duffy, Elding and Spencer). The pathetic player merry-go-round of the lower leagues. Anything can happen tonight: two teams both lacking in confidence with ambitious managers who can't achieve what they promised at their interview. It screams a home draw doesn't it? But if it is that's Shouty and Shorty's ten games gone. Judge us after ten games they huffed at the start of the season: then we'll know better how we are doing. Even a decent win tonight will leave Town buried in mid table in a bad league. Anything less than a win will make a rational play-off prediction almost impossible.
In other news Grimsby Town Chairman John Fenty (Con) unexpectedly resigned as chairman last night. Not with a flourish, but with a mildly incoherent ramble. Major shareholder Mike Parker has bought too many shares and the Takeover panel has been alerted. John told the Telegraph they got in touch with him on Friday (16th) but the statement on the superb new official web site said it happened on the 17th (Saturday). Nice to see that reputation for forensic accuracy being maintained even in these hectic times.
Cutting through the blather it would seem that Parker has ended up with just under 54% of the issued Town shares. No doubt the takeover panel will be asking questions as to whether Fenty and Parker are acting 'in concert'. Before I get on to that perhaps I should confirm that the Panel will force Mike Parker to make an offer to shareholders for their shares (including Fenty). But, don't get excited, they are perfectly entitled to decline that offer.
'In concert' is a highly technical term in this context which lacks a pithy definition. Just because the two men claim to rarely speak and don't answer each others emails very well does not necessarily mean they are not acting 'in concert' by the way. If the panel judges that there is a problem with acting 'in concert' then Fenty may be obliged to make a share purchase offer too. That is almost certainly why Fenty has resigned as Chairman: to minimise the risk that he is seen as acting in cahoots with Parker to run the club.
Typical that he's done it so late and so obviously within a couple of days of his collar being felt by the Takeover panel. A bit like scrabbling to remove a year-old web page when a fuss blows up over a player contract. But, gentle reader, this is all rich men's games; another wrinkle is that for Parker to buy other shares he has to pay the highest price that shareholder has paid for a single share. So if Fenty wants to scupper Parker all he has to do is buy one share at an exorbitant price and then Parker could only buy all Fenty's shares at the same price as that highest one.
The takeover panel is not like the dodgy goals committee - you won't get the answer in a week, or a month by the way - the wheels will turn with a glacial slowness.
Fenty, who loves a moment to play the drama queen like no other, claims to have suddenly realised the situation of him becoming just a minority shareholder has occurred and flounced off the stage. I can't possibly wear this Chairman hat any longer he's yelped. And because I'm no longer the majority shareholder it doesn't seem right to keep lending the club money to pursue my harebrained schemes, to fund all the pay-offs necessitated by my many bad decisions, and to subsidise the clubs hopelessly unviable financial model which I engineered.
But don't worry I've 'stabilised' the clubs financial situation. The loads of money I diverted to the abortive fentydome project which meant that we ran up a huge tax bill which took the best part of five years to pay off; that's benign debt. The fact that I allowed the wage bill to creep up by half a million quid from £1.3m in season 2004/5 to £1.8m five years later has no bearing on the clubs huge loss-making plight. The club lost nearly a million last year and will lose at least as much again this year. But 'I've stabilised the clubs financial situation'.
Fenty also reminded us yesterday that the club is a loss-making business. He told us a few months ago that he and Parker had agreed a budget whereby the club is expected to lose over £900,000 this season. That loss would be supported by the two men. They were 'acting in concert' - each supporting the other and the plan.
But the club is only a loss-making business because the major shareholders have chosen a too-large spending budget that makes it one. I, and many other fans, don't want 'someone to keep pumping money in to the club'. We want a club with a sustainable budget, a club that lives within its means and takes each expenditure decision carefully and for the long term.
All the extra money pumped in by Fenty over the past ten years or so has been wasted. Wasted on a completely unaffordable and unsustainable stadium project to be built in the wrong place at the wrong time with no chance of a flagship anchor tenant. Wasted on an endless expensive churn of players and managers who are hired and paid off on a whim. Wasted on maintaining too expensive overheads in a shrinking business. Bad business decision after bad business decision whilst the club plummets a hundred places down the leagues. Against that backdrop it is understandable that the hard core of Town fans regularly attending has roughly halved. By doing that fans could be accused of killing their own club. But that has inflicted minor scratches compared to the complete lack of control over costs.
Yesterday was an opening gambit engineered by Fenty with the implicit complicity of Parker. Or vice versa; it doesn't really matter who started it. Two businessmen are failing to run a business, and playing a game of thrones. It's not good for the club, the fans or the town of Grimsby. It's killing our club: get it over with and get the club on a break-even basis with stability on and off the pitch. And be quick about it, we are sinking. See yer.