Exile wrote:Blow me.
The club's commitment is there for all to see, chariman aside, and he's just a figurehead - the passion's in the future, with Mole, Gamble et al, not Bonser and Whalley. The landlord is a different kettle of fish entirely, but, and here's the key point that you seem to have failed to grasp totally, we can't change the past.
We can help shape the future, and that's what being a fan is all about. I wish we'd never almost gone broke thanks to Ramsden (and sundtry predecessors), wish that GMI, Denglen and Davenmanor hadn't totally kippered us, wish that there'd been an alternative to Bonser, and desperately wish that Bonser had at least tried to keep the land with the club instead of securing his own lucrative future through it (according to him he was the only decent deal on the table besides developers although I don't recall much public effort to find an alternative at the time) but that's what happened in the past. Here's another key point: Staying away makes not the blindest bit of difference to our owner, but it does make a large difference to what the football club can offer.
By the way, has it occurred to you that the younger fans coming to matches weren't even born when the Bescot move and the change in ownership came about? They still come along, hoping, like we did at their age, for a decent match, some great 'terrace' craic, a good cup run and to go home happy. Until you can reconcile yourself with the present you're stuck in a past that we cannot ever change.
Look forward not back, or are you this bitter about every decision you never made in your life? No doubt your time is too valuable to rue those things that might have made a difference, but hey, you've done well, you're heading into the busy period, and you'll have billed a lot of people for your precious time, which is much easier than justifying your (in my opinion) untenable position.
Sorry, stayaways make me angry.
No need to say sorry Exile, people who keep giving Bonser money and watch him bank an excessive proportion of it into his pension scheme could make ME angry, but it's their right, just as my rights are mine. We must all do as we think best. It's no-one else's choice but our own, so "sorry" isn't necessary for that, from either or any of us.
I appreciate your point of view and for putting it over so well, and I know that in the short term the easiest thing is to give the club your money and keep them ticking along "for the love of the club and because we're fans", while JB takes his massive wedge without batting an eyelid. I went along with that for long enough, many many years in fact, and for much of that time without even bothering or thinking about the background to what was going on. Maybe if it wasn't for my involvement with this site since the late 1990s, and the many detailed and searching questions asked and discussions that go on here, I may never have become interested at all in the politics and the finances of the club, my extreme dis-satisfaction at our state of affairs may never have arisen, and maybe I'd still be trolling down to the Banks's for every home match as before, blissfully unaware and uncaring about how my club was being "raped".
Unfortunately, rightly or wrongly depending on your point of view, it DID get to me, which is why I became a stayaway and why we have had so many discussions about it over the last 5 years.
While most people seem to see it as the responsibility of the fans to cough up the cash to keep the club going, maybe it's because I am an accountant that I look on this from the opposite direction. The businesses I deal with can't wait until customers come along asking for their products and services, they have to promote themselves, present good desirable products and services that attract the buyers, convince them they are good value for money, and sell themselves to those customers. If they fulfil their customers' hopes, wishes and aspirations, they'll have loyal customers, but it won't end there, they have to keep on providing those products and services and keeping those customers happy, and if the word is good and it gets around, they'll hope and expect to acquire more and more of them.
I don't make much of a distinction between that business model and Walsall FC, though I appreciate that lots of people do, and I completely understand that football clubs are of a different nature and feelings and loyalties come into it that just don't exist anwhere else. But my mind reduces it to that argument over quality and service, and I don't think we are getting that, and haven't for quite a few years, due to lack of investment on the pitch. I see that lack of investment as a management problem, whereby it is up to the owner(s) to invest and present a desirable product to the customers and, perhaps more importantly, to the lost and potential new customers, to kickstart the building/re-building of the customer/fan base.
You seem to suggest that I am somehow dwelling in the past, but no, not at all, you miss the point. I am looking at what can and needs to be done for the future, to build the club and set it on the right track. That needs investment at a level that another 200 - 300, even 500 fans can't and won't provide in the short term. The past does indeed suggest that JB won't go down the right route, but that does not make the need and the argument any less valid, and it is, I agree, the future that is what's important, and I see investment as the beginnings of that.
I think we both know most of the facts and the problems, but we come at them from opposite viewpoints. I don't say you're wrong, it's right for you and that's absolutely fair enough and is why I never have and never would discourage people from going to matches, supporting the club and the team, and enjoying themselves in the process. But neither am I wrong, because this is how it is for me, and that's what I have to act upon unless someone convinces me otherwise, but that hasn't come near to happening yet.
