The same old scene.

Now that I no longer attend matches I am, of course, in an ideal position to hold forth on the subject of NCFC.
We are in the final throes of moving house and as part of the process I fired up an old PC to see if there was anything worth saving on it. There was, and I also found loads of articles from both the Pink Un and my own period as a citizen journalist. They date mostly from the period 1999 - 2009. What is enlightening, or depressing depending on your point of view, is how very relevant so much of it is to what is going on now.
What is missing is one particular piece of nonsense which was first peddled by, if memory serves. McNally. The nonsense is that the club is a co-operative. It isn't. It is what it has been for decades: a company largely owned by, and totally controlled by, two individuals - Mr & Mrs Wynne-Jones. They may not like it, they may hide from it, but when things go wrong the buck doesn't stop with Webber, or Stone, or Farke, or Neill, or Moxey etc. It stops with them.
So what is depressing is that the comments and criticisms levelled at the owners a decade and more ago are still relevant. They haven't learned from past failures, and they haven't learned from the successes of that brief golden period when Bowkett, McNally and Lambert were in charge.
Those criticisms are three-fold. Firstly lack of ambition. It was first said back in the last century, by someone who is now a senior a brown-nose, that the owners were happier being a big fish in a small pond. More recently we know that their ambition on relegation to league one was to consolidate in that division. There's the context for the most recent transfer window. Remember, if you like being admired, it's much easier to impress Old Father Giles who runs Scrumpy FC in League One than it is to impress Daniel Levy.
Secondly, bad recruitment. Time and again sub-standard people have been hired, or retained, because they were nice chaps rather than because of ability. It's no coincidence that the club achieved great success when it was run by, to put it simply, three bastards.
Thirdly, the failure of the non-executive directors to scrutinize management and hold it to account. This failing was first alluded to by Doncaster, and the Turners highlighted it. Have they in any way asked Webber to justify what he is doing?
Now, this is not a plea for the owners to go. The bar for a decent football club owner is set low. I have many criticisms of Mr & Mrs Wynne-Jones but of one thing we can be absolutely certain: they are totally honest. So this is a plea for them to change their modus operandi. Or... If Mrs Wynne-Jones really meant it when she said they'd never get their money back, how about this? Ask Alan Bowkett if he has the time and the inclination to run the club, and if he does do a Jack Hayward and sell it to him for a tenner.

Posted By: Winged Eel Creosote, Aug 28, 21:59:45