Ian's new idea

Tringreen wrote:

.Trouble is they're not very bright

They were bright enough to get hold of some power in the club they love, strikes me all the "bright" people on the Tring Brightometer are sat behind their keyboards bitching.

I find I am developing a certain respect for the Pork Platoon, give me sneaky over "bright" every time.

The Red Star wrote:

You are not alone ATD, all of Exeweb know Newell for what he is and has always been. He is an embarassment to your Club. We didn't mind the banter about us needing to rattle buckets (its what we have to do to keep our Club alive) but it got nasty and vile over many years. This is some light comment. Newell is the next door neighbour mouthing off all the time, the big I am, the bully, the kind kids stay away from, the neighbour whose "friends" aren't really friends, the one who didn't get any qualifications and the kind who think Marx is one of the Chuckles Brothers

This appeared on Exeweb last night and thought it deserved an airing here:


"A bit confused here.

Is this the same IJN who
1) Put complete faith in Sir Woy and his MAGNIFICENT 7 to not only make them a major PL force but also deliver the World Cup to Cornwall?

2) When all that started to go nipples toward the ceiling assured his loyal band of sycophants "Never fear. My new bezzie Kagami-san will never let me down. I'll even jet out personally to bring the money back?

3) "Never trusted 'em for a second!" Thank goodness I have such a bulging book of football contacts. My newest even better bezzies, Petey and Brenda are the sort of men with the wealth and integrity to save our mahoosive club (and ANYONE who dares to even suggest otherwise will be hearing from my legal representitive)

4) "What a pair of useless winkers they were! grrrr!! Never trusted them for a moment. Should never have been allowed anywhere near MY club. Fortunately, due to my vast and impressive circle of personal and business connections I have even persuaded my newest and bestest ever bezzie yet to step to our rescue. I even have have his absolute assurance that his interests are purely in the football side and nothing to do with property development and real estate. I can say this with total confidence as he told me so himself.
And guess what - I do not even want some sort of honorary title, like 'El Presidente' in recgnition of the huge things I have done for my club - the adoration from my huge army of green disciples is reward enough.

5) "The road to recovery has, I concede, proved somewhat rockier than I had anticipated when I began my attempts to save my club. But despair ye not, my loyal brethren. Five years ago I realised that we stood not far back from the edge of a yawning precipice. But can anyone deny that, under my stewardship, we have taken great steps forward since then?
The dream is almost realised - after two 'inverse promotions' we are finally within touching distance of our dream of Premier Division football.

All that I need now is the goodwill (and wherewithall) from all of my TRUE Janners for that final push.
Gr**n-sky thinking was needed and, as I lay awake, jet-lagged last night, the final, brilliant solution came to me!
Was it a sudden influx of Russian Oligarch investers?
A massive set of Euro Lottery winners?
Our (formerly) beloved owner liquidating his property portfolio for the good of my club?

NO - NONE OF THE ABOVE.

As I finally drifted off in revervie and idea so BRILLIANT, so GROUNDBREAKING, so INNOVATIVE that it could only have originated from the mind of a financial genius such as myself.
For, as I dozed off, I swear I caught the faint, but growing, sound of COINS RATTLING IN A BUCKET".

POST THAT ON PASOTI !!!!

Angry of Mayfair wrote:

You can understand clubs like Exeter doing that nothing wrong with it and i believe a local firm paid the wages of Cureton last season, given the exeter board are not well off nor is the club fans helping out is needed.

However

James Brent is a millionaire and owns several companies that are turning profit. He can afford to invest cash into the club to fund a new striker.

however he isnt interested in the football side of the club despite his quivvering lip.

jabba the gut ecfc wrote:

This all seems a bit garbled and difficult to understand...

Angry of Mayfair wrote:

...only if your backwards like most east devon natives it is ...

Apologies Angry - I didn't read what you posted properly. I was making a sad attempt to multi-task at the time (discussing our win and the situation at PAFC on the phone, ironically). Your post made perfect sense - my bad.

I'm not actually an East Devon native though. Sadly I only did part of my growing up in the better half of God's own county, so most would probably only consider me an honorary Devonian at best.

Lord Tisdale wrote:

Angry of Mayfair wrote:

All im saying is if Brent can find £26m for Pavillions and several £M'S for this icerink grandstand idea he has then he could if he wanted

Uuuuuuh !

He doesn't want to, he isn't going to and to his credit he said both these things from day one.

Ice rinks, new grandstands, pavillions et al will make money, PAFC will never do that so Brent will never be interested in it, continually going on about how he could, or even might, is a redundant premise, it's the same as Tring going on about how some of you "knew it would happen", whoopee fooking do, what did any of you even try to do about it ? What have you tried to do about it since ?

Brent saved PAFC, get over it FFS, move your focus into the real world where your club needs help.

Except that Brent didn't make it clear he would never provide emergency funds for the playing side in the contingency of an emergency situation, which is what Angry is referring to. He did speak out against the reckless, unsustainable spending of the sugar-daddy model (which I suppose I have to credit him for) but that's quite a different thing. You know more about business than me, but given that profits are probably out of the question, I was always under the impression that running like a business involved growing said business and acquiring assets, rather than the other way around.

Far from admitting to his customers that his conception of the PAFC business model was to keep it ticking along on life-support until it's organs could be harvested, before disposing of the carcass to someone with a dialysis machine, he said (and inferred, which is just as important) that his intention was to give the fans what they craved - i.e a return to the Championship, at which time he would happy to pass on the reigns to anyone who could get them to the Promised Land (ha, ha). He talked up the relative size of the club budget, comparing PAFC to Torquay (who were looking good at the time) and so on. Ironically, part of his criticism of the sugar-daddy model (which I agree with) was that it leaves clubs hostage to the (mis)fortunes of their owners - exposing them to "potentially life-threatening events", as he put it. Well if the current disaster is not a life-threatening event, then I don't know what is.

IIRC, he also talked about "engagement with the fans" and "a club at the heart of its community". He certainly gave the impression - or at least allowed it to be formed with the help of his acolytes - that he was the harbinger of a new dawn and the pathfinder of a return to Holy Mount Zion.

He didn't have to say any of this. He could have said "I'll step in and take the club out of administration, but then it's up to the fans" and he could have made it clear to the Trust that PAFC was going to be his baby and they could keep their noses out, instead of pressing all the right buttons about fan engagement and community ethos. He didn't have to play divide-and-rule politics by co-opting the self-appointed fan leaders and allowing them to proselytise on his behalf, while establishing a rival patsy organisation that could hardly fail to put a spanner in the Trust works. If he was genuinely keen on fan engagement, why not continue to engage with the Trust as he did before and during the takeover when Webb was in charge? Perhaps because if the ordinary fans were presented with the above deal on the table, they might not have "sat back" in quite the same way.

It's probably true that their fanbase was somewhat supine and ran around chasing their own tails at times. That might partly be down to one of the reasons why Devon is such a lovely place to spend time in - i.e it's somewhat sleepy nature. On the other hand you could argue that their situation was different than ours in a number of important ways. In a perverse sense we were possibly fortunate in that the run-up to our disaster was a more transparent farce, with more easily identifiable pantomime villains in and around the centre of power. We had also long been in a moribund state, familiar with the sound of our own death-rattle. After all, it was only nine or ten years between administrations, during which time we lost the ground - at the time the Trust took over I don't think there was secured debt any more or at least wasn't quite at the titanic level that confronted PAFC. No ground meant no charges on said ground from a Mastpoint and so on, which can't have hurt. We weren't exactly unfamiliar with misery on the pitch either - we would actually have been non-league ten years earlier had it not been for Macclesfield's ground problems, not to mention all the times we would have been relegated even before that under current rules. It's possible that given that mountain of protracted and ongoing misery we had been hardened somewhat and eventually reached the stage where we weren't prepared to take it any more. It seems that the Greens as a whole are not quite there yet.

I imagine the true scale of the disaster came as something of a shock to many of them; they were sitting pretty in the Championship not long before after all. People tend to react in different ways when in shock - most freeze, or act like headless chickens looking for a miracle, while a few step up to the plate. In our case there was no other game in town - i.e no Brent or Heaney or the like. In the circumstances we were probably fortunate in that we had some good people stepping up to the plate who were in it for entirely selfless reasons and who to this day never make a song-and-dance about what they did, or seek to elevate themselves above the rest, or seek any reward for their past and present efforts. However it would be wrong to say that there have never been any egomaniacs or dead-weight on the Trust. What if they had been the ones driving the process and either deliberately or inadvertently running around sucking up to powerful men and establishing unhelpful personality cults?

While I'm on that subject, an encounter I had last season is the perfect illustration of the way a fan representative should behave and one which the Greens should perhaps think on.

After a home game, I bumped into someone who I'm sure just about every ECFC fan would respect and thank for their huge efforts at the outset of the Trust being formed and beyond (that is if they constantly reminded people about it like some I could mention). Bear in mind that this is somebody who really could be said to have helped "save" the club, instead of merely shouting the claim that they did from every available rooftop.

The Liverpool tie was coming up, so I asked him if he would be sitting in the Old Grandstand for the game so we could have a chat about something. To my surprise, he told me he wouldn't be going to the game. When I asked why, I was even more surprised to say that he hadn't been able to get a ticket in time. I pointed out that surely he could speak to the Club and that they the would be only too happy to sort him out given his past efforts.

Do you know what he said?

" I couldn't do that - it wouldn't be right."

The past is gone - I'd let them off that particular hook on the basis that they were panicking and badly led. For one thing the moment the Riddler's Trojan Horse was welcomed through the gates of HP by the usual suspects any kind of meaningful fan involvement was dead in the water. The present is probably academic too in a sense, given that the fanbase and it's representative groups have been expertly divided and are probably in limbo until some cataclysmic event like relegation occurs that might galvanise the silent majority who never read ATD or PASOTI, as well as those who take an interest in the all the machinations.

Contrary to your attacks, there is a value in talking and "bitching" about problems - and not just as a cathartic exercise. At the risk of sounding like David Icke, ideas, thoughts and beliefs can create their own reality. Many protest movements and revolutions have been inspired by individuals who did nothing but put their complaints and ideas on paper while taking no practical action themselves. I'm not exactly advocating that the disaffected members of ATD and PASOTI should do that, but I can't agree with the idea that you should never complain or

You're absolutely right about the future though. They need to be ready for the next stage in the saga. However it might get bloody and complicated given the division in the fanbase and the apparent recalcitrance of the board. Their Trust has more obstacles to negotiate as a result, although I think they've begun to play things well - the way they dealt with the confidence trick of the share offer was well judged and indicates an end to the Churchillian conceit and personality cult politics of Webb and co. However if they get duped again by a combination of a rich man with forked tongue, self-appointed leaders with complex motives and the consequences of being controlled by their belief that the Premier League is somehow Argyle's rightful place then they deserve everything they get.

It strikes me that Greek (no pun intended) Tragedy could be described as a combination of hubris, recklessness and bad planning - which just about sums up the causes of the tragic situation the Greens find themselves in.


UTC! (How long will that last on an Argyle forum, I wonder?)

Lord Tisdale wrote:

Greenjock wrote:

Fat cnut must be sweating like a rapist in a rubber suit out there. Hope it's the monsoon season

Removed by mods.

You really can't help yourself, can you? I know from the Ghosts of Exeweb Past how much you love to let off a stink-bomb in a crowded room then sit back and chuckle at the resulting mayhem. I like to think I can take a joke, but I find that comment incredibly offensive, for reasons even you should understand.

If that's the sort of thing I'm going to have to read, then I'm out of this discussion.

Two grand posts Jabba. I always felt that Lord Tisdale was on a bit of a wind up, it's bad enough being shit wihlthout a jabbering little monkey jumping up and down pointing and laughing.

jabba the gut ecfc wrote:

You really can't help yourself, can you? I know from the Ghosts of Exeweb Past how much you love to let off a stink-bomb in a crowded room then sit back and chuckle at the resulting mayhem

Nothing of the sort, I was merely making the point that the expression Jock used implied that he had intended to say something different.

ps. I find the use of the term "fat cnut" to be cutting in the extreme, I am though working hard to get over it.

jabba the gut ecfc wrote:

Lord Tisdale wrote:

Greenjock wrote:

Fat cnut must be sweating like a rapist in a rubber suit out there. Hope it's the monsoon season

Removed by mods.

You really can't help yourself, can you? I know from the Ghosts of Exeweb Past how much you love to let off a stink-bomb in a crowded room then sit back and chuckle at the resulting mayhem. I like to think I can take a joke, but I find that comment incredibly offensive, for reasons even you should understand.

If that's the sort of thing I'm going to have to read, then I'm out of this discussion.

Apologies for the post only just being removed.

It slipped through our radar

Post now removed, we may be laid back on here but posts like that are not welcome on here.

I've missed something here

The phrase I used is a phrase that we used as kids, just like "as pissed as my grans mattress".

I can't work out if it's my post or Lord Tisdale's that has caused offence but if it was mine, tough shit. And me describing Newell as a fat cnut is a fact which cannot be disputed.

Greenjock wrote:

I've missed something here

The phrase I used is a phrase that we used as kids, just like "as pissed as my grans mattress"..

Seriously Jock ?

If that's the case then I apologise for my assumption although I rest my case on the fact that, unlike your granny's mattress, the other one was unintelligible.

You might though consider moderating the fat cnut thing, those of us with a BMI of over 40 have feelings too you know.

Lord Tisdale wrote:

Greenjock wrote:

I've missed something here

The phrase I used is a phrase that we used as kids, just like "as pissed as my grans mattress"..

Seriously Jock ?

If that's the case then I apologise for my assumption although I rest my case on the fact that, unlike your granny's mattress, the other one was unintelligible.

You might though consider moderating the fat cnut thing, those of us with a BMI of over 40 have feelings too you know.

Do rapists not sweat inside rubber suits then?

Greenjock wrote:

Do rapists not sweat inside rubber suits then?

Contextually what would a rapist be doing in a rubber suit ? Hardly conducive to their chosen past time.

Lord Tisdale wrote:

Greenjock wrote:

Do rapists not sweat inside rubber suits then?

Contextually what would a rapist be doing in a rubber suit ? Hardly conducive to their chosen past time.

What they don't have zips? Rapists don't have days off? They don't go on holiday?

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When the rapist's finished jumping on his victim

He doth love to lie a basking in the sun

with a cooling drink beside him in a big tin

A rapist's life is quite a happy one.

Lord Tisdale wrote:

Tringreen wrote:

.Trouble is they're not very bright

They were bright enough to get hold of some power in the club they love, strikes me all the "bright" people on the Tring Brightometer are sat behind their keyboards bitching.

I find I am developing a certain respect for the Pork Platoon, give me sneaky over "bright" every time.

Oh dear....... that's fine with me. They need all the help they can get right now.

What we need is someone who is sneaky, bright and minted, but given bright why would he be interested in Argyle.

Ahhhh those were the days.............. result strangely familiar though.

Courtesy of GOS.

1921: At the third attempt, Chelsea knocked Argyle out of the FA Cup, 2-1. With no goals in the previous 210 minutes, this second replay was staged at Ashton Gate, Bristol (a neutral ground, no penalty shoot-outs in those days). As in the first two attempts, Argyle were the better side and this time were winning with just 13 minutes left. The crowd of over 26,000 - a record for a midweek game in Bristol - included thousands from Plymouth and about a hundred from Chelsea. In total, this third round tie was watched by over 110,000 spectators.

Comatosed giant now but hey we've still got a club.

Tringreen wrote:

1921

Now that is a quality piece of straw grasping.

David Lloyd George was PM, the old king was still on the throne, Ireland gained its independence, the Chinese Communist Party was founded and (cue Cilla) "surprise, surprise", Argyle were losing football matches strangely enough on this occasion to another club with little or no history but who were lucky enough to find an investor with money unlike the plethora who strolled through the Boardroom at Gnome Park before the saviour arrived.

Lord Tisdale wrote:

Tringreen wrote:

1921

Now that is a quality piece of straw grasping.

David Lloyd George was PM, the old king was still on the throne, Ireland gained its independence, the Chinese Communist Party was founded and (cue Cilla) "surprise, surprise", Argyle were losing football matches strangely enough on this occasion to another club with little or no history but who were lucky enough to find an investor with money unlike the plethora who strolled through the Boardroom at Gnome Park before the saviour arrived.

Ha ha !Here's another straw........ David Jack was probably playing, scorer of the first cup final goal at Wembley two years later......... but I may be wrong

Tringreen wrote:

Ha ha !Here's another straw........ David Jack was probably playing, scorer of the first cup final goal at Wembley two years later......... but I may be wrong

Ah David Jack, who, as every schoolboy knew, was the first £10,000 footballer, fortunately there were no sell ons in those days so Bolton scooped that particular lottery win.

coathypafc wrote:

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is there not enough wire to wire his fat gob shut ?

Introduced to Brent and given a glowing endorsement by none other than Peter Ridsdale, how could you doubt him?

Put your trust in the Porkster, please!