Without "childish sniping and sneering" here's where I think it went wrong.

From public remarks made by Neil Doncaster and the Turners it appears that the non-executive directors neglected their duty to scrutinise what was going on in the company. That meant people were left far too long doing important jobs badly. We know from what Roeder said that there was no scouting being done. And we know from what Dennis said that the medical advice being given was inadequate. That meant that money was wasted on players who were untalented and/or unfit. With nothing coming through from the Academy it's pretty clear why we don't now have a team (and anecdotal evidence suggests that a former employee was left in charge of the Academy for far too long even though he was no good).

It's also my opinion that an error was made on promotion. Mrs Wynn-Jones said in April 2004 that the moneys would be spent reducing the long-term debt. But that didn't happen, with the result that despite our large attendances etc we're actually not very competitive financially, and won't be for about another decade, unless we get an unexpected windfall.

So we were a team that had little money to spend on transfers, couldn't identify transfer targets anyway, and didn't produce our own players. Looking at it that way the only surprise is that we haven't gone down already.

However it does seem that the problems are being fixed. Our recent purchases have been pretty good, and able to run and jump. Sammy Morgan is long gone and we are promised a decent crop from the Academy. But it still might be a couple of years before all those improvements are fully reflected in the first team squad.

On the subject of Cullum one thing that interested me is that he was proposing to make the same mistake as this board did in 2004/05. If his ?20 million had been applied to the football budget it might, or might not, have got us up. But if it had been applied to clearing the debt we would have been left as a financially sound club, with just about the best cashflow in this league, enabling us to compete with just about anyone in the Championship for as far ahead as anyone can see. Since Cullum is much richer and cleverer than me there must be a flaw in that plan, but I can't see it.

Posted By: Bryan Salad Surgery on February 17th 2009 at 23:20:27

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