steveo
mine to stay the same please
So its a complete guess then.
Throwaway rumours and complete guesswork. So much more interesting than facts.
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FAO all Ron Martin believers, apologists, apathists: why I shall be voting option 5..
So its a complete guess then.
Throwaway rumours and complete guesswork. So much more interesting than facts.
Billy Bests boot laces
President⭐⭐🦐
Suggest you ask as many fans as you can their opinion on this matter when you next attend, and then you can gather your facts?.
A Century United
Highland Exile
Since when did mass opinion add up to facts? Just because a lot of people believe it doesn't make it any more likely to be true, often the opposite - on that basis, Homeopathy is a brilliant addition to Medical Science instead of actually being a load of old codswallop that relies on the placebo effect for any sign of efficacy.
steveo
mine to stay the same please
You can get as many opinions as you want but until we hear if from Tilly it's not a fact.
Perhaps you could tell me how many opinions equal a fact. 100 or 500 or maybe 1357?
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Kent Shrimper
Mike Reid
In the same respect Beefy if people do have an opinion of Ron which the "lets suck it and see" brigade don't like then they are just being negative. I don't personally see an alternative to him but i just want the man to conduct OUR business with dignity and stop the ******** way he treats everyone. Im not sure why people keep saying "there isn't anything we can do as fans", **** me if every person thought like this then women wouldn't of got a vote and South Africa wouldn't of finally got a voice for the black people, people do need to take a stand and voice there opinion / show there feelings. Just because someone doesn't think it will do any good doesn't make it wrong.
Gt Yarmouth Shrimper
President⭐⭐🦐
Some goog points there KS, but what gets me (as a moderate poster who doesn't like what is going on, but doesn't see RM as the anti christ) is why the majority of the anti Ron protesters do not seem to be able to put across a credible arguement without resorting to agressive and abusive language
Thorpe Groyney
Open your mind
Perhaps you could make a list of the anti-Ron protestors and quote the aggressive and abusive language that they have used? Or should those opposed to Ron's tenure accept opinion as fact, whilst some in favour of a status quo deride a poster who used a guess (by his own admission, too)?
Very similar to the protest at the ground last week. On here was word of warning about a baying mob, of gobby oiks. The reality was the police and stewards praising those who turned up, with one quote of "I admire what you're doing", and the only incident of abuse was it being directed at them.
It is too far down the line now. People have had their say, and will continue to have their say, whether pro Ron, anti, in the middle, or past caring. Some will be more forceful than others - from all opinions, not just one view. A cursory glance at the Derby protest thread will confirm that, or perhaps the one where a poster rather ill-advisedly started a thread claiming that people who were anti-Ron didn't have the club's interests at heart (although it came over more to me as 'those who didn't agree with what I say shouldn't be allowed to say anything').
Very similar to the protest at the ground last week. On here was word of warning about a baying mob, of gobby oiks. The reality was the police and stewards praising those who turned up, with one quote of "I admire what you're doing", and the only incident of abuse was it being directed at them.
It is too far down the line now. People have had their say, and will continue to have their say, whether pro Ron, anti, in the middle, or past caring. Some will be more forceful than others - from all opinions, not just one view. A cursory glance at the Derby protest thread will confirm that, or perhaps the one where a poster rather ill-advisedly started a thread claiming that people who were anti-Ron didn't have the club's interests at heart (although it came over more to me as 'those who didn't agree with what I say shouldn't be allowed to say anything').
A Century United
Highland Exile
On two occasions I have been thoroughly abused for my percieved pro-ron stance, to the extent that both times the Mods removed the post in question. Of course, because the posts have been removed I can't now flag them up but you know without having to check that it happens. Or are you calling as level-headed and thoughtful poster as Beefy a liar?
Thorpe Groyney
Open your mind
Why are you purposely now putting words into my mouth, or perhaps I should say words onto a screen, bringing into your reply for no apparent reason a specific poster I have never had a problem with? If you have a problem with me send me a PM.
I would have said meet up for a drink in Eden Court later this week, but if you have the same petulant attitude you've been displaying towards me recently, I'd rather not waste my time, breath or money.
I would have said meet up for a drink in Eden Court later this week, but if you have the same petulant attitude you've been displaying towards me recently, I'd rather not waste my time, breath or money.
Hotman
reason, honour, integrity
First rule of dealing with A Century United - if you don't agree with him, you are clearly not thoughtful or level-headed. How dare you. :madman:
A Century United
Highland Exile
Good grief! If you check back, Beefy makes the very point that you are arguing against - that if you are percieved to be in any way pro-Ron, you are likely to be called some fairly derogatory names. Perhaps suggesting that you were calling Beefy a liar was a bit further than I meant to go, but it doesn't invalidate the point. You are trying to suggest in your first paragraph that suggestions that name calling takes place are wrong or exaggerated. Anyone who reads back through these threads will know that simply isn't so, and I am suprised and disappointed that you posted that, especially since you yourself described people who didn't agree with your point of view "heartless and gutless".
As for our personal arrangements, I didn't think that the public forum was the place to discuss them - surely a PM would have been more appropriate?
A Century United
Highland Exile
Cheers MC. I would have thought your own sig would give the lie to that but hey ho.
Tommy2holes
Life President⭐
Couldnt diassagree more.
Firstly you say that Tilly has 2 relegations on his c.v. Technically your right , but the first being in the championsip. A league that is the 4th best supported league in europe. A league that has teams last season getting 50k crowds and an average of 30k.
For us to compete in that league was always going to be an up hill struggle especially when you look at our budget for that division compared to almost everybody else's.
We had the makings of a decent side , but lets not forget that the majority of those players had already played beyond capabilities to get us promoted the previous season. Asking them to step up again was a bridge to far.
Our budget ultimately led us to signing the likes of rickets and foran as they were the only type of players who would come to sufc on what we were paying. In hindsight im sure we would have saved money and recruited from league 1 and more than likely tried to keep some of those players who we released.
Ultimately getting big time charlies in coupled with eastwood losing form saw that team spirit diminish , which i think is what killed our chances of survival.
I also think that we played some great football at times , but were niave at both ends of the pitch.
In all honesty as great as promotion was , it probably came a season early.
I certainly dont blame steve for that relegation and enjoyed every minute of it . That was the beginning of the end as far as the clubs finances go. Too many contracts handed to players who were not worth the money. Ultimately the agents and the board agree fees etc and you cant blame tilly for that , although he did sign some unsucessfull players in that period.
As for relegation to league 2. To blame tilly for that is beyond a joke.
Unable to sign the players he wanted, unable to pay the players he had. Forced to sell the only thing that was winning us games in Lee barnard for an absoloute joke of a transfer fee. Not being able to motivate a team that didnt even know if the club would pay them or indeed if they would have an employer.
The way Ron martin ran the club last season is criminal. And to lay the blame at tillys door just shows what kind of man we have at the helm.
I agree that all the high earners needed to leave , but who gave them contracts?
I agree that a wholesale change needed to be made, but i still beleive that tilly was the right man for the job.
I will support the team and the management , but make no mistake. Southend united will never have another man at the helm who will love this club as much as tilly did and still does.
The likes of sturrock are 10 a penny . Look at col u and all the managers they have had , some of which have been quite high profile.
They would love to have a tilly equivelant at there place.
Tilly is everything that is good about sufc and Ron martin is everything that is bad. Unfortunatley he has control and is not going anywhere.
Tilly has been thrown out like rubbish for the second time by this club and anyone that thinks we will be better of with someone like sturrock in charge is deluded. If we get promotion which is unlikely then he will be off and we will be looking again.
So once i again. I completely dissagree with your post. it was not luck that we got promoted twice . It was a good management style a keen eye for the right blend of old and young players and a togetherness in the team. He made mistakes and he got us relegated twice as you put it , but he was our very own tilly.
Be careful what you wish for.
As for this thread and what to do with Ron martin. The way i see it boycotting games without paying would be suicide . It wont drive Ron out it will kill the club and i wont have any part in that.
I will however pay my money support the team and support any protest against ron martin before or after the games.
The only thing i can see this ahcieving is making Ron a little uncomfortable on matchdays.
If thats all we can do then i'll have some of that and hope that the blues prosper once again.
Up the blues
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Being an uneven, unthoughtful person myself, that just made me crease up
Matt the Shrimp
aka Harry Potter
Thanks first to brigadista, for a thought-provoking first foray onto these boards. However, one thing ought to be cleared up: the notion that Ron "got the club for next to nothing". I don't think that's right at all.
People seem to forget that our current woes trace back entirely to the mid-1990s - and specifically to the Whelan-Chipmunk stewardship of the club (at a time when Vic was fighting a losing battle with cancer - hence with no one properly running the club from a financial point of view). We signed players on ruinously high wages (e.g. Boere on - supposedly - £3,500/wk basic... and that was in the mid 90s!), whilst gates were dwindling below 5,000 as we commenced our seemingly inexorable slide down the table.
When SEL (half Delancey, half Martin Dawn) bought out Vic's 76% shareholding, they not only paid a healthy sum (about £4m?), but they bought a club with at least £4m of debt - and rising. John Main did nothing to halt that decline - players wages alone were, infamously, 123% of turnover during his stint (and that's before we account for the £150k paid to Peter Storrie - what for, exactly, I've never understood).
By the time of our first appearance at the door of the Winders Court in 2000, we were a club that was already substantially broke. Where Ron Martin can be criticised is that he has done nothing to improve that situation. Instead, he has taken on some very substantial liabilities (e.g. the finance to buy out Delancey's half-share of the club), he has spent a lot of money on some expensive architects and planning consultants... and all seemingly predicated on a business plan where he would always be able to obtain a ready stream of working capital from external sources.
This we all know, and we've talked about numerous times. So, what's the point in repeating it? Well:
1. We shouldn't trick ourselves into thinking that, somehow, Ron is the problem and that the panacea is to remove him. Ron clearly is a problem. But our club was screwed long before him, and is likely to be for some time afterwards if/when he goes.
2. Ron - through a sophisticated (tangled?) web of sub- and offshore-companies - has already spent and invested a lot of money in this club. Brigadista - what makes you think that somehow he'd simply walk away? Administration, or a CVA, wouldn't change a thing. He'd still be the largest single creditor. He'd still call the shots, and we'd still have to deal with him.
3. Liquidation wouldn't be a great solution either. We would have to rename the club (he'd probably own the intellectual property in the club badge and the club name) - we'd have to become AFC Southend, and re-start at the bottom of the footballing pyramid. It would be 10-15 years before we were even close to the league - and I imagine we'd have lost a lot of our fanbase along the way. FC United is linked to Manchester United, one of the largest football clubs in the world; and AFC Wimbledon is linked to a former Premier League club in a place that was always a hotbed of football fan-dom. Southend is neither of those things. What makes you think the club would survive at all, let alone in anything like its current form?
* * *
Don't get me wrong - I believe Ron has acted in a shabby, shameful manner in the last year. He has peddled half-truths and misinformation; he has strangled the club of cashflow; he has failed to pay the players; he has treated the fans with disdain; he alone set the club on course for relegation through his actions; and he continues to act like some sort of risible pocket Napoleon. He is a total bloody embarrassment, of that there can be no doubt.
But the way I see it, the choice we face now is to stick with him - since he is determined to make his supermarket deal - or to face oblivion. If the club can survive for long enough to see us in a new stadium - one in which, perhaps, we might have a chance of growing the fanbase - then there may yet be a future for this club.
Maybe we are, ultimately, doomed - even if we move. Maybe relegation and penury beckons. But there remains a chance that things will turn out OK - we'll stay in the league, and we'll prosper. A slim chance, but a chance nonetheless.
If we all boycott the home games, however, then we have no chance - it's liquidation, and 15+ years of obscurity while we scrape together the money to buy a plot of land, build a stadium and work our way back up the footballing pyramid from the bottom. You'll forgive me if I don't think that that looks like a terribly appealing prospect.
If we support the club (and its unappealing current chairman) we have a chance. If we boycott it, we don't. That's how I see it; and that's why I'll be at Roots Hall on 7th August, cheering on the boys (and saving an especially loud cheer for Anthony Grant).
Matt
People seem to forget that our current woes trace back entirely to the mid-1990s - and specifically to the Whelan-Chipmunk stewardship of the club (at a time when Vic was fighting a losing battle with cancer - hence with no one properly running the club from a financial point of view). We signed players on ruinously high wages (e.g. Boere on - supposedly - £3,500/wk basic... and that was in the mid 90s!), whilst gates were dwindling below 5,000 as we commenced our seemingly inexorable slide down the table.
When SEL (half Delancey, half Martin Dawn) bought out Vic's 76% shareholding, they not only paid a healthy sum (about £4m?), but they bought a club with at least £4m of debt - and rising. John Main did nothing to halt that decline - players wages alone were, infamously, 123% of turnover during his stint (and that's before we account for the £150k paid to Peter Storrie - what for, exactly, I've never understood).
By the time of our first appearance at the door of the Winders Court in 2000, we were a club that was already substantially broke. Where Ron Martin can be criticised is that he has done nothing to improve that situation. Instead, he has taken on some very substantial liabilities (e.g. the finance to buy out Delancey's half-share of the club), he has spent a lot of money on some expensive architects and planning consultants... and all seemingly predicated on a business plan where he would always be able to obtain a ready stream of working capital from external sources.
This we all know, and we've talked about numerous times. So, what's the point in repeating it? Well:
1. We shouldn't trick ourselves into thinking that, somehow, Ron is the problem and that the panacea is to remove him. Ron clearly is a problem. But our club was screwed long before him, and is likely to be for some time afterwards if/when he goes.
2. Ron - through a sophisticated (tangled?) web of sub- and offshore-companies - has already spent and invested a lot of money in this club. Brigadista - what makes you think that somehow he'd simply walk away? Administration, or a CVA, wouldn't change a thing. He'd still be the largest single creditor. He'd still call the shots, and we'd still have to deal with him.
3. Liquidation wouldn't be a great solution either. We would have to rename the club (he'd probably own the intellectual property in the club badge and the club name) - we'd have to become AFC Southend, and re-start at the bottom of the footballing pyramid. It would be 10-15 years before we were even close to the league - and I imagine we'd have lost a lot of our fanbase along the way. FC United is linked to Manchester United, one of the largest football clubs in the world; and AFC Wimbledon is linked to a former Premier League club in a place that was always a hotbed of football fan-dom. Southend is neither of those things. What makes you think the club would survive at all, let alone in anything like its current form?
* * *
Don't get me wrong - I believe Ron has acted in a shabby, shameful manner in the last year. He has peddled half-truths and misinformation; he has strangled the club of cashflow; he has failed to pay the players; he has treated the fans with disdain; he alone set the club on course for relegation through his actions; and he continues to act like some sort of risible pocket Napoleon. He is a total bloody embarrassment, of that there can be no doubt.
But the way I see it, the choice we face now is to stick with him - since he is determined to make his supermarket deal - or to face oblivion. If the club can survive for long enough to see us in a new stadium - one in which, perhaps, we might have a chance of growing the fanbase - then there may yet be a future for this club.
Maybe we are, ultimately, doomed - even if we move. Maybe relegation and penury beckons. But there remains a chance that things will turn out OK - we'll stay in the league, and we'll prosper. A slim chance, but a chance nonetheless.
If we all boycott the home games, however, then we have no chance - it's liquidation, and 15+ years of obscurity while we scrape together the money to buy a plot of land, build a stadium and work our way back up the footballing pyramid from the bottom. You'll forgive me if I don't think that that looks like a terribly appealing prospect.
If we support the club (and its unappealing current chairman) we have a chance. If we boycott it, we don't. That's how I see it; and that's why I'll be at Roots Hall on 7th August, cheering on the boys (and saving an especially loud cheer for Anthony Grant).
Matt
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steveo
mine to stay the same please
Ok fair point and we obviously disagree on a few things. I don’t dispute the fact that Tilly loves the club but loving the Club doesn’t necessarily make him the best man for the job. Who could deny Bryan Gunn wasn’t Norwich through and through but it didn’t make him a decent manager.
I do agree about Promotion to the Championship being the root of all the problems, but Ron gambled on staying up and failed – It’s probably what we all wanted to do anyway.
With regard to the future, I think Southend is the tip of the iceberg and as I have said in previous posts, if Ron gets the Club in good financial shape and FF gets underway, we will be in a better position than a lot of other clubs as we go into the next decade.
So basiclly it appears you're ready to accept that what happened post-CCC was wrong, but we can't grumble too much as we'd have done/wanted to do the same thing?
I refuse to buy that because as i've said many times before, it wasn't/isn't upto us, the fans, to deal with the financial running of the club. Ron has a duty of care to run the business. It's his job to weigh up/predict how certain financial movements will effect the business.
If that had of been done properly we wouldn't have found ourselves in this situation currently.
palexander
Life President
I've said it before - but imagine the uproar (on here at very least) if Martin would have come out in our CCC year and said;
"Sorry, we cannot sign anyone as we just cannot afford the wages"
Can see it now...
"WHERES THE MONEY GONE RON!"
"GO AND DO ONE!"
"WHERE IS THE WARCHEST"
"THIS ISNT TILSONS FAULT"
etc etc...
So I think you are wrong GraysBlue - we are and were responsible - as fans we always want more, better, stronger etc - we got what we wanted and whilst we dont decide the contracts of course, we were responsible in part for the recruitment drive.
And again, sorry to harp on with this oft repeated point, but I believe a 'better' manager could have spent the limited budget we had more wisely. Look at what Sturrock has achieved on a -£ budget! I'm not advocating getting rid of Tilson when we got promoted (though perhaps another chairman would have - after all, you have to do what is right for the club and in hindsight what was right for us perhaps, was a more experienced head for that level??).
All in hindsight anyways - what happened, happend. We enjoyed it at the time and are now reaping what was sown...
steveo
mine to stay the same please
Sort of. But having massively over achieved to get into the Championship he wanted to stay there. He could have taken the Burnley route and worked on a tight budget fully expecting to go down again but to be fair most of us wouldn’t have approved.
We only missed staying up by 7 points from Hull and look where they went.
It probably was a gamble that failed, but even then we are only guessing. Attracting players would mean giving them lengthy contracts at decent money, and call it bad judgement on Ron’s behalf but the alternative would have been to stick with what we had and get hammered every week.
Also this all happened when the move to FF was looking good and maybe Ron thought survive a season in the Championship and the extra revenue from the move would kick in.
Under Ron’s guidance, we have had some good seasons and some bad. Would you have swapped these for staying in League 2 in a mid table position? Why not credit him for the good years, blame him for the bad and call it even. Then see how we are fixed at the end of 2010 which should give him enough time to get this mess sorted, or fail and see the Club go under.
Interpol Shrimper
Member
I still say that if Ron had come out after the Scott Macdonald shambles and said "we tried but we understandably lost out to a bigger club" we'd have (mainly) been satisfied. Far better that than signing some mug who cost the club over half a million quid and the manager plainly didn't really want to be here, purely to "pacify the supporters"!
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