Jon Blakely's Canadian Chronicles
Thursday 04 July, 2002
Waiting for the man to redeem himself
I am going to sit my pen 'down' after this article to give the man that so many people trust through thick and thin some much needed time to gain the trust back from the anti-Geoffrey Richmond (that's me if you weren't sure)
I guess in a court of law, Mr Richmond may have been sent down for attempted murder for what he has done to BCFC, but no one seems to want to believe any of that stuff. He's back because no one else wanted to touch our club with a 'barge-pole'. Why? The biggest debts you'd ever imagine. And still we have to 'owe' our short term future to the PFA.
I still ask and have never heard an answer - where has all the money gone?
Please add up all the signings, the players sold, the TV money, the parachute payments, the gate receipts, the 25 years season tickets and still the debts are huge and we now owe the Players Union (upto) 4m quid.
I asked Mr Richmond at the start of the season if the Premiership experience had been the biggest financial disaster ever for Bradford City, he replied (and I paraphrase) that I was out of my mind, and in fact I should keep my opinions to myself. I still haven't sent him a 'told you so' e-mail, but I will. Someone has to bring this man to account (no pun intended)
Finally can people stop talking about this bright new future with new, young, hungry footballers. It can't happen until some other club take our players off our hands.
This is not Championship Manager, where if you had a player you wanted rid of, but no one wanted, you took over Arsenal and bid for him, signed him for 10m, and then resigned. This is the real world and all ourplayers are on fat-cat contracts and teams are gonna look at last season to see if these players are any good, and guess what...
All this obviously relies on City coming out of Administration, and let's hope they do, but due to the happenings over the past two years this club is operating with both hands behind it's back for the foreseeable future.
The club needs it fans, and the fans need to be in an organised position to stop this ever happening again. Everybody says that Mr Richmond has made the mistakes and he has learned from them. Yet he asked us to trust him first time around and look what happened. Please don't stand by silent next time and let it repeat itself.
Waiting for the man to redeem himself.