DING DING
Second Leg's Out - Round Two
Wycombe boss Paul Lambert has stoked up the fire before the second leg suggesting that he used to play for a club that had more fans than Stockport can get in their ground coming to watch them train?
Really? Who? I'm really baffled by this one! Who is this magical team he's on about? I'm sure it wasn't Celtic as I'm positive we would have heard about 11,000 fans turning up for a training session, and it certainly wouldn't have been anyone in Germany, because that's just not their bag. So which team you on about Lambo...?
Coupling this with the snidey and very unprofessional comment made to Gannon suggesting he shuts up until he wins something. Big Time fucking Charlie, does he ever have to queue for a table in Pizza Hut?
Oh, we bow to your superiority Mr Lambert, but you manage Wycombe Wanderers - W.Y.C.O.M.B.E - Not Milan. You manage a team of perennial underachievers. Get it? Lambert, you are a first class grade A tosspot.
You share your name with a cross-dressing cock-muncher off Emmerdale. You were an average player and an even more average manager, that's why the Scottish FA chose Burley over you. You would have been worse than Berti Vogts.
Of course there is a regular common theme running through Gannon's post match comments, and they always seem to come again managers with the Christian name of Paul. Last season it was Paul Trollope of Bristol Rovers, and this season with Ince and Lambert. Has Gannon got something against this name?
In fact I wish he had, therefore he would never give Paul Turnbull a game again. He was woeful against Wycombe, what we needed against 'Bite Yer Legs' Doherty and 'UFC fighter' Holt on Sunday was Jason Taylor, not some namby pamby mid Cheshire freckled schoolboy with as much football experience as I have of laying Michelle Marsh.
I, personally don't see what Gannon sees when it comes to Turnbull, and after passing the ball a total distance of -35 yards on Sunday evening, surely he has to bump this surplus to requirements teenager back to serving the Football In The Community Dept.
On the subject of releasing players, my list is as follows...Griffin, Adamson (both certs). Tansey, Tunnicliffe, McNeil, Coward, Ellis, Turnbull (probables). Rose, Clare, Havern (Possibles).
Will be interested to hear your views. See you on Saturday...!
TROUBLE AT MILL...!
Is This The End For Mansfield Town?
The Stags of Mansfield Town were relegated to the abyss that is the Conference - no matter how much you tart it up by calling it The Blue Square Premier - after County's dire and dull Cheshire derby draw at Chester.
A note on a unofficial Stags site says it all - "Keith Haslam, yes, everyone does blame you. Seventy-seven years in the league and as it comes to an end"
Mr Haslam, I really don't know how you can sleep at night. He was attacked by a fan who had managed to gain entry to the Field Mill boardroom after the game against Rotherham. Haslam required hospital treatment and reports are that a 45-year-old man has since been arrested, but this isn't the hatred of a minority, this hatred goes much much further than anything to do with anyone called bin Laden.
The controversial owner has been in 'negotiations' to sell the club for around 18 months and has shown no signs of walking. He's turned down three offers from former chairman James Derry (property developer - stay well away), while former York City owner John Batchelor (asset strips everything he touches) has also been sniffing around like his does any club in danger.
From Malcolm Glazer to Ken Bates, complaints about ownership and auterior motives are commonplace in football, but the exasperated fans at Mansfield do have more of a point.
Field Mill is hardly the most illustrious or one of football's hotbeds, yet over the past decade the club have given its owner Keith Haslam - the club's only director - a whacking and relatively unexplained £585,000 in interest-free loans - and that was on top of a very decent salary, rumoured to be in the region of £66,000.
The club also paid over 580k to Haslam's holding company, "Stags Limited", to buy land for an youth academy yet to be built - so that makes it more than £1 million gone to the man who controls the club who has shown little or nothing since.
I'm not a legal man, but the loans to Haslam are unlawful surely? A breach of some section and sub-section and some act somewhere? A source at Mansfield once told me that the FA are well aware of the loans and its investigations are ongoing.
The prospects of Haslam repaying his loans do not appear blindingly promising. In July 2002 a committed and well organised supporters' trust, decided to cut the much maligned Haslam some slack and tried to work constructively with him.
The trust raised money to buy shares in the club and entered into a formal written contract in which Haslam agreed that he would do his best to repay. In September last year the club's accounts to June 2003 showed that £239,000 which the club had "loaned" to Haslam had been "written off", meaning that amount had gone and would never be repaid.
Cue anger in Nottinghamshire. Then the accounts for 2004 revealed that the club had advanced Haslam more than £90,000 in further interest-free loans, in clear breach of his agreement. With no evidence whatsoever of any repayments since the agreement, feeling furious and betrayed, solicitors were instructed to investigate all possible actions against Haslam, but this guy is still in control.
What does get my goat about this is that no matter how controversial I am on here, or how many people I upset in the process, I am after all a decent football fan, and all the banter and counter-banter on here is nothing but good natured joshing. However, when I found out that Haslam has a (wait for it...) £775,000 house in the Peak District - while the team he supposedly loves sit on a uber-tight budget for players, it makes my blood boil.
Fans naturally stayed away. Why should they pay £16 to line his pockets? Average gates plumetted and will do even more with the exciting prospects (sic) of Lewes and Kettering coming to town next season.
Haslam has owned Mansfield for 12 years, and in that time the club have underachieved massively. Since 1993 they have made it out of the bottom division just once, 2002-03, then went straight back down. Keith Curle, appointed manager in December 2002 with the Stags eight points adrift, complained his budget was too low to assemble a team to keep them up. He managed it, and the following season - rather Gannon-esque I have to admit, he led Mansfield to the play-off final; that year the club made a profit of more than £300,000.
In December 2004 Curle was sacked - if anyone remembers this incident it was the youth player / banana allegation that was doing its rounds at the time - a charge Curle has always denied, and in stepped Carlton Palmer to steady the ship.
Mansfield finished 13th last season, then Palmer resigned after a defeat to Rochdale left them third from bottom of the league. Mansfield in mayhem and Curle still pursuing Mansfield for unfair dismissal.
So Mr Haslam, where now? Of course the bookmakers have made Mansfield prime contenders to come straight back up at the first time of asking, but teams very rarely do.
I fear for the future of Mansfield Town.
