Steve_R

One of them says that those who don't go will spend their money on blue wicked and smirnoff ice. Isn't that what you keep saying?

You honestly think that only people in Oldham drink cider and do drugs?

I think you'd find that if you tried to take practically every other club out of the town of it's name and plonk it somewhere else, their fans would be up in arms. For a hell of a lot of football fans supporting your team is all about local identity. I support Latics because I'm from Oldham, it's my local club. Move it somewhere else and it wont be. Why do people get annoyed at ManU fans from Oldham if it doesn't matter where you come from or where your team plays? If that means I have a small world mentality then so be it. But anyone who thinks that moving us out of Oldham will have the fans flocking is seriously deluded.

Part of the agreement when they bought back BP from OMBC was that they guaranteed football would be played there for at least 10 years. There are three years left and I just don't see how they can could go back on that.

Be as rude as you want but just stop talking :censored:e

If we move out of Oldham we will have no club.

There has been much bull:censored: spouted on this board over the last day or so, but none of it caps this.

If we move out of the borough of Oldham it is exactly the same. The distance is irrelevant, be it 80 yards or 80 miles. Oldham Athletic belongs in Oldham. Take it out and it is Oldham Athletic no more.

Now I’m not sticking up for OMBC here but all this talk about they don’t care about Latics is bollocks. They’ve been behind Failsworth from the off, but what this has shown is their total ineptitude. They’ve tried to railroad it through without going through the proper procedures so that basically we could get on with it, but it has come back to bite them on the arse. As Corney says, they want a new stadium; they just don’t seem capable of helping Latics to deliver one. And as for moving out of town, unless is something we’re forced into, then that’s me out of it. If we take the decision to move out of Oldham and build a new stadium elsewhere, then it’s Jeff Stelling or Oldham Borough on a Saturday afternoon for me.

Correct

What he said

The flak he received at Barnsley was awful, and he copped it in plenty of other games as well. But in my 40 odd years watching Latics nobody has copped for as much abuse as Dave Penney. It seems ironic then that there's another thread running at the moment absolutely slaughtering our ex manager. As for Richard Butcher, terrible news. RIP.

The Birmingham section looked pretty sparse at Bloomfield Rd the other night when I saw the goals on TV.

The thing is (and I think it’s pretty much what you are saying), is that we’ve lost a lot of fans recently, and they haven’t all buggered of to Man City no matter what our Chairman says. The football and results so far may be a lot better but hovering around mid table isn’t going to tempt many back or attract new ones. They may hear noises about how much better we’re doing but when they pick up their Sunday paper and see us in twelfth position or whatever, they just think ‘That’s pretty much how its been for the last fourteen seasons.’ Unfortunately we are in that viscous circle were the only way crowds will increase significantly is with a serious promotion push, but we need the gates to show a sharp rise in order to finance one. Either that or Dickov proves to be a miracle worker and achieves it on a shoestring budget like he’s working on now, but for that he’ll probably need that precious commodity, time, and our recent history shows we don’t afford our managers too much of that.

So you'd shake the hand of a paedophile for a tenner? Franchise FC have never had a penny out of my pocket and as long as I've a hole in my arse they never will.

I’ve always said that when something doesn’t go to plan these days it would appear that there has to be someone to blame. It has to be somebody’s fault. As far as most football fans are concerned if their team doesn’t get the result they crave it is usually the fault of either: 1) the referee 2) the manager 3) the goalkeeper It would appear that most on here blame 2 or 3, although I’ve definitely read one person hammering the ref. They way I saw it last night was in the first half we played some of the best football we’ve played in a long time. Slick, one touch football, great passing moves, three cracking goals and plenty of other chances. We were totally dominant. Yet it is rare, even at the highest level, that a team dominates in such a way for 90 minutes. In most cases when a team is so much in the ascendancy in the first half and have a healthy scoreline to boot, the second half falls a little flat. Exeter have an astute manager and they had little to lose anyway, and no doubt we did become a little complacent, but the game was drifting towards a comfortable victory when they scored. Suddenly panic set in everywhere, from the stands onto the pitch. Goals change games, and they were buoyed by theirs, we panicked, and god knows how but we managed to throw away a three goal lead. It happens. It shouldn’t, but it does. Arsene Wenger is regarded as one of the top coaches in the world but he copped for it on Saturday. ManUre were 3-1 up in injury time at Everton not long ago and ended up clinging on for a point. But there has to be someone to blame, somebody has to be at fault, and suddenly the manager, whose name was echoing round the ground from ecstatic supporters in the first half had got it all wrong by the end. :censored: happens. It always has and it always will, but doesn’t always have to be someone’s fault.

I think it was September ’81 and we played Norwich away. A coach load of us went down to the game to be followed by a night out in Great Yarmouth. Latics won 2-1 to carry on our unbeaten start to the season so Great Yarmouth fell host to 50 or so pissed up Blues celebrating our victory. At the end of the night we ended up in this nightclub were some of the locals took exception to us and it kicked off. The police soon turned up and two of our lot were, shall we say ‘wrongly arrested’ and carted off to the local nick. Me and my mate, with a belly full of ale inside us, decided that if we told the coppers what had actually happened they would surely let them off so went down to the cop shop to plead their case. We were soon told that they’d be held until Monday morning before being up before the judge, so we might as well go home. We asked for directions to the coach park were our coach was due to leave shortly, only to be told that it had been sent on its way already! So there we were, both bladdered and stranded in Great Yarmouth at half one in the morning. We decided to head to the train station, kip down there and get the first train out of the place in the morning. When we got there a train was in dock, and it was either that or a freezing cold platform so we just got on it and crashed out. We woke up about six in the morning and got off it straight away before it set off and we ended up even farther away from home than we already were. We pooled our money together and waited for the ticket office to open only to find out that we only had enough for one of us to get home. There were no credit cards then (or at least we didn’t have one) so my mate had to phone his dad, who had to go down to Piccadilly Station and pay for his ticket before they’d let us on the train. Being a Sunday there were no direct trains to Manchester so we had to change three times before finally getting home about 9 O’clock Sunday night. Still, we won 2-1 so all’s well that ends well.

But even if the wage bill for the players we’ve signed equates to that we’ve (mostly only recently) loaned out, or is even a bit less, we’re still losing a shed load of money with no one to bail us out if the :censored: hits the fan. So in effect we’ve still signed players whose wages we can’t afford. I’m not having a go at anyone here, it’s just that on a smaller scale we’ve only done what Wednesday have (ands most other clubs for that matter).

Well I presume Feeney, Jones, Jarrett etc are being paid a wage, and all the loans, short term deals etc will cost the club something. These were all signed after Blitz said 'no more money' and we lost £1.5m last year.

The thing is TTA (or Blitz and Gazal) agreed to sign players on two or three year deals last year but have stopped funding the club part way through those, meaning the the money is not there to pay them. So we now have a wage bill that we can’t afford as we’re struggling to ship those players out, resulting in Hardy’s ‘Financial Disaster’ claim last week. Yet despite this we’ve still added to our wage bill this season, and have taken on loans, short term contracts etc. These may not be big wages, but it would appear its still money we haven’t got. The grand scale of things is much smaller, but the principal is very similar.

We took 595 last year.

Well according to Hardy if we build Failsworth we don’t even need anyone to turn up to break even, so an average crowd of say 5,000 should have the profits soaring. Easy, isn’t it?

The main question for me, and one that never gets answered, is say we get the nod off the Charities Commission and the council grant planning permission, then what? The club are in a perilous financial position and the men with the money have ‘severed all ties’ with the club, so who’s going to fund the building of this new stadium?

Writing FACT in capital letters doesn't make it one.

Whilst in no way sticking up for the council, we can put as much pressure on them as we want to get Failsworth sorted, but say planning permission was granted tomorrow, then what? We haven't got a penny to start building it with.