More About Gordon Gibb
Everything was going right. Everything seemed to be going Citys way until the money men at Valley Parade started talking.
Almost everything that they said we great. City are making money just about but they will lose some next season as we go for promotion.
The money for selling Dean Windass and him getting promoted at Hull has helped but no one ever gets into football to get rich so Mark Lawn and Julian Rhodes don’t expect to make a fortune. Football is a fan’s game for them and you don’t get rich doing that.
Or do you?
Because the worst news of pre-season came when the “landlord of Valley Parade” which is Julian Rhodes code for “that twerp at Flamingo Land Gordon Gibb” got paid. Not only did he get paid but we also found out that he had a freeze on the rent for five years and now the **** can ramp up the rent.
This is the pepper corn rent he talked about when he had the club sell Valley Parade to him. Pepper corn rent? If he told you it was raining you’d go out to get wet just to check.
He is getting rich off of us and thanks to a deal which is very shady. How much money did City get from the £2.5m sale of Valley Parade and why sell it if we were going into Administration not that long after?
We can’t trust him. We need to be rid of him.
Mark Lawn, Bradford Council, Someone wanting to be a third partner in City, need to get some money together and get our ground back from that man.
Because the worst news of pre-season is that we still have to deal with the chairman from our past.
There is a school of thought on message boards and forums that has it that Gordon Gibb is preparing to ride to the rescue of Bradford City with a huge financial investment which would see him take control of the club to protect his asset - Valley Parade - and catapult the team back to glory.
Frankly I wish I had some of what those people are drinking. Gordon Gibb is not the white knight riding to our rescue. In fact Gordon Gibb would not know one side of a white horse from the other and the investment he has in Valley Parade is as much his sister’s as his and belongs to a pension fund.
Nevertheless BfB understands that some kind of investment is coming and coming soon. Julian Rhodes has been in talks with a guy with a bob or two and the upshot would seem to be that his time as the man holding the weight of Bradford City on his own may be coming to an end. I doubt the phrase White Knight should be used - should it ever be applied to someone preparing for the thankless task of football ownership - but maybe Knighthood is a good metaphor to use.
For a long time Bradford City - as a whole rather than a group of directors or owners - have operated a kind of Quixotic belief that the club would flourish on the basis of a couple of decisions taken in popularist ways. For the La Mancha windmills read the managers of Valley Parade. Each one slain would prove something, would right some wrong, but never did.
In League Two we face up to reality and that reality is that any investment in the club from another owner needs to be matched by a reality check around the ground. I’ve spoken too long about atmosphere and development of players in that environment, about expectations and setting them to reasonable levels and about good old fashioned get behind the lads support. I honestly believe that without these things being addressed then money into City is wasted. I honestly believe that a very good start addressing these would be to appoint Stuart McCall.
It is a commonly held belief that McCall would have become City manager had we not been relegated this season and from what BfB understand this is the case but McCall has issued no comments
rather than denials and - as he faces up to trying to keep Sheffield United in the Premiership as assistant tomorrow afternoon - is torn between his head which tells him to coach at The Blades until a top two divisions job comes up or follow his heart back to Valley Parade.
For inspiration perhaps McCall will look ten years to his left tomorrow to Paul Jewell who took City and Wigan and made his own Premiership clubs. Had Jewell not taken brave decisions with his career then he would not be considered the manager he is today. League Two to anywhere is a huge ask but City need McCall and he knows it but without him City’s future looks bleak.
McCall’s thinking time has the same clock as the investment and Julian Rhodes’s desire to announce a new manager - read into that what you will - and those who are in the know say that it is not as cut and dried as he won’t come cause we went down
and in situations such as these the murkiness of uncertainty is better than assured defeat.
Back in the Geoffrey Richmond: Saint or sinner debate a phrase used to be used. It was sometimes RTG but could be RTS. The final character was not that important, the other two stood for rose-tinted.
The rose-tinted debate raged on the Internet Bantams mailing list and around Bradford for a few years and still bubbles under in all those places now. The idea was that one could look at City two ways. Firstly you could ignore the perceived pillage of Valley Parade and the club’s short route to the dump chute of administration by believing that everything would be all alright and the club was experiencing a dip in form. These people were ostensibly the rose-tinteds.
In opposition them in this sub cultural battle were the self-titled realists who saw everything going to Hell in a handcart and would countenance no call that anything at the club was anything other than incorrigible. These people had seen the future, and it was black.
Post-administration realists departed the field and claimed victory and it was hard to argue that on the whole they had been right about the future of the club come the slide from the Premiership. The club had gone bad and they had said it would. The fact that other developments which flourished were talked on with the same grim attitude mattered not, the prediction was for financial woe and so realists won, even if in the scattershot of the argument phrases like “This club will never produce a good player” were used at a time when Lewis Emanuel and Danny Forrest were pushing into the reserves.
Now the debate on the Clayton Omnibus as well as online is the future of Nicky Law, that he has none specifically, sides are drawn once more down similar lines but - and tellingly - they have swapped sides.
The rose-tinted have looked at Nicky Law and with a gulp of the realism they were encouraged to encompass they state that the problems at City are more than just to do with a manager who has the capacity to cock up tactically and see a shrinking gate, falling sponsorship and the trend of football to hogging the money at the top table of the Premiership and suggest, not unreasonably perhaps, that the last thing we want to do now is rid ourselves of a manager who while curious in some areas has strengths in others in favour of the lucky dip of the positions wanted adds and considering the bad experiences with bosses we have had in the past few years it’s no surprise they have that opinion. It’s realism of a sort.
The other voice coming up is from that camp that used the word realist as a badge. The “realists”, the same people who decried Geoffrey Richmond and called all bad have taken a leap away from reality. To “The Realists” the universal cure all is that once a P45 with the name Nicolas Ulysses Law on it is drawn up then City begin a new, that the weight of football and financial problems pushing down on Valley Parade are lifted by getting a guy who throws on more men fifteen minutes from time. The notion, when said out loud, is almost a definition of looking at a situation with a rose-tint.
So what is the point of all this? The point, dear reader, is this. The state that City are in now is bigger than Nicky Law, Gordon Gibb, the tactics on the field or the fans in the stadium and a change of manager would be largely cosmetic at this point. If changing manager after 18-30 months was the path to success then there would be European Cups at Valley Parade. It never worked in the past, why should it work now?
To use a popular metaphor City are a ship that hit and iceberg in administration and now we are sailing away from it bailing out water for all we are worth. Getting in a new manager would be polishing the brass as we sink.