So presumably they’ll be both out of a job by May?

Of course you should expect a CEO to have a level of competence, nous, initiative etc etc, especially on that wage - but it is clear he has none of those qualities, yet they continue to employ him! The buck stops with them, always.

Yet they employ them, and countless others like them, for 11 bloody years! These people obviously are just not cut out to own a football club, as actual improvement on the pitch, increasing revenue, increasing crowds etc etc - you know, just the standard at professional sport clubs, never seems a priority.

‘Nothing to do with the owners’ TM and Waggott employ themselves, I take it?

An actual chant that doesn’t mention Burnley? Wonders never cease!

I once had a meeting with Williams in his office (a long story) not long after the Ince debacle, nice coffee and biscuits from memory, I imagine it’d be some Smart Price rich teas with Waggott these days. He pretty much admitted that Jack loved Ince as a player and he made an emotional appointment on the back of it, something you should never do - take note Ed Woodward.

Decline or not, as we saw with Ince, the club being the size it was in the Trust era, we were only ever one bad appointment from disaster. Ince was nipped in the bud soon enough, alas there was never any intention to do likewise with Ke*n, a complete self-sabotage that made clear that the normal rules of running a football club would not apply with these owners, and well, look at the state of the club now.

He may now ‘never work again’… I bet!

Oh I agree, my point was more that I don’t think that a lot of the LT comments are a million miles away from what I hear every week.

Though if ‘99 had said he did like to film the game on his phone, you’d be all ‘I just like to watch my team in the moment, why do you need to film?’ 😁

You say that tomphil, but take away the Sharpe element of it and I hear plenty of that kind of stuff at Ewood. ‘Young team’, ‘Crap fans’, ‘no passion’, ‘small club’, ‘fans to blame if we do a Bury’, ‘owners put in a fortune’, ‘who you gonna get better than Mowbray?’, ‘we’ve no money FFS’ (though they’ve just said the owners put in a fortune, so go figure!).

Needs filming on a phone as ‘people want personal memories’. Hmm, if only there was an organ of the human body that could store such things instead…

Makes me laugh. He’s pretty much saying his own eyes told him it was fecking crap… but because the xG says so we’d *actshully* performed well!

‘Half spaces’.

You said repeatedly on the Waggott thread that they are doing/have done good things, that we can’t survive without them and things are changing behind the scenes. Today you are saying you want them out of the club - bit of an odd standpoint if we can’t survive without them.

So you haven’t been repeatedly telling us how things are now going to change for the better under these owners -even though on that post this morning you stated that you want them to leave?! No wonder folk can’t make head nor tail of where you are coming from..

That’s a real commitment Jim and there were 800 others in the away end with you at £30 a pop on a horrible night with it on the red button. And people talk about ‘passionate Geordies’.

Hang on, so you want the owners out? So what has this sustained campaign of yours these past couple of months been all about then?

That works if there’s a limited amount of articles you can read for free before it shuts you off (like how the LT website is set up now). But if they are setting up a model like The Times, for example, you can’t read anything without signing up.

Only quality journalism can have a working business model that includes a paywall - The Times, The Athletic etc in the UK, the big US newspapers. People buy subscriptions for ‘long reads’, in-depth investigative reporting, features, magazines supplements etc etc. The LT is obviously in dire straits with the collapse of sales of physical papers, especially at local level and they mustn’t be able to wash their face with online ads. But the industry has structurally changed and low brow papers and small, stripped out organisations like the LT just won’t get folk taking out subscriptions. As an example, The Sun tried a paywall… lasted about 6 months. There is nothing the LT offers that you can’t get for free on Lancs Live… perhaps the LT won’t exist at all as a stand alone title in a couple of years (it largely doesn’t already with no HQ, a shared editorial operation with Bolton/Bury papers and sub editing in South Wales).

Lancs Live laughing heartily…

What are you disagreeing with? Oxford proved that a feel good occasion, party atmosphere and a tenner to get in will get folk in. A normal mid table game in winter won’t be doing that. Your post is contradicting itself, Oxford proved that there’s no mass hatred of Venky’s keeping folk away, just a crap team and atmosphere… and we know who to blame for those two realities.

So nothing to worry about then if the few senior pros we have left are refusing new deals? Onwards!

You aren’t getting it 1864. Most fans who no longer go don’t ‘hate’ the owners and aren’t not going as a result of said hatred. What is actually happening is that they’ve either long moved on to other hobbies - as happens when you get out of the habit, or as a result of a decade of chronic mismanagement they see an average team, average results, average manager and an empty ground and think ‘nah’. And no gimmicky £15 tickets for an odd game or a couple of quid knocked off a midweek game in winter is going to make much difference whilst we forever tread water between about 10th and 18th in the second division (at best). A floating/lapsed fan is a consumer and isn't going to be guilt tripped - ‘play your part!’, ‘get behind the team!’ - into spending their hard earned on what they see as a bang average (and not cheap) product.

You either want to compete at this level or you don’t. If you can’t/won’t pay the going rate for the likes of Darragh Lenihan and believe the team will improve with a squad of academy grads, young lads brought in from the lower leagues and loanees, with minimal senior pros, then go for it, but don’t be surprised when we end up in the same division as Crewe and Lincoln.