RevidgeBlue

Completely agree. Not sure if 4) is strictly correct. Waggott was brought in (I think) by the Company that took over the footballing side of Coventry City Otium Entertainment Ltd after the Football Club had gone into administration and after that Company had already acquired the Football Club's assets for a snip. However, without having the exact time scale in front of me, subsequently upon his appointment Waggott became a Director of Otium Entertainment and at a later date brought Mowbray to Coventry as manager, Mowbray presumably then brought Venus in. At some point there was a scheme hatched to sell Coventry's training ground for housing with their Chairman also a Director of Otium (not Waggott) saying it was not an asset stripping exercise but a plan "to get everything under one roof". Sound familiar? Waggott left Coventry not that long after Mowbray was appointed seemingly to pursue other interests as a Consultant and resigned his Directorship of Otium. Venus then became a Director of Otium at some point before also later resigning. Can't remember exactly what happened with Coventry's training ground think someone on here (Hoochie) said Sport England blocked the sale of the training ground until a new facility could be built and new owners renovated the existing one but basically it is still at risk.

Exactly. If the Rao's wanted to be more fondly remembered for their legacy they could spruce the 3 newer sides of Ewood Park up, rebuild the Riverside and upgrade the existing training facilities to state of the art standard without any FFP implications. Instead we're seeing Ewood fall into disrepair and half the training facilities being sold off although I don't believe the latter scheme has originated from them and who knows what they've been told by those on the ground at Ewood.

They've a lot better chance than we have and using your metric they've no right to be competing with us! 🙂

The commentators make it virtually unwatchable for me, every foul committed by an opposition player is a yellow/borderline red. Every foul committed by us it's incredibly soft and the opposition player is making too much of it. They're also frequently advocating that our players should go down easily and/or roll about a bit to earn fouls/penalties or cards for the opposition yet when the penalty was conceded tonight they had the gall to complain the ref gave it on the basis of who screamed the loudest!

Good performance. Shows how desperately badly Mowbray has underperformed this season and what we could do under a half decent manager.

Elliott should have gone on his own there.

Pointless late subs, do they still get appearance bonuses these days?

Commentators: "Good showing from Gallager" JFHC.

Really clumsy and rash challenge by Gallagher. If it had have been the other way round I'd have wanted a penalty. He's an absolute liability at both ends of the pitch. Douglas is terrible as well. Other than that, pretty good performance by recent standards. Trybull who I don't rate at all is having a decent game and Dack is playing more in the areas where he can do some damage.

The Tombola machine must have had to go in for repairs due to overuse. Might be wrong, the last 2 games I can recall us winning then Mowbray naming an unchanged side were Wycombe and Derby at the start of the season........

What isn't the case? Waggott has said the schemes have to be cross financed! I actually think that the potential lack of any training facilities for a period is the least of the worries with this scheme.

Exactly this den. It's so basic and obvious isn't it?

To be fair, you're the one indulging in "speculation" by believing every word that comes out of Mr. Waggott's mouth. The rest of us are examining what facts and information are available, comparing it with the rosy sales pitch and noticing the vast discrepancy. Just on the point of having nowhere to train, if this went ahead and even if we could retain Cat 1 status on the condensed site (which I doubt) how long would we be without any training facilities? Waggott has said the scheme has to be cross financed from the sale of the houses. If this were being done purely from the point of view of improving the training facilities the housing would only go ahead AFTER the combined training centre had been built AND even more crucially after Cat 1 status had been secured

Have you even looked at the screening application and the specification of the new centre in detail? The Club by their own admission also admit they'll lose a number of outdoor pitches and ancillary facilities such as parking. How is this an improvement or an upgrade? Have you even looked at the requirements for category 1 Academies Stuart kindly posted on here? How could everyone sharing a single new facility built to the same specification as the existing STC possibly comply with that? Are you aware of the ramifications if Cat 1 status is lost? Running an Academy at all would be virtually pointless as we'd simply be developing talent for Clubs with Cat 1 status to come in and pinch for next to nothing.

Waggott admitted in the LT he was the one driving it as I recall.

That's exactly what we don't want though! £1.9m saving - cover new deals for Corry and Bennett for 18 months or so.

Two more points, the fact that Waggott keeps making such a big deal of, I.e. that the two planning applications are interlinked is completely irrelevant. If both were granted the Club would be under no obligation whatsoever to act on either of them. Secondly if the Club really wanted to allay supporters' fears on this then they would guarantee that the entire scheme would be conditional on Category 1 status being retained in any new facility. Not merely on both planning permissions being granted.

Obviously the Club would be a lot cheaper in terms of running costs if we didn't have the Academy. Again I stand to be corrected on this point but if we were to lose Cat 1 status then there'd be little point in having an Academy at all as Clubs with a Cat 1 Academy can then poach your own youngsters for a fixed fee of £3k upwards. Perhaps this is the real agenda here. Come up with a plan that has no chance whatsoever of attracting Cat 1 status, then plead a hard luck story that you've been beaten by the regulations and scrap the Academy. thereby saving a fortune in running costs. It sounds a lot more palatable to the gullible than "We've taken the decision to scrap the Academy".

Thanks for posting this. Quite clear that Waggott has no idea whatsoever whether or not we can obtain Cat 1 Status on the smaller combined site and is going on a wing and a prayer on that. I'm still confused about the covenant thing. According to the article from 2016 your initial research indicated this protection was in place. How can Waggott therefore claim that these expired after seven years in 2000? One of you must be wrong and I have to say it would be very unusual to impose a restrictive covenant protecting the use of land which lasted only seven years, there'd be little or no point. Covenants usually "run with the land" in perpetuity.

Don't give up. If you never say anything else ever again about anything Waggott does, don't (willingly) let him get away with this.

What more could you ask for than a red/white oblong on a plan? Bloody entitled fans expecting to win the Premier League every year!

£750 when I looked it up. Apparently no-one thought at the time he would ever get planning permission for housing on the 42 acre site of the old hospital.

I might agree, were it not for the fact we had multi billionaire owners and once those facilities are gone they're gone forever, it's not like they're being temporarily decommissioned and can be brought back to life if we ever get promoted. I think it's the case also that if you lose Cat 1 Academy status PL Clubs are allowed to pick up your youngsters for a pittance? I stand to be corrected if that's not correct.

There is no way this is for the benefit of the Club! In fact if you read the plans carefully, then compare that to what we have now, then see what facilities are necessary for Cat 1 Academy Status, you'll see it's exactly the opposite!

I've didn't realise the Club only owned the land on a 999 year lease and not the freehold. I looked up the supposed Landlords London and Auckland Properties Ltd expecting to find a thriving Company and found instead rather bizarrely that the Company had changed its name to Brockhall Village Developments Ltd at some point and was dissolved on 30/12/2010. Looking at the list of former members the Company was obviously a Gerald Hitman Family concern, a name I've heard but someone I've never come across. Is this the disappointing news you were referring to Ozz, or does it get even worse?