Bath City, bailiffs, and failed takeovers – Is there any chance this is all a bad dream?
Once again it has been a long time since my last post. I had written a rough draft of my thoughts after the 1-1 draw with Bath City, but by the time I could get round to typing it up things had moved on.
The Bath game was a tremendous disappointment. I had predicted a great atmosphere and had hoped for another battling performance. As it was, it was the dog that didn’t bark. The crowd were subdued, in comparison with the previous home games, and the football was some of the worst that had been played for months. The two goals that were scored were wasted on that game.
As I said when I first started to write this blog, is my first season as a season ticket holder. I wanted to capture what it was like to be a regular fan following a non-league team during a season. I had no idea that I would be chronicling what feels like the terminal decline of Kettering Town Football Club.
The news this week that the locks at Rockingham Road had been changed came out of the blue, not least to the members of the trust who had stock left inside the social club. In hindsight, of course, it should not be surprising that we had not been paying the rent. We have not been paying what we owe to more immediate concerns, so why would we have been paying for a ground that we no longer play on? Legally binding contracts don’t seem to hold much sway with us this season. Anyway, a club with two grounds did seem like a bit of an extravagance, especially when we didn’t own either of them.
What strikes me most about everything that has happened is the feeling that none of us can do anything about any of this. This is one of the reasons I have been so slow to post anything. One of the constant refrains of message boards, is ‘instead of criticising, why don’t you come up with some solutions?’ But it doesn’t feel like we are in a position to come up with solutions. As a fan, I feel powerless. The club now feels so far out of the hands of fans that we simply have to wait to see the result of a boardroom bun fight.
There is no doubt that fan power was able to prise out Morell Maison earlier in the season, but that was a straight forward task compared to changing the ownership. It seems clear now that the Chairman should leave, and I imagine that he probably agrees with this. But for him to sell, there has to be someone to step in.
But even if the Chairman leaves, who knows what will come next?
My ‘other team’, the team I inherited from my dad, is Derby County. The current owners are an American sports company who are a front for a group of unknown investors. The group took over from a local businessman and his team a couple of seasons ago. Although they seem to have steadied the ship after years of debt, I am sure they are not seeing the returns on their investment that they envisaged, and many supporters are questioning their lack of investment.
The local businessman they took over from was at one point a hero who bought the club from a group of crooks. A word that it is pretty safe to use seeing as they have subsequently been sent to prison. However, he was quickly under pressure and was not the saviour the fans had hoped for.
The group of businessmen now serving at her majesties pleasure bought the club for a £3 after a local newspaper man was forced to sell up after sinking his own personal fortune into the club and running up huge debts trying to stave off relegation from the Premier League. He was probably the clubs most stable and successful owner in my lifetime. He invested a lot of his own money chasing the dream, and he achieved it, for a while. But it couldn’t last, and poor signings and high wages lead to huge debts. Despite giving so much, the fans forgot and wanted him to leave.
Before him, and before my time, there was that renowned businessman and hero of pensioners everywhere, Robert Maxwell.
The point is that over the past 30 years, Derby County have had only one owner who everyone was behind, and the fans even turned on him. At each turn there is the feeling that the new lot will be the answer, the people to bring success to the club. Owners who buy to make money, to asset strip, or to satisfy ego, will all fail eventually.Even those who buy out of a sense of civic pride will more than likely not succeed. Just look at Everton, where the desire to remove Bill Kenwright, who much surely be the owner of one of the country’s most stable and successful clubs, grows unexplainably louder each week.
There is a growing feeling that the best way forward for clubs, especially at Kettering’s level is through some sort of fans’ ownership. But even that now seems out of our reach.
Now we are at Nene Park, any owner would surely need to have deep pockets to make the ground work at this level. It is apparent that the attendances that need to be generated, and the sponsors boxes that need to be filled, are only possible with league football, and successful league football at that.
Although there are obviously commercial opportunities to generate income, these are likely to come as a result of the profile of the club being high. Fans ownership simply does not seem realistic at Nene Park.
Who knows where we go now? It feels like things will get a lot worse before they get better.
Even if we avoid a points deduction for administration, and even if we can shake of the embargo, it feels unlikely that we will be able to avoid a real relegation battle. And if Nene Park can’t be supported by a Blue Square Premier team, there is no chance in hell a club in the Blue Square North will be able to keep it running.
All in all, this season feels like a horrible dream. Walking back to the car last week I had the sudden feeling that I would wake up and everything will be all right. It would probably be some kind of Dallas-style season-erasing shower scene. Wickstead Park would never have happened and I would be stood on my slab back at Rockingham Road, hoping that the back wall of Cowper Street would hold up for another season.
This isn't Kettering 