Always a Wasp
General Category => Wasps Rugby Discussion => Topic started by: Heathen on June 09, 2019, 09:52:00 AM
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Stung again — spare a thought for homeless Coventry City as Wasps row rumbles on
Rod Liddle
It is 18 years since Coventry City last played in the Premier League, during which time they have come close to extinction, played in the lowest tier for the first time since 1959 and generally had a fairly awful time of it.
Last season gave fans a few reasons for optimism — manager Mark Robins had assembled a decent squad and a late run took them close to a place in the League One playoffs. But now, this. For the second time in the past 18 years, the Sky Blues are without a home of their own and will be playing next season’s home fixtures at St Andrew’s, in Birmingham, 21 miles away.
The club’s owners, the London hedge fund SISU, have failed to strike a deal with Wasps rugby union team, who play at — and own — the Ricoh Arena. Back in 2013-14 City played their home games at Sixfields stadium, home of Northampton Town, more than 32 miles distant. They had hoped those bad old days were gone. The decision to play at St Andrew’s was again a last-ditch attempt to prevent the club being expelled from the Football League on account of having nowhere to play.
A spokesman for SISU said “we are incredibly disappointed and frustrated” that no deal could be struck over the Ricoh Arena. Not as frustrated as the EFL — which agreed to the ground share with Birmingham City only with great reluctance — or, of course, the benighted fans. Last season Coventry City were the fifth best supported club in League One, with an average home attendance of 12,362, an improvement on the previous season’s average of 9,255. They will be very lucky to achieve half of that number next season: their average home league attendance while playing at Northampton’s ground was scarcely over 2,000.
The problems are myriad and complex. A long-standing row over the sale of the Ricoh Arena to Wasps rumbles on and is coming before the European Commission. City believe the ground was grossly undervalued when it was sold, to the tune of about £28m. But that is only the half of it.
Wasps are, on the face of it, an extremely successful rugby union club. They finished eighth in the Gallagher Premiership last season with an average attendance of 17,975 — a figure beaten only by Leicester Tigers. But their financial position is far more perilous than that of Coventry City and, frankly, they will be fortunate if they are in existence by the this time next year. Their debts, for a rugby club, are astonishing — £55.8m at the latest count after their pre-tax losses last season more than doubled to £9.7m.
The total owed to their Irish owner Derek Richardson, who six years ago rescued them from bankruptcy at the last minute, rose to £18.6m, which some estimate to be at least a third of the chap’s worth.
Worse still, Wasps now face a serious inquiry into alleged financial shenanigans, involving suggestions of grossly overstated profits, a breach of covenants regarding bonds and effectively lying about a million quid or so which Wasps marked down as capital revenue when actually it was another bung from the uniquely generous Richardson.
Meanwhile, hanging over them is the legal action that insists they got the Ricoh on the cheap. If I were a Wasps fan I would be looking at the relatively stable Coventry City with a degree of envy: City’s latest losses were less than £2m, which is around about what you might expect for a decent sized club in the third tier.
The Sky Blues supporters are, of course, beside themselves with fury that they will not be able to watch their team play in their home city and have been apt to blame the owners, as is so often the case.
This seems to me a bit harsh. Without the intervention of the hedge fund monkeys, Coventry City would not exist at all and SISU have put an awful lot of money into the club, without seeing very much in the way of a return.
Again one is tempted to ask why they have done this, but as they are all financial experts I suppose they must know what they are doing.
League One is rapidly becoming a sanctum of the lost and the dispossessed, given the travails of poor Bolton Wanderers.
There was a time, fairly recently, when Coventry City had the longest unbroken spell in the top tier of any club, Arsenal and Everton excepted — 34 years of pleasant over-achievement that included a memorable FA Cup final win over Tottenham Hotspur in 1987, participation in the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup and a two-legged tie against Bayern Munich, and a top-six finish. And that delightful goal off a free kick scored by Ernie Hunt after Willie Carr’s illegal flick-up, which we all tried to copy in the playground.
Sentimentalists such as me, then, rather hope that Coventry’s problems come to an end very quickly. There is the suggestion now that City’s owners may attempt to build a new ground somewhere in the environs of Coventry. In which case, what on earth will happen to the Ricoh Arena if Wasps go bust? Or even if they don’t? It seems a little bit profligate in these straitened times.
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I wonder how much Joy paid for that.
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It really is sloppy journalism.
Is he actually a CCFC supporter or just a prat writing a one eyed piece.
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I've copied and pasted my post on DW.
Sisu PR machine grinds on. Did Joy Seppala dictate this article whilst sitting on Rod Liddle's face?
Bur seriously - does The Times/Sunday Times have it in for us? First Owen Slot and Alex Lowe wrote a nasty hatchet job on Lima and now this ill-informed drivel.
Rod Liddle is not a well respected journalist, anyone wanting an insight into his methods only has to read this Guardian article which criticises him for vilifying disabled people.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/19/rod-liddle-disabled-people-hate-media-me (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/19/rod-liddle-disabled-people-hate-media-me)
Liddle wrote his piece of crap in The Sunday Times last month.
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This is starting to niggle now. I'm wondering if Wasps need to be more aggressive in the press about all this. There again there's a big part of me that applauds Wasps for staying out of it.
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This is starting to niggle now. I'm wondering if Wasps need to be more aggressive in the press about all this. There again there's a big part of me that applauds Wasps for staying out of it.
I agree it would be nice if Wasps Press Machine (??) took articles like this to task.
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Bust and relegated with all our best players leaving seems to be the main pr thrust at the moment.
Guess come next December we'll have some idea as to how true that is.
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Bust and relegated with all our best players leaving seems to be the main pr thrust at the moment.
Guess come next December we'll have some idea as to how true that is.
Do you know something the rest of us don't?
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He is pessimistic at best.
Don't you just love SBT - they have found an article that backs up their world view.
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Bust and relegated with all our best players leaving seems to be the main pr thrust at the moment.
Guess come next December we'll have some idea as to how true that is.
Do you know something the rest of us don't?
Absolutely not. It's just then the new accounts will be done and we'll hopefully have some idea of how the season is going.
I'm hopefully optimistic, but then i usually am with wasps and England.
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A far more balanced view in a couple of recent articles from The Guardian/Observer:
David Conn April 20th:
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/apr/20/toxic-tactics-coventry-slide-oblivion-litigious-hedge-fund-sisu (https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/apr/20/toxic-tactics-coventry-slide-oblivion-litigious-hedge-fund-sisu)
David Conn 7th June:
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/jun/07/coventry-city-to-groundshare-with-birmingham-city-next-season-efl (https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/jun/07/coventry-city-to-groundshare-with-birmingham-city-next-season-efl)
Thanks to RogerE on DW for bringing them to our attention.
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David Conn is pretty thorough in his work. The Gruniard was the only paper that saw through the Munto saga at Notts County and Conn was instrumental in that. The rest seemed to think Sven Goran Erikson and Sol Campbell were perfectly normal people to have around a struggling League 2 side and just repeated the lines fed to them by Munto. This was when Campbell had just left Arsenal (in fact he may have even left Arsenal for Notts, but my memory may be messing me about there). It would seem the ST is doing the same here, probably for an easy life.
Also football clubs will always illicit more sympathy than a rugby (or any other sports club).
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A far more balanced view in a couple of recent articles from The Guardian/Observer:
David Conn April 20th:
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/apr/20/toxic-tactics-coventry-slide-oblivion-litigious-hedge-fund-sisu (https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/apr/20/toxic-tactics-coventry-slide-oblivion-litigious-hedge-fund-sisu)
David Conn 7th June:
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/jun/07/coventry-city-to-groundshare-with-birmingham-city-next-season-efl (https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/jun/07/coventry-city-to-groundshare-with-birmingham-city-next-season-efl)
Thanks to RogerE on DW for bringing them to our attention.
Thanks Ross, I would have posted them on here, but kept getting a "site can't be reached" message for about an hour earlier.
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Bust and relegated with all our best players leaving seems to be the main pr thrust at the moment.
Guess come next December we'll have some idea as to how true that is.
Also that Wasps have been dishonest in negotiations, as SISU/CCFC signed an agreement to cease all Legal Proceedings yet Nick Eastwood citing a lack of commitment to ceasing Legals as a blocker.
However, they seem to overlook that SISU/CCFC signed that document in mid-April knowing full well that was a pre-requisite to discussions all along, yet had submitted an EC Complaint in February, so signed the Letter knowing proceedings would still be in place.
When Wasps then (presumably) requested that they indemnify them against any EC findings to effectively delivery the same pre-requisite to having discussions of ceasing all Legal Action SISU/CCFC rejected and that was the end of talks for both sides, for now.
Just a complete mess.
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I've just read an article from Rod Liddle in the Spectator. It is basically an anti left, islamaphobic rant where he supports Tommy Robinson and calls the threats against Jess Phillips, Anna Soubry and other female MPs as 'a little bit rude'. I think that tells us everything about how seriously we can take that article on the Times.
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I have a feeling Liddle may have at one time appeared on some TV programs.. perhaps Have I got news for you, maybe some news discussion type programs.
I suspect he's a freelance journalist who writes content aimed at the target audience (click bait) so I'd take everything he writes with a pinch of salt.
He's probably in the same mould as AA Gill or Will Self earning money writing as a self professed pretentious intellect.. whereas he's probably just a bit of an arse scrabbling around for his next column.
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I have a feeling Liddle may have at one time appeared on some TV programs.. perhaps Have I got news for you, maybe some news discussion type programs.
I suspect he's a freelance journalist who writes content aimed at the target audience (click bait) so I'd take everything he writes with a pinch of salt.
He's probably in the same mould as AA Gill or Will Self earning money writing as a self professed pretentious intellect.. whereas he's probably just a bit of an arse scrabbling around for his next column.
That's exactly the conclusion I drew. I've never read the Spectator before (my daughter is wanting to apply to study Politics at Uni, so I thought I'd get her some reading material), but I get the feeling that that journal is largely filled with writers of the same ilk to be honest. The New Statesman is the next magazine in line!