Salut! Sunderland is always anxious to present the other side of a contentious story. We cannot pretend to know much about the Fulwell73 group of wealthy, would-be owners (could they be the mysterious unseen people who wanted to buy out this site not so long back?) beyond what we’ve read elsewhere
But we do know what Paul Summerside, another long-suffering fan, makes of our current predicament. A stern critic of the club and especially Moyes last season, he is now on the side of rational consideration and a spot of patience …
The question introducing our poll at our Facebook group – join with ease if you use that social forum, read: “do we have to accept the inevitable consequence of the present scandalous stalemate is that promotion next season is an utter fantasy?”
Paul’s answer: “of course not!”. And he went on:
Phase 1 pre-season. Player fitness and friendlies organised. Ball/Stockdale/Dickman and others well capable of filling in short term. The players, especially those wishing to leave will have a professional approach to pre season.
Important thing is to get the buy out sorted ASAP.
Phase 2 Short looks keen to move this along at pace, dropping his valuation to an absolute bargain £85 million. (Bricks and mortar of the club are worth that) This is significantly closer to the initial £50 million offered by the German consortium. Frankly, if they cant raise that to what Short is asking, I would have serious worries about them as a force.
Once this is sorted, rumour has it by the end of this week, one way or the other we can turn to
Phase 3 a managerial appointment. Problem we’ve had to date is the uncertainty brought about, by trying to multitask manager appointment, with the buy out. This was always a non-starter and frightened away anyone remotely interested in the job.
The new owners will want their own people, possibly an injection of vorsprung durk technik*.
Short/Bain will have their targets should the buy out not materialise. Either way a manager WILL be appointed.
Conclusion The next two weeks should be very interesting times for SAFC supporters and fans.
Patience, and a slice of reality pie needed. Onwards and Upwards.
* This German phrase is usually translated into English as “progress through technology”. A literal translation would be “advancement through technology”. There’s no single English word which is an exact English equivalent of “vorsprung”; “to leap ahead” comes close. Thanks phrases.org
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Paul, I admire your fans confidence and hope, but have some niggling issues with the sentiment, apropos:
Phase 1 – depending on the ,hem, professionalism of the squad after last seasons efforts is wildly optimistic, this does not stick to all players, but there were quite a few senior culprits who envisage that they are ‘better’ than the championship and automatically deserve to be in a ‘Big Team’ (Borini, Kone etc spring to mind) then there are the ‘Big Players’ who appear to be incapable of raising their game (Rodwell etc).
Phase 2 – agreed, its priced to sell, but if they can’t raise the funds at this level, what about funds for team strengthening. No point being sold cheap to a consortium who do not have the funds for building a decent team, we are just replacing like with like.
Phase 3 – No manager will come without job security to allow him the time to do the required job, which is significant at SAFC. The time period for the job has to be agreed and the funds available for achieving the set goals made available, otherwise like for like again.
These three disparate phases are not going to fall into place overnight, Shorts eagerness to sell at this time is undermining the end goals. Don’t get me wrong, I an as happy as the next man to be rid of him and hopefully his associated cohorts that have pulled the club down, but the timing of it and the completely lack of organisation or consideration for the season ahead are scandalous and another fair reflection of this administrations complete and utter incompetence of running a football club.
I wouldn’t trust this lot to run a bath!!!!
And if the takeover doesn’t happen, there’s this big assumption that Short/Bain will simply revert to Plan B and appoint one of their “targets”. But we’ve already seen them in action, when they got publicly humiliated by the guy from Aberdeen! If they knew what they were doing, why did they even approach McInnes with the takeover hanging like a noose around their neck? “We can’t appoint a manager until the takeover is complete, so we’ll just go out and try and appoint one anyway -scaring off our first choice in the process!”
I fear AJM6730 may be right. I admire the optimism of the article and it’s a valid point of view but none of these things have actually happened yet, Nobody has bought the club. Short is still there but desperate to get away. There is no manager at the club. Just about the only two players who came out of last season with any credit either went to Everton last week or will shortly be off to Bournemouth. Others will follow them out of the door – especially those who can command a fee, leaving a threadbare playing staff incapable of mounting an assault on the summit of the Championship. Just because last season was **** doesn’t mean it can’t get a whole lot worse…
How simplistic. Very straightforward, by the time I go out for a pint on Friday night we’ll have new owners, a manager and rumours about who we’re going to sign.
Forget it. It’s a train crash. If you think last close season was bad, this one is going to put us back in the third division.