Just weighing up my favourite bit:
- When he referred to himself in the third person
- When he took the credit for us staying up
- When he threw a young loanee walking into a horrendous dressing room for his first EFL loan spell under a bus
- When he had a go at Chris Powell for getting rid of players yet knowing that the wage bill was massively unsustainable.
- When he alluded to knowing more about fitness and conditioning than our fitness and conditioning team
- When he signed off by calling our fans keyboard warriors.
As usual with Ron, there's enough spin and crafty omission of truth to pull the wool over the eyes of most fans who aren't ITK and you can't blame them for that. He should have been a PR guru.
HOWEVER, there are a few bits in there where he does come across well, I have never questioned his commitment to the club, I just think he runs the club badly. He's acknowledged the need for a CEO which is a massive positive. Unfortunately, it looks like the actual appointment is some way off given the need for progress with FF, which obviously is never going to happen.
It seems from this that the money for next week is in hand although it could well be a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul - I would have liked further scrutiny on this although to be fair Ron would have easily been able to bat this away with some "business sensitive" line.
Encouraging that he owns the mistakes over Bond and Waddock. The stuff about rowing back on signing players in January doesn’t sit right (although he is correct to say it’s a terrible window for permanent signings). IIRC he did the Talksport interview after the Bolton/MK/Wimbledon games and said we’d be signing five or six players. Are we really buying that a disappointing but not catastrophic 0-0 with Tranmere was enough for him to write off the next four months?
Nice buttering up of the council, and an insight into how things work with FF as most people really don't know the ins and outs of that kind of thing.
Interesting insight on how much it costs us to keep playing at Roots Hall. £300,000 over the summer just to keep it up to scratch is a huge amount of money. You do wonder how long it has left.
Worryingly there seems to be little acknowledgement of the ruinous late Brown era and why we are now paying for it, although he did say he backs his managers which is a way of spinning it positively I suppose (and it can't really be denied, even if was bloody stupid). “There isn’t a budget really” well given we’ve been under an embargo and have been paying players and staff late I would suggest there probably should be one.
Could have done with some bullet points, but I guess the Echo had editorial control this time. I would like to have seen more questions about why we seem to struggle so badly with recruiting players, and why it seems we are blacklisted by every agent and club in the country.
But it was a genuinely interesting read and fair play to Ron, even though he has been largely responsible for this cluster****, for finally communicating with the fans.