Officially the worst ever Barnsley team

I have seen in my time of supporting the club since the 90’s. Absolutely sickening to see how much of a state the club finds itself in.

I was absolutely delighted when these owners took over, as we were not really progressing under Patrick Cryne, who saved us, but clearly didn’t know how to run a football club properly. So these owners were welcomed with open arms. They made promises about improving the matchday experience, about making improvements to the ground, and the most important promise was not to do anything “crazy”. Well for starters that last one has been broken straight away! Just look at the state of us ffs!

Im afraid this is the start of a downward spiral, it’s going to take something miracle like to save us from sinking like a stone. Next season will be a long old hard slog with relegation a realistic possibility, we are a shambles on & off the pitch, & with the clubs shocking recruitment policies we’ll struggle to attract any decent players. God knows who the new manager will be, but who the hell in their right mind would touch us & ruin their career?

It’s a sorry state of a affairs, & I’m out, won’t be renewing until these owners bugger off, which sadly isn’t looking like anytime soon!

 

You'll probably get the old timers on soon to tell you the tales about the years in the old fourth division where winning re-election was a doubt. Worst in your memory doesn't necessarily mean worst ever.

 

Those are the people Cryne relied on.

 

The old timers are here. Yes we were bottom of the 4th division but we didn't give up trying. These no hopers haven't an ounce of commitment in them. Particularly and here i am again Woodrow bashing. But as a captain he is non existent as for tackling he couldn't tackle a good dinner

 

We were in much better hands under cryne than these clowns if he was still here id most likely be renewing. Im going on my own boycott time people woke up.

 

The difference is Cryne cared, these tossers don’t.

 

I agree also cryne borrowed the club money after relegations much of which was wrote off. Hope people arent thinking these clowns will do the same 5k season ticket holders trying to compete with Wednesday derby and sunderland but our budget will be closer to fleetwood and wycombe. Really can see us dropping again.

 

Cryne played on the "just be happy to have a club" mantra and people eventually swallowed it. It's the reason we settle for the crap we do until it's too late. Maybe if the fans had been more vociferous against Cryne he'd have maybe sold up earlier before he was terminally ill. Then he wouldn't have had to rush through the sale to these Charlatans.

 

The same Patrick Cryne who, over his tenure, donated £3.5m to the club and wrote off £12.5m of loans. Admittedly Oakwell Holdings received around £7.4m on the sale but to compare him and the current owners, investment -£750k is not a fair comparison in my own opinion.

 

I'm not. I'm saying he massively contributed to the mindset of the support.

 

Isn’t the fact that the championship will always have at least 6 teams with parachute payments, others like Stoke, Reading, Derby being bank rolled by multi millionaire owners and the rest struggling to compete.

My own view is that it wasn’t Patrick that made us uncompetitive but the changing finance models other clubs operated under and the growing impact of the premier league.

The fairy tale stories of Bournemouth and Brentford were bank rolled by £100m upwards of investment.

 

I still think he panicked and pulled the plug financially too early. That should have been when he looked to sell rather than placing a manager on gardening leave.

 

Probably agree there but how many of us would sacrifice our family’s wealth to the extent he did?

I think you are right that the switch in policy came about like a knee jerk but seeing your own wealth start to diminish rapidly and no end in sight could have been a big factor.

 

Incredibly naive to believe an investment arm of a venture capitalist company was going to result in any investment. Their goal is to make money not spend it. What we could have expected and haven’t got is them running the club professionally and having strategy plans that are flexible and changed if they are failing. And don’t appoint people in customer facing roles if they are terrible communicators.

 

I remember when we got parachute money. Just when we had a decent team with premiership experience and loads of fans, just when we needed an experienced manager to push on to the next level and go for promotion, we set a cheap, inexperienced, untried player manager on and IMO completely wasted the opportunity that the parachute cash gave us.

 

You mean by being half a game from getting promotion back to the Prem?

 

We needed a top manager at the time. Bassett came a year too late because we'd spunked too much on the likes of Sheron, Kevin Richardson and Van de Laan. He had the pressure of knowing it had to happen that season. If he'd been a year earlier we might not have signed Hignett but I'm sure he'd have made better use of the money.

 

Patrick had his flaws but if he hadn't gotten ill I think he was just getting going. I remember the meeting in the exec where he said he didn't want to be in control and running the club but eventually he had to and he ended up doing quite a good job of it and we started doing well. Then he also said he would rather see Hourihane and Winall see out their contracts than sell them - they owed us nothing. He loved Conor and tried his best to keep him but failed. Then he got ill and everything went tits up which is a shame - maybe he would have continued to build us maybe we would have continued to yoyo. What I do know though is he was a fan and wanted us to do well and build. These muppets in charge have zero interest and affinity to the club, the town or the people. They have no interest in building us up as a footballing force which is what football WAS about. They just see us as an investment vehicle to make money from. They care not for league position or stature so long as they continue to make money form the club in salary and player sales etc. ROI. Thats all they care about.

Until we get them out and return to a model where we have a local businessman/woman at the helm we will continue to spin our wheels and degrade further. Its just a question of how long we have this disease in our club and how far we slip in the meantime.

 

This is it for me. I never expected them to splash the cash but I really did expect/hope for a massive improvement in the professionalism of the club, from recruitment, to player’s contracts, match day experience, commercial output, sponsorship etc etc.

We’ve actually declined on most of the areas. The most disappointing aspect for me is the match day experience. I was hoping Oakwell was going to go down the German model with attracting fans there hours before games and building up the atmosphere but it’s worse than it’s ever been.

The club is dying on it’s arse and I can’t see how this gets turned around quickly.

 

I remember cold nights in the 60s at Darlington under bad floodlights watching Kenny Brown. Bottom division must have been worse than this side, but it doesn’t seem like it.