Steele Stones Shackell Crainey Golbourne Perkins Dawson Mellis Butterfield Vaz Te O Grady Reight Team
We aren't skint - compared to most of the Football League we are in an enviable position, ie not millions in debt and/or with mystery foreign backers who could pull the plug at any time. Cliche time, but we are cutting our cloth accordingly, and doing ok on it, as we have done for 126 years; long may it continue.
We were only £2 million in debt then which I suspect would put us in the top 10 richest clubs in terms of the debt rather than turnover. We also owned land worth 5 times that so why the hell we went into admin overnight god only knows. Dennis had a lot to answer for by keeping it from the shareholders.
I would rather play Bobby or Fozzy than Shackell at centre half but other than that it's a pretty good team.
I'm not saying you're wrong mate, but if you haven't I'd definitely recommend you read John Dennis' book. You'll find the whole book interesting anyway as it's a really good read, but it might change your mind about him being such a villain during the administration saga. You might not change your mind, John admits his mistakes and takes full responsibility, but it's very interesting to read things from his perspective and to understand exactly what he was up against.
I haven't read the book, but do we believe he is completely honest about everything? Does he talk about his decision to not work with Patrick Cryne, which ultimately sent us in to admin?
Obviously I can't say for certain if he's honest because I wasn't there and I don't know the facts, but I certainly feel as if he was being honest. He spoke a lot about the Patrick Cryne bid. According to John Dennis, Patrick Cryne wanted to take over the club with a controlling interest without compensating the share holders. The shares that had been in Barnsley fans families for years would have essentially become worthless. John and the board didn't think any of the shareholders would have found that acceptable.
Just to add to that. John made it perfectly clear that Patrick's intentions were entirely honourable, extremely astute and well though out. Patrick wanted his money to go in to team building. Perfectly understandable, that's where I'd want my money to go too if I had such funds. But we can't get away from the fact that Barnsley FC was already owned by a group for shareholders. For John to take Patrick's proposal to the share holders he had to commit to that bid. In the shareholders meeting would be other directors who were already planning a takeover that would offer a cash settlement for the shares. John would then have to back a bid that didn't offer a cash settlement for the shares against one that did. In his opinion that was an impossible situation that he was bound to lose.
Thanks for that quick overview mate. I wasn't being mischievous with my post, just asking for a snapshot so thanks for the response. Sounds like I need to read it ......
I didn't think you were mate. I think it's a question that many people would like to know about. We've only got John Dennis' side of things, but even from that I can understand both points of view. I can completely understand why Patrick Cryne only wanted to use his money to help rebuild the club. That's exactly the way that I would feel. But I can also understand the situation John Dennis was in, trying to convince share holders to give up their stake in the club. We had an archaic system of one member one vote, rather than one share one vote. It had served us well for many years and protected the club somewhat, but when we got in serious trouble it acted against us in trying to find a way out of it. Patrick Cryne is rightly held in high regard for getting us out of the mess we were in after administration. He's put a hell of a lot of his own money in to our club and we should all be very grateful. But imho John Dennis was a great chairman too. It went sour in the end, but he did so many good things for our football club.