Quote: G1 "Whether Hetherington took advantage of the situation at the time Harris left us or not it does not excuse Caisley's idiocy and arrogance in signing the player.'"
Did I suggest it did in what I posted? I and a lot of others - including, I suspect his fellow directors, took what Caisley told us on trust - as you well know. Over quite a few aspects of this affair. I'm sure I was not the only one to feel very angry and betrayed when it transpired that we made fools of ourselves defending a position when certain key facts appeared not to have been told to us - or that CC was maybe not able to back up what he had originally assured people of (I choose my words carefully).
Quote: G1 "Your comment about what we "couldn't do" on the field is a bit bizarre. We weren't far off you in your greatest year, 2003, and had beaten you twice already in 2004.
You were the architects of your own downfall. You wilfully signed him and you wilfully refused to enhance your captains contract and play Leon at Stand off. Don't try and lay any blame for your current demise around these parts.
GH may well have pulled a blinder over Harris but that had nothing to do with us causing Bradford any ills. Chris Caisley shouldn't have touched him or should have done the proper thing and approached us.
'"
Look at what I said Gareth. I did not say "You" did to us...I said "the Harris affair". All Leeds did to us was what Caisley gave you opportunity to do - which Hetherington gleefully took. That only became fully clear much later. And what I was talking about was not beating us, but absolutely hammering us - maybe that bit was not entirely clear. You'd never, apart from maybe once when you knocked us out of the cup at VP, absolutely hammered us IIRC. And again, I stress, I said "the Harris affair", not "you".
I never got to the bottom of just how much of IH's contract was funded by external image rights - and so was likely from funding not necessarily available to pay more to Peacock. But again, it seems quite clear now that JP was badly served by Caisley (and Noble?) and Saints have proven that Noble was completely and utterly wrong about Pryce. Nowhere did I suggest that was down to Leeds. It was down to the Harris signing.
Quote: G1 "Besides, I am not entirely sure that the Harris signing was the sole reason for your on field issues right now.'"
Of course it was not. The decision - forced or otherwise - to take over Odsal has been pretty instrumental too. There are other important historic reasons too, I suspect, about which I am not going to speculate on here, which might explain a few things too. But it still seems to me that the Harris signing, and everything that resulted from it, was the biggest single cause of the accelerated decline of the club.
What I was referring to in my first paragraph was the acknowledgment that Harris might have been a bit badly done to by GH at the time of his move - both you and BR seemed to indicate that. At the time all the business was going on, all we ever got told from on here was that IH had no moral argument at all, did we not? And that Hetherington was only doing what was morally right rather than taking an in-his-lap opportunity to get one over Caisley. Now the dust has settled, some of you guys are acknowledging the wider, less partisan picture in the same way that some of us are.
Yes indeed, it is just a pity that the story now - from both sides - is not the story that was portrayed at the time. Would have saved us all a lot of trouble, and for some of us a load of anguish and embarrassment.
