Quote: RDM "Adey, I agree that there appeared to be little time to do anything other than pour money down the drain back in April...............sorry, support the pledge.
You're right in saying that Wakefield fans were never asked to raise half a million quid, but WE WERE asked to "dig deep" in an effort to raise a six-figure sum at the beginning of last year. Ultimately, the fans decided we'd had enough of the Richardsons so WE CHOSE not to contribute knowing that the uncertainty of Administration would follow.
Given what you now know and with all the RFL financial support through the Administration period, it's perfectly reasonable to say that a Supporters' Trust COULD have been put together and (given how much the supporters raised in the pledge) been able to put a bid to take on the Bulls that was worth more than the OK bid.
All you can hope for now is that that Omar Khan (who, just like Andrew Glover never harboured ambitions to own a RL club) is able to put the Bulls back on a sound footing for the years to come.'"
Sorry mate,
but you people are just not listening.
Whether we could have raised more than £150k is totally academic. Personally, in the circumstances of the time, I very much doubt it since we would have been competing against the club and at the time few people were aware we even HAD a supporters' trust.
The new owners are having to go through serious due dilligence by the RFL, to prove thgat they have the MILLIONS needed to fund the ongoing losses, at least while they come up with ways of cutting costs and increasing income. How the hell would you have expected a supporters' trust to have been able to do that?
This really is getting quite tiresome now.
Had the fans not contributed the £400k (it was not £500k, btw, and if you knock out the contributions from outside of the Bulls fanbase it was rather less than that) to the pledge, do you really think a supporters trust - staffed anyway only by a handful of spare-time volunteers - could have raised that sort of money from a standing start in such a short period of time? Of course not. And we would anyway then have been hailed as the bad guys for undermining the club's efforts. And lets say that as a result the club had been placed into administration just after Easter, as was lined up had the pledge failed, do you realisticaly think any kind of a bid - costed, financed, staffed - could have been put together in time? Of course not. The administration would have been unfunded, and while the fans were trying to get organised the most likely scenario IMO is that a group involving former shareholders would have pounced. The very last thing most fans will have wanted to see.
And how were we to know that certain shareholders were set on staging a coup to oust the board - that Caisley announced the day before the pledge closed and when most of the funds had been raised?
I for one am getting sick and tired of being lectured by people who never actually had to atempt it themselves - indeed who admit that they CHOSE not to attempt it themselves - to do something that they know little about in a political and financial situation that likewise they clearly know little about.