But this has been the whole problem. First of all I am no Greene fan. Greene had taken the club on with the strong backing of the RFL. He had no idea about rugby, indeed had never been to a match. So the only thing he could do was rely on his coach and advisor put in place by the RFL. This is the guy that badly let down Green and why I distrust the RFL.

Whilst I agree with pretty much every point, you also have to accept that if you take that huge risk and gamble everything on making the middle 8s, you have to accept part of the blame if the team doesn't make it. Yes it's their fault for not making it, but the club then being in financial ruin is largely down to taking that risk.

I agree, had he not spent all that and we had a barely competitive squad that didn't even get close to making the top 4, then people would have moaned about that too. Undoubtedly he was between a rock and a hard place when he took the gamble. But the financial state the club has found itself in is down to the gambles, regardless of whether the reasons for those gambles are good ones or not.


It's like someone betting their life savings on the favourite in a horse race. If they then lose them, is it the horse's fault for letting them down that they're now skint?

Well, if I ran a rugby club, it is the sort of gamble I would personally think reasonable to take.

Don't ever forget we were within one kick of returning to SL and then it would have been a whole new ball game.

And as for 2016, well, I still can't understand why the players played as badly as they did in our key game, and nobody could have reasonably predicted they would, but of course the damage had largely already been done by that team contriving to be out of the top 4, which, to be blunt, was never in anyone's script. There's gambles and there's gambles, but to get on in a sports club you HAVE to take some gambles, nobody will settle for grey solid mediocrity, but if I were Green I would feel that our highly expensive squad of pampered players had dismally failed to keep up their end of the bargain.

where could I get a copy of the report?

Did Green sanction Ferres to acquire the ridiculous number of players he did in that squad?If he did then he is as much to blame as the reckless Ferres.But as we all know,the rot set in under Caisley with the unforgivable Harrisgate.

More really to do with the Council no longer willing to pay for the upkeep of Odsal from 2003.

Accounts took a nosedive after then. Subsequent mistakes over Harris, keeping McNamara so long etc compounded matters.

There's definitely 2 types of screwups for Bulls over the last 20years.
There are missed opportunities - Tesco backed OSV plan for example, not focusing on academy early or intensely enough
And there are (what I will call) stupidities, decisions deliberately made by the board which were plain wrong. Harrisgate. The Odsal settlement, £60 season tickets, recruitment.

The way the league structures are set up now the only way out of the championship is to spend big and BUY your way out. If you haven't got a sugar daddy bank rolling you are not going anywhere. At the end of the season you have to have a team that has been playing part timers all year turn up and produce the goods on 7 or 8 occasions against professional clubs who have been playing higher quality opposition all year. The new structure now encourages the championship clubs who have superleague aspirations to roll the dice. Mark Green rolled the dice for 2 years and lost. Management has been poor and the squad massively underperformed last year. The match at Fev was a disgrace and the players on that pitch should have been ashamed of themselves.

None of this excuses the fact players were being signed after the defeat to Fev, some from overseas. Season tickets were sold and Green publically said the club would remain full time after the Fev defeat. Surely he knew the impact this would have. I did as I called it at the time like you did that there now was a massive black hole in the finances and trouble was ahead, the thing is the club just carried on regardless spending more money it didn't have and that lies with the man at the top. Ferres and RHP saw the iceberg and took to the lifeboats.

Isn't this what franchises sort to avoid?

Are we not getting a copy of the Administrator's Report, then?

[*]

What kind of screwup is thinking you can get away without paying VAT on season tickets?

I think it's down to selling them as memberships i'm sure thats what the argument was, I dont think you pay VAT or pay smaller amounts on sold memberships. Bit daft really when its plainly clear they were season tickets

Haven't we done this in years gone by when your ticket/pass got you discount at various places. In that time you could have said it was a membership as it gave you other benefits. However with the later version I think the only benefit was that it got you into matches and that is why HMRC classed it as a season ticket and not a membership.

On the face of it I'd agree but the law is a very strange beast sometimes.

To be fair, the idea that Green thought he didn't need to pay VAT because they were 'memberships' is what I understood the problem to be. When you think about it, having a club and allowing 'members' free entry and use of facilities isn't[i that[/i much different from the concept of season tickets and I can certainly see how the law relating to those entities might overlap in places.

Whether he just, 'didn't set it up correctly', or was 'bang out of order', might often need to be settled some arcane legal processes, I suppose. ...and what mood the judge is in!