One of the major problems was frittering away the near £5m handout from the council for the stadium upkeep on the coral stand a a very good set of players instead of actually keeping it for it's intended purpose

The Coral Stand is one of the best sources of income we had so WTF you on about?

Surely by now the Coral stand would have repaid the original investment ?

Actually the club needed the Coral Stand as it had no corporate facilities at Odsal at all in 2000. What they should have done was to get a loan to pay for it rather than use the handout to pay for it outright. Simply not having corporate facilities would have left them unable to entertain sponsors etc. The money would have frittered away even faster otherwise. The Coral Stand is probably the only profitable part of the business!

A lot of the handout did go on the stadium upkeep too. I remember Duffy telling me of £70k that was needed to sort out drains in one part of the stadium that had collapsed. Possibly spending some of it on Lesley Vainikolo and Co wasn’t arguably the best thing to do in hindsight but I would suggest that as soon as the Council came out of that agreement the writing was on the wall anyway.

That’s the issue. No club can survive at Odsal without a wealthy benefactor covering the costs of upkeep. The Council were that benefactor in some ways for a time but that money they handed out wasn’t going to cover things indefinitely.

Probably so by now yes.

You have missed the point more than Addy's MPG kick .

The act of "favouritism" means Bradford as a club will always be hamstrung whilst the club pay rent and are saddled with all the bills whilst the RFL pay a pittance to CBMDC.

Legal and Planning considerations mean nothing if the lease is held by anyone without the money to develop the land and the message from Thorne is you can't be viable without a modern stadium.

With the RFL choosing not to sell they are ultimately interfering with the ownership process buy turning away people with real money because they are offering nothing in return.

This, in my opinion, means we'll only ever be a target for the Lambs and Greens of the world. Which is fine if we accept that Green couldn't even keep us alive in the Championship and our future lies part time (though how a much smaller, part time club can survive in Odsal is beyond my crumb of a brain ).

Such a scenario, for me, does not fulfill the remit the RFL put forward of a 'successful, professional club the City of Bradford deserves'.

No one is going to be stupid enough to build such a stadium on the land whilst the RFL insist on retaining the lease. You've have to be a fool to do that.

Get your £2.50 on the Euro raffle - it's £62m tonight.

Another fact of modern life to depress me further.

Couldn't really see 24000 turn up to watch the drains being rodded

Not sure about Henry Paul being a proven and experienced coach. Personally I'd have stuck with Rohan.

Very tempting but I the interest of good taste I will decline to lower myself to make the comment that resides in my head.

This really seems like a stop on the way to Admin4. But it all depends on the agreement with the RFL re: rent. If the rent is the same then I think it won't be long before Chalmers is homeless. I am hoping that if the supposed salary issue is the reason for Rohan leaving then the owners already have a replacement lined up.

I know this comment was a while ago but I'm just catching up on all the posts and I thought these 3 replies so good I just had to remind everyone - We're Bradford fans, we're at an all time low but we never lose our sense of humour.



Reply #1

Article in today's YP about yesterday's press briefing from the RFL, with a couple of points I'd not heard/seen before. Apologies, couldn't find it on their website so can't post a link yet.

1. Rimmer stated 3 parties are keen to work alongside the new owners.
2. Chalmers and Lowe have not provided a financial bond as a guarantee.

From point 1, it would seem clear that the bigger plan around stadium development is the big prize for the new owners, there is no big prize from owning a championship team you have no emotional attachment to and from 2, wasn't it a pre-requisite to provide a bond in the application process? I suppose that Chalmers and Lowe haven't provided a personal guarantee, so maybe someone else has??

If this has been said before, apologies, can't keep track of all the threads and speed of developments.