That's fair enough. Good to see reasoned argument reassert itself.

My view is different in that I was (and remain) desperate to see the club avoid administration. Blind chance kicks in once that happens, and I really could not see how administration would solve anything financially. Still can't. If Caisley DID have investors who would not invest until Hood and Bennett stood down, well the pledge bought time so they could stand down or be removed, and so any such impediment has now gone.

By calling in the pledges, the old board avoided immediate administration. That action bought time for work to be done on a more sustainable financial settlement going forward. Whether it was to be under the auspices of the old board, or a new board, was and remains pretty academic in my book (and still is) provided we stay out of administration.

Should it ever transpire that avoiding administration was only ever a fools' hope, then I will join you in taking issue with the old board. At present, as you know I have an issue with Caisley for making the internal battle public at such a crucial time. It would seem from the letter that Caisley did not believe administration could be avoided under Hood, from my reading of it, but so far we remain in business. And the longer we remain so, the greater the hope must surely be that we will remain so?

Caisley will surely have known that convening an EGM to remove Hood and Bennett could not be done before the likely timing of appointing administrators? If so, and given the seeming intransigence of all parties he must surely have realised that Hood was unlikely to go until forced? And also, if administration was just a week away how did he himself propose to avoid it if Hood had resigned on the spot? There may be answers to these questions, but - like the question you raise - at present we are not party to them. I doubt we will ever be.

In the circumstances, therefore, I would have expected Caisley, minded as he clearly was to have a reckoning, to have said something like:

"OK, you believe you have a better chance than us of keeping the club out of administration; and you have left us sod all time anyway to do anything about it on our own account - we'll deal with that later. Go ahead then and save the club - if you believe you can. And in public, and to these outside investors you claim you have, we will not oppose you. If you fail, we'll string you up and you should expect no less. If despite our expectations to the contrary you should succeed, then once the funding IS in place we will have a day of reckoning about how we got to this situation. And it is extremely likely that you will be removed from office anyway. But at least you will still have your shares, and there will be less reason for us to consider suing you."

Or even something less hostile.

Had he done so, I could have little issue with him. Him and his group owned the majority of the shares, and within reason were entitled to act accordingly - and a situation had been presented to him where he probably had little choice but to take some action.

But its seems it never happened. And until it becomes clear why it did not, and why he chose to go public when he did, my main gripe since the pledge was announced is with Mr Caisley. Before then is a different issue.

Hopefully, until such time as more information becomes available we can continue to agree to differ, and reasonably amicably?

If this is true you can't help but feel that a newco would have been a damn sight better with 500k in the bank to start with. I.e. If things were that bad the administrators should have been called in weeks ago.

Leeking at the previous messages coming from the club it appears they were but the pledge 500k would slow the process down and allow time for investment. I believe the investors will be there but will not want to take on the debt. The losers if this is the case will be those who are owed money and of course those who paid into the pledge (however as it was voluntary and to support the club you love its never a loss)

It was always going to be difficult and hindsight is always superior but perhaps the club should have gone then, that said there is nothing official yet on this just rumours and texts?

Good luck Wakey went through it and whilst our team may not be in top form the club has had a dramatic turnaround and hopefully more good news to come in less than 3 weeks.

No, you specifically referred to the 'new lot' playing to the public gallery.

How do you square stating that the charge was disputed from within the club yet then tell us it wasn't from within the the club, 'From nowhere near the club'. I don't want a PM as I've been consistent in arguing that this type of private briefing to selective posters who'll tow the party line has been damaging and purposely misleading. I've lost count of the number of times you've fell back on the 'someone' has told you in a dark corner when the available evidence hasn't quite fitted together.

No, you haven't been critical of both camps, the Bullbuilder statement withstanding you have gone to extraordinary lengths to present the case for Hood and Co, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Neverthless, every man is allowed to believe what he wants and state it as he wants. What is slightly galling is this utter pretence of evenhandedness, this speed to lecture others on being partisan or biased, these grandfatherly warnings that we are being selectively briefed when you have been at the heart of a message board campaign to present the previous boards argument and by the very volume of your posts, dominate that argument. The charge of dishonesty and disingenuousness is laughable coming from a naked propagandist.

Your claim to change your mind is similarly risible. You have simply shifted your feet as the ground beneath you has fallen away. Ostensibly you are putting the precise same case you've made (in what must be millions of words) three years ago when I and others said the BOD should resign. What you've actually done is develop ever more sophisticated narratives to defend a man you called Duke Peter of Hood the week he gave away the lease on the ground to cover the debts he told you at a fan's forum the club didn't have. If I recall you gave me a good telling off that week as I pointed out just how absurd that story was.

On the leaker, by the time you responded at length yesterday afternoon it was obvious which camp they were in.

That was always my problem with the pledge. If things were as bad as Hood was saying then it seemed better to go into administration and then ask the fans to support newco. The fans could only be asked to pledge once and a pledge that ended up throwing the fans money down the drain would always be the worst possible outcome.

In the end I pledged, albeit very reluctantly, out of a combination of guilt and because I took Hood at his word that the extra £500k would be forthcoming.

Yep, 500 grand will be down the drain if administrators ARE called in and Hood would get the last laugh. What a disgrace of a man.

I think if you were one of the creditors who were paid from the pledge funds : players, small suppliers or the public at large via tax you would not consider it money down the drain.
As a pledger I think we kept the team on the pitch and gave the clubs squabling owners extra time to find a solution

I did ask at the time if it would have been better to go into immediate administration , and for the 500K to be used to kick start a new co, but Adey convinced me that this was a bad idea. cant help but feel my instincts were right if this rumour comes true!

As Gene Krantz said as Apollo 13 exploded, "Lets look at this in terms of status. What do we have that is working?"

The truth is we dont know and wont know! If a newco is granted the Bradford Bulls place in Superleague then its ownership will be the Caisley group, wont it? The only assets we have are the players. If Hood is to be believed (can we realistically do this?) then we have no debt as such. If Caisley is to be believed, then things are not that good!

All I can see here is that administration would enable us to:

have a clear and simple view on who owns the club. Thus making it easier to attract inverstors going forward;

clear out players that are on contracts that dont match their talent;

risk losing players that we would like to keep for the future;

lose 4-6 competition points;

risk losing our SL licence in two years;

alienate the fans who gave generously to avoid such a situation.




Its hard for me to look beyond Hood and Bennett for blame for where we are now. They could have not called in the pledge. If the leaked letter is real (yet another what if!!!!) then prior to the pledge deadline they knew that a majority of shareholders were against them and that their position was untenable, regardless of the success or otherwise of the pledge. also, the way that they presented "facts" to the fans became less and less credible as we got further into this debacle.


But hey ho! who has lost the most? Yes its the Bradford fans and rugby league fans in general who have been duped into thinking that they could avoid what has always seemed inevitable. As well as feeling sorry for ourselves, what about those players who gave their medals/ rings/ shirts for the club's survival. The club will be irrepairably damaged by this whole episode. I hope that those responsible can live with themselves.

In which case I am happy to clarify that I beleive both camps have been so doing, in their respective different ways.


I have told you in a PM anyway. Maybe you could ring the source I named and ask him yourself? I just ask that you maintain the confidence on here.


I think you will find I have. Over the clear "black hole" where I cannot account for what happened to all the Odsal proceeds, for example. Over Hood's failure to stand down when it was clear the majority of the shareholders demanded it and he had delivered on the immediate requirement of avoiding immediate administration, for example. Over his desperately poor PR over the whole pledge period, for example. Whether equally critical is a separate issue. I would also point out that what you call "evidence" is all too often no such thing, being symptoms and not necessarily causes.


I have never said I was being even-handed. I have tried to be objective, but the one side I AM on is the side of natural justice. The one thing that really riles me, more than anything else, is injustice. Much of what I have posted has been in response to what I perceived to be injustice, frequently where people were making attacks without - in my opinion - sufficient hard facts to form a more objective conclusion. I stress "perceived" - my opinion. You in turn have yours, and others have theirs. If I am a propagandist for anything, it is the truth - however uncomfortable that may be, including to me. I detest liars, and people being deliberately disingenuous comes close. As I have repeatedly said, I hold and held no brief for Hood. As I have said before, my first impression of him was that he seemed naïve and lightweight, but probably genuine. That remains my view. As does my view, again formed from observation, that Caisley seemed to be an extremely assertive bully intolerant of the views of others. Neither in my view is what I would seek in a Chairman. Maybe some amalgam of the best aspects of each would be.



Even so, when more facts become available then if necessarily I HAVE moved my position. Indeed, probably my biggest [ivolte face [/iwas over Harrisgate, when it became clear to me - in my opinion, of course - that what we had been told and assured of at the time simply cannot have been correct. Told by Mr Caisley. The other big one was of course over the Odsal Lease sale. Told by Messrs Hood, Bennett, Duckett and Duffy. And again, when it became clear to me - in my opinion of course - that what we had been told at the time cannot have been correct. I wasn't the only one to laud Hood over the Odsal sale, same as I wasn't the only one to support the Harris signing. And I wasn't the only one to find that those who argued at the time it had to be bailout had more justice in their argument than appeared to me at the time. Even if there were further motives behind the sale. Why the hell do you think I was happy to put my name to the Bullbuilder statement calling for some clear answers - once the crisis was over?


But that was not the point. I do not know who the leaker is, and can only speculate - and there was a hint, I am sure accidental, yesterday. And until yesterday I thought it must be someone from Camp Caisley - or someone doing the job they were told to do.

I have never sought to be either disingenuous or resort to derision in support of my arguments. I just wish that applied more generally.

The real problem is no information coming out of the Bulls camp / whoever
This is now leading to rampant speculation, Chinese whisper’s and secret information passed by encoded crisp packed wrappers left in a bin somewhere in Bradford. Lets just settle down and hope for the best and keep our pace makers ticking over nicely.

xxx

The club has been badly run for too long. Poor decisions across all areas.

My heart hoped that Admin could be avoided, my head though told me otherwise.

If the report is true all we can hope for is a pre-pack arrangment where players are retained and we can commence proper planning to get the club back to the top.

It will never become clear, though. Not now. I have no gripe with the new board, because it hasn't yet done anything. Which tbf, to date, includes the positive "not doing" of not putting us into administration. I suppose once they do their first ever thing, I'll know whether I have a gripe with them.

Rather than participate in the pathetic ing contest which the usual suspects launch into with the predictability of the transit of Venus, I turn yet again to the biggest mess operationally, and that is how this board, or any board, can run this shambolic place if the private company share structure remains as it is, and how any potential investor whose head is screwed on would go anywhere near a project where they know that the main protagonists are implacably hostile, won't even meet for years, and show no signs of any reconciliation.

So I am sort of assuming that unless there is a way to somehow alter the tangled web that is the present system of shareholdings, whoever is running the club will have one hand and a few fingers tied behind their back, together with the glint of several blades.

What I don't know (I assume Adey would have some idea but fail to see why he continues to share his opinions when whatever he posts, he is constantly personally vilified) is whether, now that the new board is in place, they could arrange a pre-pack the effect of which would be to effectively change this ridiculous shareholder-camps impasse. A pre-pack "from within", as it were, with a predetermined outcome and a known sensible management and operational structure going forward, instead of the current utter mess, may well be attractive to any potential "investor" they may have in the wings, and done that way, so far as I know they could preserve our playing assets as well as not shafting any small creditors. As long as the creditors vote for it. I'm no expert, but these sort of arrangements seem to very much depend on who has the casting vote/votes. I wonder who that would be?

Well... according to companies house we aren't in Admin yet !