Depressing, but it was always just a matter of timing in my view, the cash has never been there to see this plan through IMHO.

I have now pretty much given up any hope of us/someone developing Odsal in any meaningful way for top class sport. So logically we have to leave. I dont want to but I can't see a future for the club at Odsal (I'm talking the next 30 years not just the next 3) so we either leave Bradford (No idea how or where this would work) or move to VP.

In reality I think the only option is making a move to VP work, I didn't like VP last time, Im not a fan of moving there now but I see no other option.

If we occupied VP on equal terms with City, with equal "branding" and say over the running/developing we could make it work. We would need to do some building work to increase the pitch size, as has been said, just remove some of the front rows of seats in a couple of the stands and re-lay a bigger pitch (easy to say I know but surely shouldn't be beyond feasible?)

We will lose fans from south Bradford, of that there is no doubt, (we lost fans last time and that was when we had one of the best Bradford sides in a generation, god knows what would happen now) but we would need a new massive marketing push across Bradford to bring in new fans to replace the ones that just will not go to Vp and maybe we could lay on free shuttle buses from Odsal in the first few seasons to encourage people across the city? But we would just have to cope with and budget for lower crowds initially.

As for the agreement with the council either we negotiate a suitable repayment schedule, or we find some crack shot lawyers to get us out of the agreement (remember we're talking about Bradford council so just round up some 7 year olds to have a look at it and we should be out of any agreement in no time).

Sad, but I see no other option in the long term, and if thats the case we might as well start to put the plans in place to ensure our licence is not threatened in the franchising round after the next one.

Cant say i want to go to VP, but i am struggling to see other options exept move the club to a city that wants us????

I'm convinced that the Council would rip up the lease in a stroke with no penalty clauses whatsoever and no clawback of the monies paid previously if it meant the Bulls could stand alone as a viable Bradford sporting venture. I presume they might have a problem would a proposal be to re-locate out of the district.

They may not be able to deliver and pay for a £75m stadium scheme ( if they had the money alone I'm sure they would have done so ) but there would be no Council interest in obstructively blocking the Bulls "moving on". I doubt many people would object to this if it was seen as the best way forward for both parties.

Just to pee everyone off a little bit more, even my little local council can sort summat out.

rlhttp://www.calderdale.gov.uk/leisure/venues/shay/index.htmlrl

The "Council" blame the recession but there has not been a 40 year recession, and that's the time they have been screwing with Odsal Stadium. I bet that the total "consultancy fees" paid over that period would be nearly enough to have constructed a new Wembley on site, instead there are several very wealthy consultants laughing hysterically all the way to the bank, at Council taxpayers' expense, while as ever - and entirely predictably - absolutely no progress is made.

This will have come as a huge blow and a shock to Hood, who as recently as the Past Players dinner was expressing certainty that the scheme was imminently going ahead. If so, then maybe he feels the same "kick in the stomach" as I did some decades ago when I had my first experience of the Odsal Letdown. But such is the incompetence of this Council, and such is their abysmal track record on developing Odsal, that sadly most people's reaction is "WTF did you really expect?"

As has been said, having piloted the decline of Bradford with the first "Wembley of the North" grandiose pipedreams decades ago, the Council have been good at only one thing, and that is knocking down, or letting fall down, increasing chunks of the city. Unsurprisingly, with so much experience, they have now perfected this, such that they have even contrived to have half the city centre converted into a bomb site which we are now told is almost certain to remain so for at least another 4 years. Itself a wild guess with no substance to back up even that prediction. So a full decade without a Centre, then?

From the Bulls' point of view, I don't know what we can now do to survive. As Adey has pointed out, we are stuck at Odsal and it is outside our powers to just leave. Maybe the worst case scenario of letting the club go bust is the actual only practical way out of that one, but without a ground, we can't even apply for the next SL licence so Bulls Holdings (2010) Ltd playing out of VP seems to be the only alternative to oblivion.

Fsck you, Bradford Council.

Yes, bugger local democracy when it doesn't suit us. Lets put all our faith in a meglomaniac.

Without Odsal being developed the only realistic option is moving to VP but I could see the Bulls being reluctant to do that unless they were equal partners with City and didn't find themselves as new hostages to the current owner of VP. A solution put forward by City's Supporters Trust was to get the council to buy VP from the current owners. However with that would look unlikely given the comments by the Lib Dem councillor. The council would have to agree to write off the Odsal Contract monies and buy VP. I can't see that happening.

I didn't realise it was reliant on Bradford College getting money from the Learning and Skills Council. Of 80+ colleges in the country to get the go-ahead for redevelopment work from them, fewer than 15 have received any money at all. There's at least one that has knocked down the majority of its campus to subsequently find that they were only joking about the money and now need to spend what they have left on portacabins instead.

My disgust at these people being the weak link in the chain, when they've been known for years to be incompetent idiots who don't have any money, is only matched by my disgust at education spending being used on sports facilities at all.

Something along the lines of how the Galpharm stadium was set up - the stadium management company being shared equally by the council, the Bulls & City? Would have to have the "share" tied to each club and unable to be separately sold to avoid the problems the Galpharm has at the moment.

I find it shocking that their spending a million pounds on a feasibility study. Of all the options discussed in the paper, the only ones which involve developing Odsal cost in excess of 30 million.

When the initial proposal was dropped for the £75m proposal I did think it was a pipedream and totally unachievable. The Council spearheaded that move and so now look like complete idiots. The initial scheme was less ambitious and could have been completed by now. As it is we're left as the main loser in this whole sorry tale.

You could argue that if the council were trying to engineer a situation to get the club out of Odsal they couldn't be doing a better job moreover I would even say that if the Council were trying to get the club out of existence they were on track to achieve that too.

Groundhog Day...

It's like a recurring nightmare.

I think it's the final nail in the Odsal coffin though hopefully not for the club. Hopefully the movers and shakers at the Council, Bulls, City and their ground's owners can come to some arrangement.

Otherwise, Halifax Bulls anyone

You are Tony Gartland and I claim my £5.

Can we have a pitch invasion with a coffin like the Fax fans did?