1. This is what happens when men with a certain amount of wealth, over inflated egos, and an exaggerated sense of their abilities are allowed to make a small community football club their personal plaything.
2. I do believe that Keyte came into the club with good intentions. He then made a succession of poor decisions until he reached the point he was so desperate to get out of the deep hole he had dug for himself that he treated staff, players and fans with complete contempt and got rid of the club to the first mug who came along.
3. That mug was sometime crook and fulltime geezer Tommy Agombar, another oversized ego, who fancied a dabble with a football club and saw a chance to make a lot of money via property development. Any time I feel any temptation to give him the benefit of the doubt I remember that the first thing he tried to do was get the leases assigned to one of his own companies. That was always his game plan.
4. Agombar was such a mug that he took the club on without having a clue what was involved and what the level of debt was.
5. There are still a few more cards to be played. This ‘purchaser of distressed debt’ may be an Agombar stooge. Even if they are totally legit they will have purchased the debt in the expectation of making a turn on the deal, so I’m sure we will be hearing something from them.
6. The English football ownership model that depends on the private wealth of an individual or group of backers is seriously flawed. It’s unstable and unsustainable.
7. Our only hope for the long term is a community based, fan controlled club. I don’t think that’s going to be easy, and I expect any attempt to set that up will be beset by factional in-fighting and lots of recriminations over what’s gone before. There’s a few egos at work in the fans groups as well.
8. Although the Agombar regime’s treatment of players and staff as far as paying what was due to them was despicable, most of the people concerned have now received at least some of what is due to them. If the club had gone into liquidation a couple of months ago they would have received nothing at all. I’m not saying Agombar deserves much credit for this, but as much as I believe in a community club, HUST & the business consortium need to be honest – what could they have delivered on that front?
9. No-one is a winner here. DK & TA are the two villains of the piece. They are largely despised and now several hundred thousand pounds poorer. Last year’s players and the other staff were messed around terribly and some are still owned money. The current crop of hopeful young players trying to get their career going will soon be left without a club to play for.
10. The biggest losers are us, the long suffering fans. For most of my life Saturday afternoons have involved either watching the game, or wondering how things were going, and since the arrival of the internet, frequent refreshes of the live scores. Now a new season has started there is big gap. I’m probably not the most obsessive of fans, and some seasons I may only have seen a handful of matches, but I first stood on the Meadow End in 1965, and for what may be the last time ever last season. A bit of my life has gone.