Regardless of individual performances on the pitch, the only serious contender for any Man Of The Match award going could only be the controller of the electronic scoreboard at Nene Park, who made his feelings over the clubs recent mismanagement perfectly clear with a very personal message for the clubs chairman, Imraan Ladak, followed with a twist on the theme of a song that has become a crowd favourite in recent years. It may be the first time that “You’re Getting Sacked In The Morning” has ever been expressed in the first person.

Such frustration is understandable considering recent events, and is a further sign the extent to which the rapid decline of this club has had the effect of radicalising the support base. Further protests are expected at forthcoming matches, but this week has also seen more formal moves towards the club, this time from its supporters trust. Thus far, the Poppies Trust has relatively quiet on the subject of the steadily deteriorating situation at the club. This week, however, that silence was broken.

The Save Kettering Town appeal was launched on Wednesday night. It aims to raise money towards safeguarding the clubs future – although it is careful to mention that funds will be held in a bank account entirely separate from that of the club itself – with any money raised to be put towards the return of senior football to the town of Kettering itself, should the club fail to dig itself from the hole in which it currently finds itself. There is also a Facebook page that you can “like” – even if only as a show of solidarity with the supporters of the club – should you wish to. The ideal situation would, of course, be for the supporters trust to be running the club playing back in the town, or with concrete plans in place for a return there. Whether this will ever be possible is, perhaps, a question for another day, but it should be a source of comfort to the embattled supporters of the club that the organisation that is best placed to create the sort of club for the town that all supporters want should be acting pro-actively in this manner.

The club itself, meanwhile, continues on its course of seeming to little else but blame others for the predicament in which it finds itself. A bizarre official club statement which sought to blame DRC Locums, the company with which the club had a sponsorship deal that has, over the last couple of years, had a sponsorship deal which has now run aground. The clubs supporters -or at the very least those that would take an interest in such matters – are surely already aware of this viewpoint on the clubs current position, so what possible benefit could the club take from issuing such a statement? Why, we might reasonably ask, isn’t the time that is being put into blaming DCS Locums being put into court action, if they are so certain of a breach of contract by the sponsors?

The issue of this sponsorship deal is a tug at the heart-strings, which raises more questions than it could ever answer. The statement claims that DRC Locums had a “terrible payment history from 2010/11″, but fails to answer the question of why such a high risk gamble as moving to Nene Park and them spending heavily on new players was pursued. It also fails to answer the question of why what is starting to look like most of the clubs commercial revenue was to come from one source, if that source was known to be unreliable. Small wonder that, the time of writing, only there hundred and fifty people have signed a petition that days little mire than, effectively, ‘blame someone else for what happened to this football club’, a policy that seems almost wilfully blind to the obvious fact that the buck, with regards to the financial solvency of ANY company, ultimately stops with the directors of the company, and not with any third party. The whiny tone adopted by Ladak on this subject in recent weeks has not cast him in a positive light.

All of this will leave the supporters of the club wondering what may happen at the winding up hearing that is due to be heard at the High Court in London on the sixth of February. There has been a recent trend for these hearings to be adjourned upon their first hearing, in order to allow clubs a little more time to get their affairs in order, but this is by no means guaranteed and the only alternatives to the first hearing are to enter into administration or repay their debt to HMRC in full. As such, the next week and a half are likely to prove to be the most important in the history of Kettering Town Football Club. That gallows humour may be needed again in the near future.

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The man behind this particular bid is Paul Wildes, a Yorkshire-based – you guessed it – property developer and venture capitalist. Wildes has no prior involvement of running a football club and, while he is understood to be a supporter of Sheffield Wednesday, no prior recorded interest in Darlington FC. His proposal is simple. He will put in £300,000 for a sixty per cent shareholding in the club. The remaining forty per cent of shares will then be available to the Darlington Football Club Rescue Group (DFCRG or the Rescue Group), in return for further investment of £200,000. It all seems very simple, but some supporters of the club are already starting to ask the question of what they would be getting for this considerable outlay.

To be able to even stand a chance of answering this question, we need to consider what Darlington FC actually is at present. Since losing ownership of its ground last year, the club, as a business, has few tangible assets. The value of the current playing staff is minimal, and other solid assets would be unlikely to raise too many eyebrows were they to come up for auction. In terms of its less tangible assets, the clubs Football Conference membership remains under threat – it has to agree a CVA and pay its football creditors in full as per the leagues regulations within their specified time frame or face further sanctions, which could include expulsion and relegation to the Northern Premier League – and it has its support base, which this season has averaged at about 1,800 people, although the response of the town to the clubs recent difficulties – over 5,000 turned out for the Fleetwood match – and historical evidence would tend to suggest that there is scope for this to increase.

Of greater importance, however, is the least tangible asset of all – the possibility of future returns from The Northern Echo Arena. Wildes claims that, “The stadium should not be seen as a liability but as the club’s biggest asset. Used properly, managed properly, it can be very profitable”, which would seem to indicate that he intends to keep the club at the Arena. It would also seem to indicate that he – as Raj Singh did, as George Houghton did and as even George Reynolds may have done – has seen the potential for the club’s commercial activities to be expanded at the current ground and likes what he sees. Quite how he intends to do this, considering the club’s current financial position and the covenants that still restrict the use of the land upon which the ground stands is open to question, and his recent interview was light on detail.

None of the platitudes and good intentions, however, remove the Raj Singh shaped elephant in Darlington’s room. Former chairman Singh remains the club’s biggest creditor and there will be no CVA or exit from administration without his agreement to whatever proposals are made. Singh has been quiet over the last few days and it may not be until Monday that his decision is known. Liquidation of the club would mean that he received nothing, but he has already agreed to write off his debts to the club and subsequently retracted that offer. The question of how much of this was brinkmanship and what sort of offer he might agree through a CVA is not known. What we can reasonably assume is that there will be a considerable amount more talking to be done before Monday’s next deadline comes and passes.

There was further confusion last night when it was first reported that Wildes had pulled his bid to buy the club by a journalist from BBC Radio Tees, only for this to be contradicted elsewhere. We will, perhaps, find out more about this over the course of today, but Darlington supporters may face a weekend of rumour which may yet go to the wire. As long as no papers have been signed, nothing is definite. The doubt that some have cast of Wildes’ credentials, however, is not entirely without justification. Darlington supporters have had their fingers burned before by people that have come into the club promising to rebuild it, and Wildes’ lack of previous experience and lack of previous connection with the club are a cause for concern. Although he has been successful in business elsewhere, it is worth bearing in mind that considerably bigger businessmen than him have lost considerable amounts of money in football clubs, and turning Darlington’s fortunes around is unlikely to be a challenge for the faint-hearted. Meanwhile, it is understood that another consortium – whose identities are unknown at the time of writing – are also preparing a bid for the club.

On Saturday afternoon, Darlington play York City in what might yet, for the second time this season, be the club’s final match, and there is consolation for the club to take from the fact that a large away following should help to boost the crowd and the club’s cash flow at a time when they desperately need to be boosted. It is to be hoped that woolly, non-specific use of the term “community club” should, when talking of Darlington FC, be replaced with something a little more concrete, and that the division of shares proposed won’t exclude supporters groups – including the astonishingly still maligned supporters trust – from getting involved in the genuine day-to-day running of the club.

After almost a decade of mismanagement, the supporters of Darlington FC might have hoped that they would break from the cycle of being dependent upon the munificence of one individual. At the time of writing, it is starting to feel as if that hope is fading from view. If private individuals arriving at Darlington FC are to be, yet again, the salvation of this club for the time being, then they should be aware that cycle of failure that has blighted the club’s recent past cannot continue in perpetuity. The discredited model of running a football club according to the whims of one private individual has let Darlington down too many times before. It is to be hoped that this will be the last time that we will find this particular football club in this position.

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To state that such an extensive media blitz in this instance represents what can be done when a company with a bit of money invests in the league would be a partially false claim. PepsiCo–the large multinational parent corporation of Quaker Oats–has an extended history of supporting Major League Soccer. Going back to the opening season of play in 1996, PepsiCo has been a league sponsor from the off, but its initial visibility was far different than this new venture with Chicago via Quaker Oats. Any observer of MLS in its opening decade will recall nationally-televised matches sponsored by PepsiCo’s soft drink of the time, Sierra Mist, and the odd integration of its advertising into MLS games. On top of having the product’s name placed prominently on screen and mentioned endlessly by the commentators, at specific times during a match the frame of the game would magically shrink in order to fit alongside an annoyingly repetitious set of commercials promoting the beverage; ads filled with offbeat comedians of the period verbally sparring over who would get to drink this hip and edgy new soft drink. In addition to turning the presentation of this new league into a bit of a farce, these early schemes somewhat reduced those televised matches down to rather simple shrill advertisement whoring for a new PepsiCo product that was relatively unknown to the general public and quite frankly, wasn’t that tasty. Those games seemed more so to serve as a selling vehicle for PepsiCo rather than assisting the league in its gambit at becoming acceptable to the North American sports fan.

In this new shirt sponsorship deal with Chicago, however, rests two subtle adjustments future league and club sponsors might be considering. Quaker Oats is a conglomerate that has been in operation since the late 19th century, a long-established company on its own prior to being purchased by PepsiCo in 2001. The face of that Quaker Man now appearing on Chicago Fire shirts is a known quanity not only to the general sports fan but the US public at large. Rather than treating the league or its clubs as a test market for new products, aligning Quaker prominently with Chicago Fire SC suggests PepsiCo trusts MLS with one of its primary brands, a brand that has a reputation it would not wish to harm in any way. This sponsorship, then, represents a wrinkle of thought that MLS is gradually being accepted as a viable player among the bigger professional sports leagues in the US, not only one that can be trusted with being affiliated with a name such as Quaker but further one that can actually help promote further visibility of an already highly recognizable American brand.

It also represents something of a continuing trend toward Major League Soccer clubs attracting more of these ”heavy hitter” sort of companies with respect to sponsor names on shirts. Quaker now joins a league that has German automaker Volkswagen’s logo on the shirt of DC United, Chivas USA sporting Grupo Modelo’s Corona name on theirs, Philadelphia Union finding the Bimbo logo of the large multinational baked goods corporation Grupo Bimbo adorning their tops, along with other internationally-recognized corporate names such as Microsoft in Seattle, BMO in Toronto and Montreal, along with the all-in sponsorship of Red Bull New York. From the first shirt sponsorship deal in 2006 between Real Salt Lake and the relatively unknown Utah-based company XANGO to now with Chicago Fire SC and Quaker Oats, the representative clubs of the league seem to have grown in stature in the eyes of the corporate world.

Herein lies the more subtle difference this new shirt sponsorship entails. Organizations such as Chicago Fire SC have cultivated individual personalities and club identities that corporate sponsors can plug into much more readily today than in previous years. With MLS working to sell itself as a league worth watching in its first decade, the primary selling point was that Don Garber & Co. could spread a company’s sponsorship homogenously throughout their young league. This sufficed at a time when the only thing corporations might have identified was that rather bland league logo of a ball being kicked in anger, or perhaps individual players swimming in squads of anonymity, but now the clubs themselves are more highly visible in their own right, each with unique character and club supporter cultures organically grown.

As an illustration, consider that when some business puts its generic flyer on the windshield of every car in a car park it is hoping at least some percentage of those who have to pull that ad off their windshield will read it and act upon their advertisement. Often, this is brings a low rate of return, as the message is distributed too widely to individuals who care too little and consider the business a bit annoying for forcing them have to take this stupid piece of paper off their windshield before they can drive off in the first place. Now, consider the company that prepares a clear message and identifies a specifically targeted group of individuals their message might impact. Often the rate of success for said company would increase and the benefit to that company might be immeasurably greater as they utilized their resources much more wisely to achieve it.

The second strategy appears to be in play in the case of Quaker Oats, which in addition to Chicago’s shirt will now have a specific “Quaker Corner” seating section within Toyota Park as well as integrating their name and money within the club’s academy and youth system. This has not happened in isolation but is popping up league-wide, as just this week international motor company Mazda announced it has signed on as a sponsor with Houston Dynamo that includes a specific free parking area for fans with Mazda vehicles in the upcoming season. What seems to have transpired, then, is that large companies such as PepsiCo & Quaker have noticed MLS has captured a solid portion of the US sports fan market–as the league is now trails only American football and baseball as the most attended sport per game - and the best way for them to enter into any financial arrangement that grants them any foreseeable profit is by marketing to the fans that fill the stands and kiss the badge.

Has analyzing it in this fashion been overkill? Most certainly, but it’s still early in pre-season training and the All-Star Game is much less interesting.

So, much like that girl back in school no one really noticed later grew up to become the envy of all at your most recent class reunion, Major League Soccer is growing up and the sports advertising wings of the multinationals seem to be looking their way more than before. While some might cry foul at the integration of the game with the corporate world, it is unfortunately the current state of affairs football clubs anywhere must leverage in order to fund their enterprises. In the US, rather than considering a sponsor’s logo a bit of a “tramp stamp” on a club shirt that might have endured a century without the necessity of having to become a sandwich board, the corporate-sponsored shirt is a mark of maturity for those MLS clubs that obtain one and a glaring reminder to those still without one that they might still be stuck in puberty.

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All of these questions and more will be asked, if not answered, in the coming editions. Mungo is a David Squires creation for Twohundredpercent.

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You can see more of David Squires’ artwork at his site here.
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Still, whatever the reason for his dismissal, it gave us another iconic image to add to the 94 already served up by stoppage time, as he sat, uncontrollably shaking in celebration, like a toddler who’d just discovered the joys of potty-training, at the entrance to the players’ tunnel when the final whistle eventually sounded. It brought to mind Luis Suarez’s celebration of Ghana’s late penalty miss at the 2010 World Cup, after he had been dismissed for the goal-line handball which denied the Black Stars a semi-final place. But the reaction of neutrals to these two similar images could surely not have contrasted more. And it wasn’t as if the evening hadn’t been impossibly dramatic already. From the moment Eurosport transmitted pictures showed a rain-swept Estadio de Bata, with the caption “start delayed due to heavy rain”, events had taken on a bizarre aspect. 

If famously-grumpy cricket umpire Harold “Dickie” Bird had undertaken the pitch inspections when the torrents stopped, they’d have been looking again in October. And in the complete absence of pitch-drying technology, prospects for play, as cricket commentators say, were not good. Eighty degree temperatures and 80% humidity suggested good drying weather – my mother would have got the washing dry in a minute-and-a-half – though I don’t know whether such weather (sorry!) has that impact. And the games simply had to go on. The tournament, and doubtless TV schedules the world over, did not allow for postponements until “tomorrow”, as there is no gap between the rounds of games at the group stage. So it was that Libya and Zambia took to an unplayable field an hour-and-a-quarter after their scheduled kick-off.

The pitch was especially terrible in front of the main stand – resembling either the Somme or the Baseball Ground during the winters of the 1970s, depending on your sense of perspective. Whatever was built on that stand had cast shadows which protected two patches of what used to be grass from the heat but not the wet. And most of the photos from this game looked likely to be of spray-soaked tussles for possession in these areas. Libya’s Ahmed Zuway momentarily forgot the conditions when diving to try and win a first-half free-kick. He didn’t do it again…at least not there. But, more remarkably, the best game of the tournament emerged from the swamp. For the first hour, Zambia looked like scoring every time they attacked; while Libya DID score both times they attacked. In vaguely normal conditions, you suspect Zambia’s direct running style and quick, neat passing would have run lanes through Libya.

However, they were hampered both by the quagmire and by early Libyan goals in each half. Both were scored by Ahmed Osman, which made you wish that former England centre-back and Eurosport regular Russell Osman had been a co-commentator (and that’s not a thought I’ve had before). And they gave Libya enough confidence to be the more dangerous side late on. Zambia still impressed going forward, with Emmanuel Mayuka likely to have “Premier League clubs looking at him” before long. Mayuka volleyed home Zambia’s first equaliser, a brilliant over-the-shoulder effort which nonetheless resembled a school playground re-enactment of Marco Van Basten’s famous strike in Euro ’88 rather than the real thing. 

It didn’t stop Mayuka’s multi-somersault celebration. In the conditions, handshakes all round might have been wiser. But he did at least cut down from four somersaults to three. And the Chipolopolo’s second equaliser won plenty of style points too, Isaac Chansa’s photogenic overhead kick from one side of the six-yard box landing on the diving head of captain Christopher Katongo on the other side. The teams rapidly and predictably tired late on, but both deserved something from the game, which would probably have gone down in some sort of history were it not for what followed. The Equatogenarians, who appear to be managed by Rio Ferdinand’s dad, certainly had plenty to fight for. They “only” needed a draw against Senegal to leave both they and Zambia needing a draw in their last game, against each other, to qualify. But the inverted commas around “only” were entirely appropriate as, before kick-off, they were as lowly-ranked in Africa as Senegal were in the world.

Not anymore.

The pitch didn’t cut up as much as feared during the first game. And some well-placed tractor racing, plus another hour’s heat and humidity, improved conditions immeasurably. Eurosport’s Stewart Robson informed us that “unless you’re actually here, you can’t see how bad the pitch is.” However, this was quite a wild assumption to make from a UK television studio. And the conditions certainly didn’t affect Senegal’s “Newcastle United front two” of Demba Ba and Papiss Demba Cisse, who emerged intact from coach Amara Traore’s cull of under-performers from the Zambian defeat – which included captain Mamadou Niang. Cisse was as lively as he must have looked to Newcastle for them to pay “undisclosed” millions for him. But he was unlucky. Ba was continuing the sort of nightmare tournament which often afflicts players identified as potential tournament stars, as he had justifiably been. On this form, Toon might still want Andy Carroll back.

Senegal should have led by half-time. But the Equatogenarians had threatened on the break and Thierry Fidjeu broke the ill-advised Senegalese offside trap at least twice without persuading the referee’s assistant that he had done so. And I had just finished writing “EG slightly the better side” when they went ahead. Juvenal Edjogo’s ball to the wing found the unlikely Kily steaming up from full-back to put in the sort of cross which gave David Beckham his close friendship with Tom Cruise. It was “asking to be headed in,” as the cliché goes, and Iyanga Travieso (a.k.a. Randy, for reasons which are probably not our business) said “yes.” Roared on by thousands in the ground, and thousands more in Newcastle anxious to see their new Senegalese strike pairing back in Toon, Equatorial Guinea had 25 minutes to hang on, as Senegal added some long-awaited urgency to their build-up play.

It wasn’t backs-to-the-wall stuff either, as they continued to break with intelligence which defied their strongest critics (hello!). But it looked as if the pivotal moment had arrived with two minutes left on the clock. The hosts had just started to indulge in desperate, “kick-it-anywhere” defending when Narcisse Ekanga decided to indulge in a bout of play-acting which he could have been named after. Having initially failed to persuade the referee to give a free-kick for a clear non-foul, Narcissus believed a grimace, a clutch of his calf and a couple of pirouettes on the mudheap would change the decision. It didn’t. No Oscar nomination in the post for our Narcissus. Indeed, if he had previously won an Oscar, the academy would have asked for it back after that slice of ham. And as the quickly-recovered Ekanga resumed his defensive, non-thespian duties, Moussa Sow scrambled home an equaliser as ugly as it was vital.

Yet, just as in Equatorial Guinea’s game against Libya, the late goal was cue for a bout of “you attack, we attack.” Deme Ndiaye’s snapshot from the edge of the box missed the post by the width of a post. And, in a near action-replay of that late goal against Libya, Javier Balboa curled a 93rd-minute shot towards the corner of the net, until it seemed to turn like a Graeme Swann off-break and rolled wide of the post by less than the width of a post. What a climax, what a game, what a night. Senegal were still, just, in the competition, yet didn’t deserve to be. And if Equatorial Guinea and Zambia manufactured a draw in the last qualifier to see them both through, hey, we’d have a whip round to pay the fine.

Yet for all that we had seen, we hadn’t seen anything yet. Alan Hansen would have been screaming at Senegal’s defenders at such a high octave that only dogs with hearing aids would hear him. They backed off so far they were nearly treading on the ball boys behind the goal. The centre-backs appeared to beckon Kily to shoot and to wave through that shot like traffic-control policemen on uppers. But only Hansen would have cared, and even he might not have cared for long.

If there were any neutrals with tickets for both games who braved the rainstorm, they were the luckiest football fans on the planet – even on a night when Barcelona and Real Madrid were serving up a classic clasico. Not even the interminably dull Quinton Fortune on ITV 4′s highlights package could suck the life out of a football evening like this. Those who suggested that “Equatorial Guinea could be the first to leave the tournament” were put firmly in their place. And, yes, that was me. Sometimes it is so, so nice to be so, so wrong.

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Last week, however, a new campaign was started by the Wimbledon Guardian with reference to the club that has always represented everything that AFC Wimbledon isn’t. Milton Keynes Dons continue to exist in League One, despite their ongoing status as perhaps the pariah club of English football. The Guardian’s campaign, Drop The Dons, is seeking to persuade this club to drop the suffix to its name which harks back to the Football League place formerly held by Wimbledon FC, but the question of whether this should or will happen is not, perhaps, as straightforward as it might appear upon a casual glance.

There can be little doubt that the “Dons” aspect of the Milton Keynes name – most supporters, including many of other clubs that recognise the fundamental injustice of what happened in 2002 – is a continuing affront to AFC Wimbledon. Indeed, its continuing existence remains an affront to AFC Wimbledon and, as the widespread congratulations that were offered towards them upon their promotion at the end of last season by the supporters of other clubs. “Wimbledon’s supporters”, says the Wimbledon Guardian, “were rightly outraged by a decision that betrayed fans and amounted to the creation of soulless football franchise.” They have attracted support from the likes of former manager Dave Anderson and former Wimbledon FC defender Chris Perry, and a petition has attracted over 1,000 signatures.

It is in this figure, however, that the problem with this initiative manifests itself. AFC Wimbledon attract over 4,000 supporters to each of their matches, which indicates that this particular petition isn’t getting the support of the Wimbledon fan-base that we might automatically have expected it to. There are several reasons behind this, and none of them have anything to do with having any sympathy towards Peter Winkleman’s Buckinghamshire-based project. It is a reasonable concern that, while the campaign has the support of the Wimbledon Independent Supporters Association, there has been no official comment from the club itself’s Trust Board on the subject at the time of writing.

More troubling than this, perhaps, is the idea that such a campaign is playing into the hands of Winkelman and his acolytes. By running such a high-profile campaign, it could appear to some – whether rightly or wrongly – that the are being petulant about something that doesn’t really matter that much at this point. It could also be argued that a change of name would legitimise the pariah, whereas continuing to associate themselves with the events which resulted in their existence will forever remind anyone that looks at a league table or the results on a Saturday afternoon of exactly where they came from. The opportunity to reinvent may allow the franchise club to claim greater links to its local community.

Others might well argue that if Wimbledon are to protest about anything at this particular stage in their existence, it should come in the form of greater lobbying of Merton Borough Council to return them to the place that the club and its support still regard as home. There can be little question that Kingsmeadow remains an unsatisfactory home venue for a club that still has aspirations of moving up through the Football League. There has been positive news of sorts in this direction with the news that the council is looking at “intensification of sporting activity” being one of the keys to the redevelopment of the Wimbledon Greyhound Stadium site, although other sites are also understood to be under review and such a move could be several years away, yet.

Perhaps the most important element to this issue as it relates to AFC Wimbledon is that their club has got as far as it has got on its own merits, and that there are doubtless many more adventures to come. Any decision that Peter Winkelman may make will be made off his own back, and it appears doubtful that he will take the feelings or opinions of AFC Wimbledon supporters in taking such a decision. If he gave a tu’penny damn for their feelings, he wouldn’t be involved where he is now. As we stand, the two clubs co-exist and no more. If or when they should meet as equals in the league, whether to boycott the match or not will be a decision for their supporters to take at that particular time. What is encouraging to see is that AFC Wimbledon, as a democracy, can continue to debate this sort of question in the open. This is a sign of strength, rather than weakness and it seems unlikely that the Football League’s pariah club will be forgiven or the means by which they came into being will be forgotten at any point in the foreseeable future, regardless of what they are called.

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Group A

It was my fervent belief as well as hope that national pride was a stronger motivational force than money for players in the ACN. Sadly, Equatorial Guinea’s 1-0 victory over Libya proved that $1m trumps pride every time. Whatever of the (low) quality of the opening match, it was a shock of some proportions. The Equatoguineans – or “National Lightning” to use their wildly ironic nickname – are ranked almost 90 places below Libya, which is a hell of a gap, whatever the (high) margin of error in Fifa’s rankings. But whatever the extent of the “new” Libya’s national pride, it was no match for the $1m from the back pocket of the president’s son, the Equatoguineans were on, or should that be “Equatogenarians”?

Jack Charlton’s Ireland may have had a touch of the diaspora about it – check Ray Houghton’s Glaswegian tones when commentating on Ireland’s internationals for details. But this lot have stretched Fifa’s rules on national qualifications into the shape of… well… Equatorial Guinea. “Naturalised” Equatoguineans permeate the squad – Jose Javier Balboa scored the winner, for pity’s sake. But it was possible to forget the money and the origins when the TV pictures shuddered to the beat of the celebrating crowd when Balboa broke Libya’s L-shaped offside trap in the 87th minute to win the game. Until then, it had been everything a traditionally-cagey tournament opener between two poor sides promised. Libya “scored” twice in the same first-half move but the goal(s) were disallowed for reasons more complex than the average EU directive.

The possession stats on the TV pictures are in minutes not percentages. But when the caption said “EQA 13 LIB 11” you could believe that neither side had the ball 76% of the time. The sheer symbolism of Libya’s presence overwhelmed what little talent they possessed. And Equatorial Guinea possessed little talent anyway. But after the goal, some football broke out. And it could have been 1-1. 2-1 or 2-0 in the last few minutes before “National Lightning” could celebrate. So ultimately, the occasion outshone the match, which was handy.

Any comparison between the quality of the two Group A openers seemed to crush any doubt that Zambia or Senegal will reach the quarter-finals. However badly Senegal defended – and at times it was very bad indeed – they will have enough firepower to win their next two games. Likewise Zambia, whose pace, control and athleticism dwarfed that of the first match… and that was just Emmanuel Mayuka’s goal celebrations – four perfectly-executed somersaults that would have challenged for Olympic gymnastics gold. Senegal’s Newcastle United front two weren’t paired until Papiss Demba Cisse’s late introduction, by which time the previously dominant Zambians were in “what we have we hold” mode. But Cisse’s cross allowed commentator Dan O’Hagan to air the “Demba Ba hits the bar” line you suspect he’d been rehearsing for months. Zambia’s ultra-defence had manager Herve Renard “doing his pieces” (copyright Ray Wilkins) on the touchline – fortunately he has plenty of hair to tear out should the need really arise. And his locks should be fine, until the quarter-finals, anyway.

Group B

Eurosport analyst Bryan Hamilton was given a stern euphemism test by Cote D’Ivoire’s narrow, scruffy win over Sudan. He had to find as many ways to say “Cote D’Ivoire were shite” without offending viewers or appearing critical. I lost count at 14. Most of his efforts were based around “improvement” and the need to do “lots” of it. Sudan were in “plucky” territory long before the end. And ITV4’s highlights suggested they could, have drawn, even though Cote D’Ivoire’s win never seemed in doubt at the time. Didier Drogba did perform, his display a reminder of the one-man show that George Weah’s Liberia occasionally put on in the 1990s. The difference, of course, was that the other Liberians genuinely were rot.

Among the struggling Ivorians were Yaya Toure (looking a stone lighter in Elephant orange than in Manchester City blue) and Gervinho. And when goalkeeper Boubacar Barry is your second-best player, there is a “need” for “lots” of “improvement.” We had to imagine that Cote D’Ivoire were imaginative from setpieces because none of them worked. And both sides were hampered by a flag-happy linesman, who appeared to be imagining infringements (the game was filmed from a high enough camera angle to show how wrong he was, and how often). Meanwhile, commentator John Loder called Gervinho’s haircut “Peter Gabriel 1972,” which would have puzzled Genesis fans, let alone the “Dad or Grandad” we were exhorted to ask. The Elephants, as inevitably noted, will want to forget this one.

More time was spent during Angola’s 2-1 win over Burkina Faso telling us that Manucho signed for Manchester United after the 2008 ACN than he actually spent on the pitch for Manchester United . ITV had ex-United player Quintin Fortune to tell viewers all about such careers – presenter Matt Smith just avoiding saying: “So Quintin, you were a Manchester United failure too…” And when Manucho fired in the winner, it was “the kind of impact which got him a Manchester United contract…” The focus on Manucho at United detracted from other memories of the Angolans, not least goalkeeper Carlos Alberto Fernandes (Carlos Fernandes to his mates, Carlos Alberto to Bryan Hamilton), a “big unit” with a propensity for stomach injuries. These have heavily featured in this tournament’s time-wasting and unsurprisingly reappeared here as Angola hung on late on.

Carlos isn’t actually very good – he “commands his area” in the same way Joey Barton commands respect. But fortunately for both goalkeepers, a game which was occasionally joyous in midfield turned to mush in both penalty areas. This was exemplified by Angola’s opening goal, which started with some wholly inadvisable keepy-uppy in his own six-yard box by Bakary Kone, and the fact that the game’s other goals were long-range shots. Alain Traore celebrated his free-kick equaliser before he’d finished his follow through – mind you, it was only the statuesque Carlos to beat. And the winner arrowed into the net despite former Manchester United striker Manucho taking up huge lumps of turf and slipping as he shot. “Wow!” Bryan Hamilton said, correctly.

Group C

Eurosport’s live feed only starts moments before kick-off, but those moments before co-host Gabon’s tournament-opener against Niger even stirred the viewer, let alone the Gabonese players, who ran the first quarter of the game on adrenalin alone. The national anthem was the usual dirge (there was a smoking disco beat when Sudan lined up for their match, but alas this wasn’t the Sudanese anthem – not even the new South Sudanese one, played by mistake). But the signing, the noise, the fellow on the symbols were beyond the call of duty And even when Gabon eventually relaxed, they were so much the better side that the party never stopped. Niger showed why they lost their three away qualifiers, without revealing how they won their three home ones. Reference was made to Niger’s “heat.” But, while no meteorologist, I’m sure “heat” happens quite a bit in West Africa.

But whatever the home advantage was must have been considerable, because they were rubbish here. Gabon aren’t world beaters, yet Niger made them look it for 70 minutes. Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang had Brazilian wonderkid Neymar’s looks and skill. Previous Gabon star Daniel Cousin was a class above the rest during his late cameo (a stone above too, proof that not all the heavyweights failed to qualify). And, jet-propelled by their crowd, Gabon could throw a spanner in Group C’s works. Niger look as close to the proverbial “whipping boys” as anyone – their 2-0 defeat here was the heaviest of the round. And both Tunisia and Morocco, who served up the best match, look handily-placed with whips.

It should have been a draw, and would have been but for Marouane Chamakh and substitute Youssouf Hadji. Chamakh revealed why Arsenal re-signed Thierry Henry, although failure to convert his clearest chance was more down to good goalkeeping than the “ring-rustiness” Eurosport’s Leroy Rosenior suggested. Hadji, meanwhile, was revealed as the younger brother of 1990s Moroccan star Mustafa Hadji, not his son – I’m not getting as old as I feared. Unfortunately for Morocco, Hadji showed all his elder brother’s sublime control to set up a potential equaliser. But his actual dad might have done better with the shot. Tunisia led by a freak goal, Khalid Korbi’s gently lobbed free-kick nearly parting striker Saber Khalifa’s eight hairs before finding the met. Rosenior insisted Khalifa was claiming the goal, even over pictures showing Khalifa telling Korbi it was his.

No such doubts, or sloppiness, about Tunisia’s second, substitute Youssef Msakni gliding past two defenders and finishing with as close to aplomb as we have yet seen – most of the shooting has been aircraft-threatening. The goal sealed Tunisia’s victory, (“the Carthage Eagles have wind beneath their wings,” noted O’Hagan, another line he’d rehearsed for weeks). But the usual commentators’ nonsense about how dangerous a 2-0 lead can be rang true here. Their goal was offside by a yard. And you sensed that given another five minutes, Morocco would have levelled, as they put in a storming finish… after Chamakh was subbed. The match between Gabon and Morocco, which is to be played on Friday, will be pivotal in this group.

Group D

Mali versus Guinea should be Group D’s pivot. For all that Ghana were as scruffy as Cote D’Ivoire in their 1-0 win over Botswana, you sense they have the organisation and power to deal with the pace and power served up by the Guineans. Eurosport insisted Mali were worthy 1-0 winners but it was difficult to see why, although the game was not as one-sided as ITV highlights implied. Even with the statuesque Bobo Balde giving Celtic fans disturbing flashbacks, Guinea looked vibrant, except during a curiously out-of-place third quarter where both sides seemed to take a mutually pre-arranged breather before starting again on 67 minutes.

Bakaye Traore’s winner had enough slices of luck about it to cover the quarter-finals at least. Mali’s tree-trunk centre-forward Chiek Diabate got the ball to Traore more by freak yachting accident than design (“my plan was to miss the ball and fall over,” noted Eurosport’s Matt Jackson, semi-disapprovingly). And despite doubts expressed on all channels, the deflection off a defender’s arse beat the keeper. Also unlucky was Ibrahima Diallo, booked for “simulation” after being unceremoniously upended by Mali’s Mahamadou N’diaye as he flew into the penalty area – the camera caught Diallo’s expression, momentarily fearful of the dismissal he was expecting. That said, Diallo sliced an outswinging corner so badly moments later that he would have been booked for time-wasting had Guinea led – it would have gone clean out of most League Two grounds.

Meanwhile Guinean substitute Ousmane Barry was inches away from cross-after-cross as Guinea chased the game late on. This was probably why he was sub in the first place, though not being called “Bangoura” placed him at a disadvantage in this team. So Mali will fancy their chance of the group’s second spot. This now only requires victory over Botswana, who were more accomplished and better organised than Niger, but scarcely more threatening. The view was that they lacked belief to pressurise Ghana after captain John Mensah completed his goalscorer/sent-off double with twenty-five minutes left. But Botswana believed; they were just wrong.

Their one proper attack should have produced a stunning equaliser, Penyo Mongala’s nonchalant back-heel and Misimanegape Ramohibidu’s far-post cross setting up Moemedi Moatlhaping’s header which was acrobatically cleared off the line by John Boye (cue “Waltons” theme music in my head for the rest of the day). However, if Ghana ever needed a second goal, even with ten men, you never doubted that they could get it. Group D is theirs to lose. Had the games in Equatorial Guinea – Groups A and B – been as involving as those in Gabon, it would have been a decent first round. But they weren’t. So it wasn’t. As Bryan Hamilton might say: “there’s room for improvement.”

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That the expansion of pan-European football should have come in the years following the second world war shouldn’t be surprising. One lasting legacy of the war was huge progress in the area of aeronautics, which led to the rapid popularisation of commercial air travel in the post-war years. European tours by some of the biggest club sides on the continent – in particular those from behind the newly-formed Iron Curtain, such as Honved of Hungary and Dynamo Moscow – became commonplace and led to the formation of UEFA in 1954. The first European Cup winners would be crowned two years later.

What, though, of international football? By the mid-1950s it was more than apparent that the future of the international game would involve further expansion and, with the World Cup being held every four years, there was room for further expansion in the calendar. Fortunately for UEFA, a man on the inside of their organisation already had a vision. French administrator Henri Delaunay had sat on the board of FIFA during the 1920s and, while he was in his dotage when appointed UEFA’s general secretary upon its formation, had been agitating for a European international tournament to rival South America’s Copa America (which had begun as long ago as 1916) since 1927. With the formation of the European Nations Cup – later to become the European Championships – his dream would eventually become reality.

The future of Europe during the 1950s, however, was being determined by two quite opposing political scenarios playing out. On the one hand, relations between Eastern and Western Europe deteriorated throughout the decade – leading to the eventual construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 – but, on the other, the countries of Western Europe took their first tentative steps towards closer union with the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957. This broader political tension would come to manifest itself in the first hosting of the continent’s new international tournament, but Henri Delaunay would not live to see it. Delaunay died in November 1955, and was succeeded at UEFA by his son, Pierre. His legacy would be marked by the trophy for which the competing teams would – an still do – play being named for him.

There were notable absentees from the first competition, of which only the semi-finals and final would make up the final tournament itself. England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales were, perhaps predictably, absent, having not opted to enter on account of the possibility of the tournament interfering with the Home Internationals, but Italy and West Germany were also absent as well. The first ever European Nations Cup match would be a match straight from the Cold War, played between the Soviet Union and Hungary in Moscow on the twenty-eighth of September 1958. A crowd of just over 100,000 people at the Central Lenin Stadium – now the Luzhniki Stadium – saw the home side beat the Hungarians, whose team had be partially broken up by the Soviet invasion of their country just two years previously by three goals to one. The second leg, played almost a year to the day later, resulted in a single goal win for the Soviet team.

Of the four teams that made it through to the final tournament in France, three were socialist countries – Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia – yet the Soviet Union’s path to the final was mired in predictable political quarreling. Their opponents in the quarter-finals had been due to be Spain, and any match between these two teams at that time would be perceived as much an ideological battle as a football match. Communists from across Europe had fought against General Franco’s nationalists in the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939 and, while Spain had remained neutral during the Second World War, clear tension still existed between the two nations at the start of 1960, when the quarter-final matches were due to be played. As things turned out, Franco refused to allow his team to travel to Moscow for the first leg and made it clear that he would refuse to allow the Soviet team into his country for the second leg as well, leading to the Soviet Union being allowed two three-nil walk-over wins and a match against Czechoslovakia in Marseille in the semi-final.

The tournament failed to set the French public’s imagination alight with, curiously enough, eighteen thousand less people watching the host nation’s semi-final match against Yugoslavia at Parc des Princes than had watched their quarter-final win against Austria at Stade Colombes, also in Paris. Those that didn’t go to the match certainly missed out on one of the great matches in entire history of the competition. France were without the injured Just Fontaine, who had scored a record thirteen goals in the World Cup two years earlier, but were leading by four goals to two with just fifteen minutes to play before Yugoslavia scored three goals in four minutes – one from Tomslav Knez and two in a minute from Drazen Jerkovic – to snatch the game by five goals to four. In the other semi-final, the Soviet Union brushed Czechoslovakia aside by three goals to nil in Marseille.

The final was also played at Parc des Princes, in front of a crowd of less than 18,000 people. The French public may have been non-plussed by a match between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, but this was another match wrapped up in post-war politics. Yugoslavia had been expelled from the Cominform – the international grouping of Communist parties – in 1948. The reasons for this were many and varied, but could be boiled down to a clash of personalities between the Yugoslavian leader Tito and Stalin, in particular Tito’s refusal to accept the USSR as the de facto leaders of European Soviet socialist countries. Relations between Yugoslavia and the rest of the Eastern Bloc began to thaw after Stalin’s death in 1953 – Nikita Khruschev, Stalin’s successor, subsequently claimed that Tito had been “next on Stalin’s list after Korea” – but Yugoslavia continued to pursue a political path that was aligned to neither the Sovietism of Eastern Europe or the economic liberalism of the West and, in 1960, there can be little question that, for the politically informed at least, this was a match with the potential for political significance.

If the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia had reached a slightly uneasy detente off the pitch during the second half of the 1950s, then the Soviet Union won the battle on the pitch in Paris in 1960, albeit only narrowly. It was Yugoslavia that took the lead with two minutes to play before half-time with a goal from Milan Galić, but this was cancelled out four minutes into the second half with an equaliser for the Soviet Union, scored by Slava Metreveli after the Yugoslavian goalkeeper Blagoje Vidinic fumbled a cross. Yugoslavia, however, continued to press for a second goal but were kept at bay by the Soviet goalkeeper Lev Yashin. In extra-time, Drazen Jerkovic missed a tap-in for Yugoslavia, and with seven minutes to play Viktor Ponedelnik headed in from six yards to give the Soviet Union their first – and as things turned out, only – major football title. They would be back for the second European Nations Cup tournament four years later, but the Cold War would turn out to have got considerably hotter by that time.

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In November, under the usual Pompey circumstances involving allegations of fraud, money laundering, misappropriation, forgery and dodgy involvement with the Russian Mafia, I wrote of the difficulties into which the extradition case against owner Vladimir Antonov had left the club. Essentially the freezing of his assets had sent Pompey’s parent company, Convers Sports’ Initiatives, into administration. This step was forced on the company by Pompey’s previous owner, Hong Kong businessman Balram Chainrai, placing a charge on them. This was consequent on CSI’s failure to pay Chainrai the first instalment for the purchase of the club and their clear inability to do so without Antonov’s money – CSI being funded in its various activities by the private fortunes of its owners, largely Antonov with a minority input from Roman Dubov and Chris Akkers.

In purchasing the club CSI had been able to renegotiate the terms placed by the Football League on Chainrai at the exit from administration in October 2010. This gave some leeway for development and enabled Antonov to ‘lend’ the club £10.8 from CSI in order to facilitate player purchase and running costs, placing the club further in debt. It is to be assumed that the Football League, having passed Antonov through their ‘Owners and Directors’ test, thought that he was good for the money. Guarantees were there from his bank, Snoras. Snoras has gone under and triggered the charges against Antonov. Despite the warning bells against this institution worldwide, the Football League considered Antonov to be a good enough owner for PFC. In effect, all the Football League have succeeded in doing is aiding and abetting the club’s fall deeper into debt, making it unsustainable yet again.

Since the end of November the club has been for sale. This is to make sure Chainrai, as secured creditor of CSI, gets his money back. Although one begins to get a sneaking suspicion that he is on a nice little earner with the interest on his loans, it seemed this time he needed a ‘pretty big fool,’ as football economics have it, to step up to the plate in order to insure him against any loss.

And then along came Joseph Cala.

On the front of it the bigger fool premise seemed to have been fulfilled. According to the Portsmouth Evening News Joseph Cala’s chief business interest is the building of undersea resorts and casino ships, ‘a new ocean leisure concept incorporating the elegance of a luxury undersea atmosphere habitat.’ Or rather the ‘pre-sale’ of such building work. The business, Carla Corp., hasn’t advanced very far so nothing has been built yet. Cala told the News that this was down to the rising price of steel, which might explain the fact that Cala Corp has recorded losses of $2,439,726. It has net assets of $6,377, with an accumulated deficit of $14.3 million (£9.3 million). He claims it is a ‘dormant company’. A bit like Salernitana in Italy’s Serie C, which Cala owned for part of February this year. The club suffered financial collapse after he failed to pay the wages and had his ownership revoked.

This should be enough to ring warning bells at Football League headquarters. Yet as the media circus gained momentum Cala seemed to become more and more likely to be the next owner of the club. In the Telegraph on Thursday morning he was 90% sure of getting the club and by Friday morning the deal was 95% done he said, being about to talk to the Football League that afternoon. He had great plans to cut the wage bill by ridding the club of eight expensive players, leaving a team of ten, and being hands-on in running the business. This would soon elevate us to the Premier League and make us one of the best … you get the drift. Perhaps he intended to play himself. He did claim to have been on the books of Inter Milan’s academy before his family moved to America.

Now put like this the whole thing is ludicrous but it is apparent that Administrator Andrew Andronikou had been entertaining the idea of Joseph Cala as the preferred buyer. This became clear on Friday afternoon when Cala finally withdrew his offer. Despite allegedly being able to prove funds of £20m to the administrator Cala said  he had baulked at lodging £3m to £5m into his lawyer’s bank account as a guarantee to Chainrai’s company, Portpin. He added that Portpin were not willing to take up his suggestion of becoming ‘landlords’ of the club. Consequent on his withdrawal Andronikou went from being bullish about a ‘preferred buyer’ being close to completion to speaking vaguely of ‘two or three parties remaining in contention.’ One can only conclude that Cala was his preferred buyer.

If Cala, a man who spoke of his enormous losses in business being useful to set against future profits, had passed the Owners’ and Directors’ test some serious questions would have had to be asked. Fans tried to raise these questions whilst negotiations were under way, doing their own research after the failure of the League to properly check Antonov. The Supporters Trust was part of this research effort, stating “Portsmouth Football Club is in a precarious position, it cannot afford to once again be handed to anyone who does not have the finances to stabilise the club,”  offering to work with the Football League in the research into any prospective buyers in order to pre-empt their last excuse that they did not have the resources to investigate Antonov. Despite any incredulity at anyone passing Cala as ‘Fit and Proper’, given Pompey’s past history of arms dealers, fraudsters, invisible men and people in fear of their life from the Chechen Mafia, anything seemed possible to the fans. Trusting the League to save us really wasn’t enough. Cala’s withdrawal from the deal was a blessed relief to all with Pompey’s best interests at heart.

Why would Cala be the preferred buyer of anyone charged with vetting owners for a football club? Perhaps the answer lies in the £1.6m tax bill for which HMRC has issued its winding up order and the reason why the tax bill hasn’t been paid.

We know that PFC is not running at a sustainable level due to Antonov having to make a loan to keep the club running. We knew in November that the cash would run out by the end of December. It is clear that since November, whilst this attempt to sell the club has been under way, the cash flow has had to be juggled, and it would appear that yet again the club has been forced to use the Taxman as an unauthorised overdraft. A sale going through in the next week to someone with money in hand would solve all that and ensure Mr Chainrai’s security for his money continued to exist, because Portsmouth Football Club is the only viable asset of CSI that will realise the money owed to Chainrai.

So we come back to the conclusion that yet again our most reluctant owner has a stranglehold on the club. Someone who is prepared to push the club to the brink of extinction rather than let go of any of the money he ‘invested’ so rashly back in October 2009. Money that has earned a nice packet of interest along the way. Money that did the club very little good at the time it was invested, failing to stem the fall into administration in February 2010. If you trace the pattern of events at that time, they seem to be mirrored this time. Even down to the failure to pay the tax bill and the desperate scrabble to find ‘another fool’. Well it didn’t work in 2010 and chances are it won’t work now. The bigger worry is that this time administration might not be an option. The club has a CVA in place on which it has not paid a penny yet, having already deferred one payment, but has managed to accrue more debt. The worry is the court will say – go straight to liquidation, do not pass go, do not collect your parachute payments. Already other clubs are circling, bidding for our attractive young players,  such as Pearce and Ward. No one wants the expensive, older, money draining legacies of the excesses of the Premier League days, such as Tal Ben Haim. We are obliged to keep these players no matter what our financial state.

This puts pressure on Chainrai. If he can’t sell, and much time has been wasted already in pursuing Cala, then he has to chose to drip feed the club to keep it as a going concern or let it go to the wall. He already claims to have spent £1m doing that recently but there is much scepticism in regard to that statement. Other potential buyers appear to have been repelled during the negotiations with Cala. Pompey Supporters Trust, when approaching the administrator in regard to finding a way for the Trust to get involved, were told they would need proof of £1oom in funds before they could even get a look at the books. Chainrai seems as determined as ever to get his money back. The alternative of pricing the club to attract a serious buyer, one that will run the club as a proper football business with the community of Portsmouth at its heart, does not seem to have occurred to him at all. Cutting his losses is not an option it seems. It also seems the administrator can do nothing but dance to the tune of CSI’s major creditor.

Portsmouth Football Club yet again is caught in the spider’s web. Today Portsmouth MP Mike Hancock is quoted in the Sun, asking the Sports Minister to step in. He says, ”We have been serially shafted. We’ve had character after character turn up and say they are going to buy the club and make all sorts of promises. As long as someone has got the money or alleges they have the money they are allowed to take over part of our heritage. All these characters are just unbelievable and none of them should be allowed to get near a football club, in my opinion. If football doesn’t start to deal with that stuff, in the end there is going to have to be Government intervention.” But government intervention takes time and Pompey’s is running out.

Make no mistake. Pompey is one of the best examples going of the pathetic state of regulation of our game. Repeat offenders are allowed again and again to decimate our clubs, yet no one seems to be able to stem the flow. The Pompey Supporters’ Trust is being repelled at every turn. There is a desperate attempt to gather details of all Pompey Supporters together in one place to give power to our voice. Pompey’s 12th Man website has gone live today for fans to register their support for some element of fan ownership at the club. There is no one else who will help.

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The Yorkshire club has had to tolerate the ownership of Ken Bates for four and half years now, at least. Bates’ hard-headed policy of pushing ticket prices through the roof, using official club media for baseless attacks on those that he deems to be his “opponents” and labelling those amongst his club’s own support that oppose his methods with language that goes beyond being merely derogatory and into the realms of merely being abusive. Set against this, the decision to sell club captain Jon Howson to Norwich City may seem, from the outside, to be relatively small beer. Howson, however, more than merely the club captain at Leeds United.

Born in Morley, on the outskirts of the city, Howson has already made almost two hundred appearances for the club since making his debut for the club in 2006. At a club at which long service was for many years part of the culture – consider, for example, the twenty-one years that Jack Charlton spent at the club or the seventeen years that Peter Lorimer managed – Howson was regarded as a personification of the spirit of Leeds United and, while there has been considerable grumbling ever since Bates’ ownership of the club was completed, it seems as if his sale may well be the moment at which those that had previously chosen to not get involved with protests against his ownership of their club become motivated to act against him.

Against Southampton on the fourth of March 1972, Don Revie’s Leeds United team put in a performance  of such brilliance and arrogance that is has come to be regarded as one of the definitive of its era. They won the match by seven goals to nil and, although they ended up losing out on the league championship at the end of that season to Derby County, the presence of Match Of The Day cameras at Elland Road that afternoon preserved forever a team at the absolute summit of its powers. This March sees the two sides meet again in the Championship, with Southampton chasing one of the automatic promotion places and Simon Grayson’s inconsistent Leeds United side sitting just below the play-off places. The cameras of Sky Television will be in attendance, but the biggest question mark now surrounding this match is how many Leeds supporters will be making the effort. Talk is starting amongst the Leeds United support of boycotting the match against Southampton, and this has been fuelled by a statement made by the Leeds United Supporters Trust (LUST) last Friday, which reads as follows:

The Leeds United Supporters Trust today calls for the Chairman and board of Leeds United to actively look to sell the club to owners whose ambitions and resources more appropriately reflect the stature of the club and its loyal fans. We believe the time is now right for the current regime to step aside and allow the club to move forward. Overwhelmingly the majority of our members have asked us to campaign for this.

 

After 7 challenging years in control, our members believe that it is time for change at Leeds United and we believe the overwhelming majority of Leeds United supporters feel the same way therefore the Trust will be supporting peaceful campaigning for new ownership in the days, weeks and months ahead and we urge the Chairman and the board to listen.

The obvious question to ask at this is point is that of how successful a boycott of this match might be. Protests outside Elland Road have already been airily dismissed by Bates as the work of “morons”, and Bates is a man who gives every impression of someone who relishes the battle against those that disagree with him and there will be Leeds supporters who will wonder what the point of further protest against him is or argue that, with average crowds already having dropped by around 3,500 from last season, the boycott has already started. With ticket prices the highest in the Championship and higher than many Premier League clubs, this is perhaps unsurprising.

Yet what alternative do supporters of the club have? The fact that Bates may not listen to them and almost certainly will deride them shouldn’t prevent them from protesting. Their alternative is to continue to pay through the nose and sit at Elland Road watching a team that seems unlikely to challenge for automatic promotion at any time in the near future. No football supporter has an automatic “right” to anything – not least Premier League football – but when we consider the amount of money that is being demanded of them for tickets, they might expect to see greater investment in the team than they are seeing at the moment, and this before we even to begin to consider the dubious character that Bates is and the circumstances under which he took control of the club. If they don’t make a stand against Bates but don’t wish to continue watching the club, the other choice is to walk away from Leeds United, whether temporarily or permanently – an unsatisfactory resolution for all supporters.

It is positive that LUST have come out to campaign for his removal. As at many other clubs with large support bases, Leeds United’s support is disparate by its nature and it is to be hoped that the concerns of LUST can provide a focal point around which those that want rid of Bates – who has been a cancer upon the game in this country for almost five decades now – can gather. Protest against him may not succeed quickly, but a boycott of the match against Southampton would serve two purposes. It would offend Bates in the only manner that he can, it seems, be genuinely hurt – in the pocket – and would be a visible signal to the rest of football that the supporters of this football club are not merely going to accept stratospheric ticket prices and the systematic sale of players. And if the supporters of Leeds United did manage to dislodge him from our game for good, we would all owe them a debt of gratitude.

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