Prestwich_Blue
Well-Known Member
Rascal said:Kun Aguero said:Rascal said:It would have been 36,637 if it wasnt for that Thai **** taking over :)
I take it you didn't taste his noodles?
I gave my STs up and didnt attend a game again until last season. I spent a lot of energy and emotion on here trying to make people see we were being taken over by a ****. A **** who nearly ruined us for his own political aims.
I can honestly say i hate the Thai **** with a passion.
Its a few years back now obviously and i dont recall much PBs posts on the matter as generally it was a handful of us against BM at the time night after night and it was vitriolic in the extreme and i ended up taking a sabbatical from BM as well
Perhaps i could have returned and gloated when things were going tits up but i didnt and even now im not totally enamoured with things now, purely from a political perspective though.
Interesting point that Russ. As bad as Swales was, we never had to deal with an owner like Thaksin before, who raised all sorts of moral questions. In fact I did write about TS quite a bit on here and in KOTK and I suppose my view hardened as time went on. I was in touch with David Conn quite a lot at the time of the takeover so was in no doubt about Thaksin's human rights record and certainly David was horrified that we'd do business with such a person. I know another journalistic Blue who was even more vituperative about Thaksin. The depth of his anger was quite staggering and very emotional.
I have to admit that I was nervous about him but open minded at first. Mainly because I'd had a message passed to me that he was keen to meet our group and I didn't want to rock the boat at that point. I also remember his interview on 5 Live where he came over really well and he certainly knew how to push the right buttons. I'm not really a 'black-and-white' person so I was torn between admiring the things he seemed to be doing for the club but, at the same time, unhappy that we'd put ourselves in the hands of someone who was clearly morally high-risk. Once it was clear that he was getting the club even deeper into the mire then I became much less ambivalent but still found something likeable about him. I think my final summation of him in KOTK after the ADUG takeover was that he was a "loveable rogue".
In May 2009. I was working down in London and was invited to a seminar at Birkbeck College about the development of the PL. David Conn was speaking and there were a number of interesting participants including a senior member of the Premier League. A few of us went to the pub afterwards and David & I had a lively discussion with the PL representative about the Fit & Proper Persons Test and how it should disbar people like Thaksin and Gaydamak of Portsmouth or even people like the Glazers, who weren't in it for the good of the game. His response was that they had to draw a line somewhere and couldn't stop people owning clubs on some vague grounds that were difficult to define. My response was that if the PL saw itself as a "global brand" with the clubs as the manifestation of that then it had to ensure it was protecting the brand.
It does raise the question of morality in football and how we should deal with questionable owners. Obviously this came up recently with our owners being highlighted over their human rights record, which isn't anywhere near as bad as many others but is still open to criticism. Where should the line in the sand be drawn?