Grovesred

95 - of

...a bunch of bigots waving union jacks and singing Rule Brittania who seem right at home down in England - I just wish they would stay there!

God, no, please!

I just popped round to York station to pick some tickets up, only find the place dotted with Rangers fans getting pissed. It's York races today, so with pissed-up punters from all over the country spilling off trains, I think the transport police are in for a busy couple of hours.

I'm appalled by Advocaat's admission that he wouldn't dare sign a black player. Lenin and Trotsky must be spinning in their graves.

Nunthorpe School, York, in the 1970s.

With contemporaries including former Boro & England boss Steve McClaren and celebrity hairdresser Charles Worthington, followed a few years later by Mark Addy and Marco Gabbiadini it's fair to say we were an eclectic bunch.

94 - Mexico

99 - the Brothers Grimm

Barrow are playing Stalybridge in the playoff final...

Barrow won 1-0, and so play in the Conference premier next season.

It's good to see a northern club coming up that can attract decent crowds; fingers crossed for a York-Barrow clash on Boxing Day

tbh, I'd have expected him to be after more than £1million; when these rich, ahem, businessmen grab control of a football club, they usually lend it money rather than invest, meaning that when it goes belly-up it's a case of heads the businessmen win, tails the supporters lose.

Anyone else find it odd that he was too ill to sign cheques for his football club, but is well enough to chase it for debt repayment?

It must be quite like old times for him...

Q. was he a bigot before he left poland? or did weedgie-land make him like that?

fair question IMO - if he's been getting grief off assorted bigots for being

a) Polish, and

Roman Catholic

then it's hardly surprising if he reasserts those two identities by wearing that T-shirt. If someone gave me shit for being an English atheist, I'd react by trying to wind up the people that were having a go at me.

Most people in my office have spent the season hoping it will be increased to a 20-point penalty.

Looks like we're doomed to disappointment, but seeing them get to the play-off final, only to be beaten by a disputed last-minute penalty would offer some comfort...

...and then to do the b*ggers over in our first home pre-season friendly on July 11th would be very heaven

Thought I'd stick a couple of quid on York (minus the realeased Manny P) to win at Salisbury.

Thought 11/10 was a bit stingy, but placed the bet, only to realise I'd bet on Salisbury

So convinced was I that City were due to thrash someone, that I also placed the bet I meant to in the first place.

D'oh!

Salisbury 3 City 0 - Net gain for the Bank of Grovesred: £0.20

Better stick with the day job...

I'm not convinced by him... I'm sure there are better...

We'll have him back if you don't want him :-)

Jamie Stuart of Grays Athletic.

Im surprised the 50+'s know how to use a computer! LAUGH OUT LOUD

They can't! Those votes are mistakes by under-40s who can't read and have been thumping the keyboard randomly.

Frequently to be seen on a Monday night standing on the terraces at Belle Vue Speedway, cheering on the mighty (ahem) Aces. Again, no airs and graces, top bloke.

While you are about though I do have a question for you on a more serious note. If Scotland gains independence as a nation will your lot all f*ck off to England or Ulster?

Please let it be the latter.

Gutted

There were tears shed in Grovesred Towers this afternoon. Now it's time to go out and get paggered.

Bringiton!

Frank Sidebottom last Friday. "Everyone! Dance like a horse!" And we did

Launched his A-Z of football club songs with "Have you seen Aberdeen?" just a few hours before they crashed out of the cup.

I wonder if I can persuade him to sing a song for Rangers tomorrow night

I've been made redundant a couple of times, but no national newspaper showed the slightest bit of interest

I have to wonder, if someone had been paying me less than the national minimum wage, would I have:

a) gone on strike for a decent wage;

sought better-paid work elsewhere; or

c) stayed for 18 years until I got made redundant.

I think it's safe to say that option c is the first one I'd cross off the list.

I want Gretna in the first divison next season, would be nothing sweeter than gubing them at Raydale

Or, failing that, straight back to the Unibond, so I can hop on a bus and go see them get a good hammering at Whitby on a cold, wet Wednesday in November.

The fact that every fascist and racist meat-head from Berwick to Bodmin seems to have adopted Rangers as their Scottish team isn't random, and is reason enough for me to despise the club, and everything it stands for.

No, I'm not a Celtic fan.

York City had a similar Fans Match a few years ago http://archive.yorkpress.co.uk/2004/5/14/246969.html which raised something like £10,000 through people paying to play, getting sponsorship, etc.

I didn't take part but those who did, had a fantastic day, and it was a great financial success, showing what can be achieved with dtermination and organisation.

...take a look at this man, whom the English FA think is a "fit and proper person" to own a football club.

I do have to declare an interest as a supporter of the first club he wrecked, but it says something about the state of football that noone in authority sees anything wrong with this individual being able to buy a football club for £1, lie to its fans, and then strip its assets.

'I do asset-strip' says the man who wants Mansfield

John Batchelor may not rename them Harchester but insists he will make a profit from Stags' distress

David Conn

Wednesday April 9, 2008

The Guardian

John Batchelor first rolled into football in March 2002 when he bought York City for £1 from the then majority owner Douglas Craig, who was threatening to withdraw the club from the Football League and sell the ground for housing.

Craig wanted £4.5m for Bootham Crescent and the supporters' trust agreed to back Batchelor's takeover because he said he had the money to buy it. He also promised he would give the trust a decisive 25.1% of the club's shares.

Batchelor whipped up some headlines for his idea to "brand" York City together with his motor racing team, but that was froth on impending financial meltdown and in December 2002 he put the club into administration. The fans' sense of betrayal that he never came through on his promises was then deepened by the discovery that he had made more than £300,000 from his association with the club.

The house builders, Persimmon, had agreed to buy Bootham Crescent and had paid £400,000 to Batchelor for sponsorship of "York Sporting Club", intended to be a merger of the football club and motor racing team.

Batchelor paid £100,000 of it into the club, then steadily withdrew all but £30-40,000 to pay for his entertainment and expenses. He kept the other £300,000, spending a chunk of it on the car-racing, and while York were plunged into trauma he bought a house for £250,000.

Little was heard publicly of Batchelor after that - until now, when he has thundered back as the man most likely to take over Mansfield Town, although after the public outcry he is likely not to rename the club Harchester United and feature them as a TV dream team. They are another struggling club, on sale for £1 by a profoundly unpopular owner, Keith Haslam, and in danger of relegation from the Football League.

Batchelor's business record, available for scrutiny via Companies House, will not reassure any Mansfield fan that he has greatly changed. Of 24 companies of which he has been a director, 14 have been or are about to be struck off the companies register, six have been insolvent, three are still going but he is no longer involved - he says he sold them on successfully - and only one small company in which he is a director is active.

One company Batchelor took over - although he did not become a director; his partner, Cheryl Hopkins, did - was Moornate Chemists in Nelson, near Burnley, a steady, solvent, family business selling cleaning products. Within three months, last July, Moornate was insolvent and in administration, after effectively being merged with another company he took over, Besglos, which was also in administration the following month.

David Brown, Moornate's former owner, says Batchelor promised to pay him £485,000 for the business, in instalments, and did pay him £70,000 up front. However, he has been left devastated, without the business he built up over 30 years, and still owed £415,000 of the price agreed. Batchelor, however, has said he bought and sold Moornate's factory, making £75,000 for himself.

"He ruins people's lives and walks away with money," Brown says. Several former staff of Besglos, and their families, are still struggling to recover, having moved to work for Batchelor on the promise of handsome salaries, then been left unpaid and lost their jobs.

Brown recalls that in one meeting Batchelor told him: "This is what I do for a living: I f*ck companies."

Batchelor himself turns out to be not only frank about admitting all this but determinedly so. He says he spent a month in late 2006 in hospital for alcohol dependency and now feels he must give straight answers to questions.

So, of his original promises to the York City supporters' trust, he acknowledges: "Basically, I was lying to them. There is no way of dressing it up."

He says he worked for many years selling hygiene products, then had a midlife crisis aged 38 and decided to chase excitement, which led him to chance his luck in football.

"When I walked through Douglas Craig's door," he recalls, "I really was a toilet-roll salesman with nothing more than a load of debt."

He admits to having cleared £120,000 personally from the York sponsorship money and spending some of it on his racing team.

Of his line of business he says openly: "I do asset-strip. I have realised if you follow the right procedures you can borrow against a company's assets to take it over. I target companies in financial distress. We try to fix them - some of my companies have gone on to do very well and I have sold them. Where I can't, I can arrange a 'pre-pack', agreeing beforehand what I will pay for assets, then put the company into insolvency. The suppliers and creditors fall away and I am left with a clean company."

Batchelor is plain: he always seeks to emerge with money himself. Of the human cost of the Moornate and Besglos insolvencies, he maintains he has "no pangs of conscience" and says: "I have always worked, brutal though it sounds, within the boundaries of what is legal."

His plan for Mansfield is to make money by selling the club on to the fans, and - with marketing of a similarly outlandish vein to the Harchester United idea - take for himself 25% of any profits the club then make.

Haslam, Mansfield's sole director for 15 years, bought the club originally for £1, then was responsible for redeveloping Field Mill between 1999 and 2001 in a deal with the builders Bowmer & Kirkland. However, he enraged many supporters later by taking out £585,142 in personal loans from the club, of which £239,297 was "written off" - the most recent accounts show that he has repaid the balance. Those loans were unlawful, because directors are prohibited from borrowing more than £5,000 from their companies. The club have also loaned over £580,000 to Haslam's holding company, Stags Limited, which bought land in Skegby, near Mansfield, to build an academy.

Both Batchelor and James Derry, a businessman who has tried to buy the club, say Haslam is offering Mansfield Town for £1 but wants to keep Field Mill and charge £275,000 annual rent to the club, or £175,000 if Mansfield are relegated to the Conference. Both say Haslam intends to keep the Skegby land, with the club effectively required to write off the loan to Stags Ltd. Neither Haslam nor Stephen Booth, Mansfield's chief executive, would confirm whether those are indeed the terms Haslam is seeking.

Most depressing to many Mansfield fans is that the football authorities are apparently powerless to act as one of the game's long-standing town clubs, formed in 1897, lurch into this unseemly stand-off. The Football League has a "fit and proper persons test" for football club directors and substantial shareholders but it does not bar from involvement people, such as Haslam, who have committed breaches of company law, or those with serial insolvency records, in and out of football, such as Batchelor. The disqualification applies to any person with unspent convictions for dishonesty, anyone who is bankrupt, and anyone who has run a football club into insolvency twice. John Nagle, the Football League's spokesman, explained: "In order to make the test meaningful and workable it has to be based on clear objective criteria rather than a subjective judgment of someone's suitability." Which means that if Haslam, or any other owner, is fed up or unpopular enough to sell to him, John Batchelor could have his hands on another football club tomorrow.

Chicken Balti

Dont know if someone said it earlier (I cant be arsed looking through 20 pages)but do people think Main saw this coming?

Anticipation is a fine quality for any 'keeper to possess

If only that bizarre rumour that he was coming to York had been true. City fans could have slagged him off all the way back into the Football League; with him in the team, we'd have been home and dry by now.