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 HALL RIGHT NOW: The good news? Not much more can go wrong. Now here's the bad...Fri 13th Jul 2012 07:53 by Micah Hall The legacy of short term thinking and the litany of misjudgement again comes back to kick Pompey in the teeth.
The Football League inevitably punished Pompey with yet another points deduction, an inevitable consequence of failing to repay any of our previous cva.
The ludicrous decisions to offer Kanu a contract extension to mitigate some verbal offer that should never have been made, extending a contract he should never have had results in us owning a player we can't play, who doesn't arrive for training and who we can't even discipline without threatening the whole future of the club. Incidentally, as you obviously can't threaten someone with breach of a contract you have already breached yourself, it mystifies me as to the reason we tried to do that. We owe Kanu a load of money in wages, how were we thinking he could be disciplined? He can do whatever he likes. The fact that many players have continued to act so professionally has blinded some to the fact that Pompey only still exist because of their goodwill in deferring wages. Many of them could have served the club with 14 days notice of termination of contracts.
The fact that Miland developments has gone into administration is yet another indictment of poor decision making. The separation of club and land just robbed both of value. The poor decisions to load the club with debt, to sell to Al Fahim, a spending spree that saw terrible signings like Tal Ben Haim and Mike Williamson, then handing the club over to Al Faraj have lacerated the club, and saddled it with an enormous millstone of debt owed to Portpin. The sale to CSI was another terrible decision which more or less knocked the nails into the coffin lid.
At least there is now not much left to go wrong. We start with minus ten points, we have no players, we are in league 1, have no owner...
There is every chance that Pompey, as we know it, will cease to exist before the season even kicks off. The Football League’s decision to refuse to allow Portpin to roll over more than a small proportion of their secured debt and the imposition of the points deduction, allied to the slow progress in settling player contracts means the upside for Portpin is diminishing faster than my hopes of being Britain's next top model.
The points deduction doesn't affect the Trust's hopes of course but unless a sustainable business turns up without the big earners there will be nothing the Trust can do.
This looks like the end of days. If the worst does happen, it at least provides the club with the opportunity to start again at Fratton Park, to try to build a club that makes decisions for the next ten years, not the next ten minutes. Lord knows the decisions made by all these much vaunted 'shrewd businessman' people have been telling me about don't seem to have worked out too well. If the people who have been running Pompey for the last six years are the shrewd businessmen I would hate to see the dumb ones.
The one consolation as we look at the smouldering ruin of our club is that the Trust couldn't possibly do any worse. The Trust is still seeking pledges from Pompey fans to back their bid. Information can be found here The views of Micah Hall are their own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial view of pompey-fans.com Click here to sign up for an account and reserve your username! You can then post on the Forum and add your comments to articles
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