Southend Utd expected Admin

[alanmayes]

Southend Utd are expected to enter Administration next week.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/football_league/article6892085.ece

[Reg Smeeton]

Southend Utd are expected to enter Administration next week.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/football_league/article6892085.ece

Saw this earlier on the BBC site, -10 will take them to the foot of the table.

Do we want to keep Revell?

[DiV]

posted this last week, sort of...

....I'm pretty certain the Revell deal is done.

[alanmayes]

Could we get Lee Barnard?

[Batch]

Could we get Lee Barnard?

I'd like to see the chairman claim he "has failed to live up to expectation".

[DiV]

Could we get Lee Barnard?

Contract runs out end of the season, worth ago.

[Rustle]

Could we get Lee Barnard?

Not a chance im afraid,he seems to be heading to the championship (Coventry) according to their fans.

[alanmayes]

Not a chance im afraid,he seems to be heading to the championship (Coventry) according to their fans.

Freddie Eastwood to return to Southend as part of the deal,if Southend can get the embargo lifted?

[Ardiles]

The Revell deal was 'done' the day he came here on loan.  Two things...

1.  While SUFC were not yet in administration at that point, we all knew they were in financial difficulty.  Revell was offloaded because they could not afford him.  Without a new source of funding, Revell was never going to return to Roots Hall.

2.  The SUFC Chairman burned any bridges that were still standing with his (patently untrue) comments about AR failing to live up to expectations.  For once, it could be us offering the proverbial bag of footballs/bag of pork scratchings and getting our man for next to nothing.  At long last, I think this could heal the still open wounds inflicted when Jan left for Middlesbrough for a paltry £1.3 million.

[alanmayes]

Accrington Stanley are also in the High Court this week facing a winding up order.

From the Guardian Website...


Fingers crossed for Accrington Stanley. The League Two club are due in the High Court to face a winding-up order brought by HM Customs and Revenue over an unpaid £308,000 tax bill. Let's hope history does not repeat itself and this is not a case of "back to the 1960s" for the Lancashire club.

At the time of writing the feeling was that Accrington would scramble together sufficient pennies from assorted jam jars and escape by the skin of their teeth. Certainly Dave O'Neill, the club's chairman, was in defiant mood at the start of the week.

"A few fans have said they are not sleeping," he said. "Let me do the not sleeping. Yes of course we are going to do it, we are going to meet it [the bill]. On a scale of one to 10 we are now a nine. The bank transfers will be done on Tuesday."

So far so confident – but then O'Neill admitted: "A guy who promised us £25,000 let us down so we are a little short at the moment."

Hats off though to the 67 fans from the Save Our Stanley campaign who walked from Accrington to Spotland at the weekend to raise £10,000 towards the tax bill before watching Stanley win 2-1 at Rochdale in what threatened to be the visitors' final game.

Afterwards John Coleman, Accrington Stanley's long-serving manager who believes he works to the Football League's smallest budget, proved pride personified. "There is a lot going on off the field," he said. "The players have had problems with their wages but they have put it all behind them. They have big hearts and even bigger attitudes."

There is a horrible element of deja vu in all this. After all the original Accrington Stanley – formed in 1891 and Football League members from 1921 to 1962 – folded under a debt mountain in 1966 after spending four seasons languishing in the Lancashire combination. Two years later a new club was re-born and began climbing its way back up the non-league pyramid.

Finally, in 2006, Accrington Stanley returned to League Two – ironically replacing Oxford United, the team they had lost their League place to back in March 1962 when they resigned due to debts of almost £64,000.

No one wants to see them wound up but Accrington's latest brush with extinction highlights the perilous financial tight-rope so many clubs are currently walking. Since Eric Whalley, the owner who steered the club through the last 14 seasons, stepped down and moved to Chester earlier this year things suddenly seem to have gone awry. But scrape beneath the surface and several League Two rivals will be privately fretting about similarly fragile finances.

How Stanley could do with producing another Brett Ormerod. When the non-league Accrington sold the forward to Blackpool for £50,000 in 1997 they sensibly inserted a sell-on clause entitling them to 25% of any resulting fee. So when Ormerod eventually moved on to Southampton for £1m, the resultant £250,000 facilitated Accrington's ascent towards League Two.

Stanley lie halfway between Burnley and Blackburn but some locals believe the intense rivalry generated by those two Premier League giants leaves little room for the re-direction of emotions to a League Two minnow.

In a world where Lancashire schoolchildren are almost always going to be drawn to Rovers or Burnley, if not even bigger clubs in Manchester or Liverpool, does it not seem inevitable that one day – possibly quite soon – Leagues Two and maybe even One will be forced to turn semi-professional?

[michael]

That's another one then.

Fitton's "half dozen" prophecy is coming true.

He is like nostradamus.

[Iffy's Onion Bhaji]

Southend were never going to have the money to fund their new stadium. It's all gone a bit pete tong for them.

[michael]

I reckon it is splashing out on Kevin Betsy that has done this to them.

We dodged a bullet there lads.

[michael]

and lasses.

[pauld]

The Accrington one is a bit weird, they've had three or four offers of investment/cash injections (including one from their own fans) which they've turned down.