Views and Opinions!

My only plea to not give up the place on the board is this.....that is exactly what the board want.  

Why give up all those shares and then just to walk away ?  JF would be p!ss!ng himself laughing at how his master plan to maintain a grip had worked. Its a shame that the trust was relatively early into its rebirth when the massive issue of the share vote came about.

Would the members vote the same today to gift JF all those shares for a relatively ineffective seat on the board ?  

I think the trust should be genuinely seeking a resolution to the "benign loan" issue, whether thats through legal advice as to just how and when JF can claim them back legally , or and , tap up the other share holders and oust JF.

Whatever happens over the last few games, it's time for Fenty to go.  How that is facilitated is the problem but if Fenty is half the fan he says he is then he should make the process as easy as possible for the good of Grimsby Town Football Club and not for the benefit of John Fenty.

Chris' post gives me a lot more hope, coming off the back of Bax's comments. I sense we're at tipping point.

I totally agree that a breakaway trust is not the answer. It'd be an unnecessary duplication and be an unnecessary split which would only suit one person.

Some good posts and points raised on various threads. My own views well known, but very much behind the thinking above.

Tired of the debacle, tired of the threats, the alias’, the contempt, the monopoly, the ‘want to go’ but still hold all the cards.

Simply put - if things stay the same then forget it. Season ticket sales would halve.  The bloke who says he’s a fan lets this continue.

Long said reputation goes a long way, and how you treat others. If you don’t - it will bite back at you one day.

Everyone knows the only way forward, apart from the few who will always refuse to acknowledge it.

The time has come to make it happen.

I have a very ambivalent view on JF. I recognise that he was the only one with any decent capital prepared to put his money where his mouth is in the aftermath of the ITV digital shambles. Even if has invested £2m worth of “benign loans” then he has still put £2m worth of his own money into the club. I know he is a wealthy man but I’d imagine that is a very significant proportion of his own wealth. Given that I am inclined to have a reasonable degree of sympathy for him.

Added to that, even when I am vilifying him, I would never question his integrity. He clearly cares about the club and I’m certain he hurt as much as the rest of us when we got relegated out of the football league and spent 6 long years trying to pick ourselves up. He was as excited and giddy as anyone after Nathan Arnold temporarily set us free. Even if it was cringeworthy, his celebrations with Omar during his interview with BT demonstrated his joy at getting us promoted. He then looked ecstatic when Dis held the promotion trophy aloft. He is as much a Town fan as any of us, just with lots more money and had the will to pump it into a leaky bucket of a football club.

I also believe that some sections of the fanbase do show symptoms of what Jose Mourinho would call “football heritage” given that it wasn’t very long ago that we were beating Liverpool in the League Cup and holding our own in the Championship for several years. We were punching above our weight in those days, I saw a Cod Almighty piece about 2 years ago showing that the attendance for the first home game of the season for a 2nd tier game against Port Vale under Buckley was almost identical to the one against Nuneaton, also the first home game of the season back in 2014. Some people didn’t know what they had. We had it really good in those days and probably only appreciate it now it’s gone. JF has overseen our natural reordering and that has worsened our perception of him. It would probably have happened anyway but it happened under his stewardship. Whether an. ownership with better football knowledge would have slowed the regression to a level to make it manageable is unknowable.

For the aforementioned reasons he has built up a great bank of good will and sympathy from me. I recognise his financial contribution is substantial and his love of the club undeniable. I was therefore able to forgive him after our first relegation from the league. However, even my good will is starting to wear thin. This season has exemplified his hugely overinflated ego, his propensity to excerbate already awful situations and hasn’t helped the perception that he treats the fans as just customers rather than actual supporters who need looking after.

I’m not going to go over old ground and fastidiously narrate all of the PR shambles, abysmal managerial appointments and consistently shambolic decision making again but I will mention one. If Ginny and the other poster whose name escapes me are correct, and I have no reason to disbelieve them, and JF did describe Operation Promotion as the worst thing to ever happen to the club then he is either very arrogant, naive or just downright insulting. Operation Promotion brought the fans together. We are often a divided bunch. Take Paul Hurst, Jon Nolan, Lenell John Lewis, Ollie Palmer etc. There have been hundreds of examples in my lifetime that show how we can have vehement disagreements on lots of players and managers but OP brought us all together. It encouraged collective desire and even if it provided the funds to sign Pat Hoban so he could fire that shot that was blocked so Nath could score it was worth it in a footballing sense as well. Even if JF does think that then it shows a huge degree of unintelligence at telling hard working, dedicated fans that he believes it. As people frequently tell me, engage brain before mouth.

The problem as I see it is that JF has spent so long in ultimate control that he believes he has become untouchable and given his financial stranglehold that is a reasonable suggestion to make. As an unparagoned individual he can say, do and think as he likes and it won’t alter his position of relative power in the club. When someone spends so long in a post they tend to think like that, look at Tony Blair and Margerat Thatcher, they both clung to power too long and their respective careers ended in disaster. Witn JF the electorate or his own party can’t boot him out when they’ve had enough of him. We have to suffer until he is ready to leave.

The other issue is the almost complete absence of viable alternatives. Unless there is a secret millionaire out there ready to buy us out then, in all honesty, I agree with JF and the current hierarchy must carry out due diligence and make sure we don’t get some Italian gangster coming in and turning us into his vanity project. I’d rather have JF than someone with no affinity to the club and the same probabe incompetence when it comes to decision making. Likewise, fan ownership is littered with issues. We would still need somebody with the necessary skills and energy to lead such a venture and nobody seems willing to come forward and lead this campaign.

Overall, the problem is almost unsolvable, we have no clear alternative to JF and even if there was one I’d be making every attempt to make sure they absolutely financially and morally capable of running MY CLUB! JF has invested a huge amount of time, money and soul into running this club and he does deserve some slack, the issue is that he has been given some and now all patience has evaporated and there must be an change. This year has plumbed the depths of despair. The Slade appointment was dreadful and the delayed sacking was denouncable. However, we must now show the same collective desire as we did during Operation Promotion to ensure we are in the FL next season.

If BigChris, Bax and Dave Roberts as a trio were to return to the Trust then I would put my unease with its prior decisions to one side and join.

Quoted from davmariner

If BigChris, Bax and Dave Roberts as a trio were to return to the Trust then I would put my unease with its prior decisions to one side and join.

That doesn't seem to be a match made in heaven

Bax :-

"The Trust isn’t representative of the supporters, it is led purely and simply by self interest".

Dave Roberts :-

"To be honest I don’t recognise the description of people in it for their own self interest"

Not much consensus there?

Quoted from arryarryarry

That doesn't seem to be a match made in heaven

Bax :-

"The Trust isn’t representative of the supporters, it is led purely and simply by self interest".

Dave Roberts :-

"To be honest I don’t recognise the description of people in it for their own self interest"

Not much consensus there?

Dave left the Trust board a few years ago before coming back now, and Bax joined after Dave left IIRC, or at least at the tail end of Dave's tenure. So they've experienced different things. Also, without wishing to sound rude, Bax is quite a bit younger than Dave and will have a different response even to the same events. Both perfectly valid positions which with a bit of goodwill on both sides (which I'm sure they have judging by the long term) are reconcilable.

Disagreements and different points of view can be managed by most adults of goodwill. It's only the terminally egocentric who cannot cope with differences.

Quoted from KingstonMariner

Dave left the Trust board a few years ago before coming back now, and Bax joined after Dave left IIRC, or at least at the tail end of Dave's tenure. So they've experienced different things. Also, without wishing to sound rude, Bax is quite a bit younger than Dave and will have a different response even to the same events. Both perfectly valid positions which with a bit of goodwill on both sides (which I'm sure they have judging by the long term) are reconcilable.

Disagreements and different points of view can be managed by most adults of goodwill. It's only the terminally egocentric who cannot cope with differences.

I know of Dave Roberts and although he left the Trust board I am sure he was still in contact with them and new them all very well, so I feel my comment still stands otherwise why would he say what he did?

You make some good points, Mariner_09 - some I agree with, some I don't.

I really don't have any sympathy for Fenty just because he's put some of his personal fortune into the club and he's now in 'debt' to the tune of £2m.

It's not our fault he's in that debt. It's his. One bad decision after another has caused that. He (and the board) are the ones that choose the managers, sanction the signings and then agree release fees when they turn out to be rubbish.

If he's now in debt by £2m then that's his doing. All we've done as fans during his time in charge is turn up, pay our money, buy our shirts, pies, pints, programmes, contribute to fundraising initiatives like OP, etc.

So that's why I (and many other fans) take particular umbrage when things like OP are passed off as simply an unwanted distraction (paraphrasing there).

If true, that's a shocking thing to say. He's allowed to think that privately but in retrospect all he needed to say was that £110k allowed us to buy Omar and his goals in the final helped us win promotion.

But that would be giving credit to the fans, and I don't believe he's ever given us credit, sincerely. Ever.

So that's that point.

To be honest, there's plenty more I could talk about but the only other thing I'd raise is the fact that he wants out - but won't go until he's happy the people coming in are fit to run this football club.

That's entirely the right thing to say, but do I believe Fenty can identify a fit and proper person/consortium to run a football club if his track record in appointing managers is anything to go by?

I have zero confidence in him selling to the right person/people, and that's why any solution to this awful predicament we find ourselves in has to involve the fans in some way, because they're the only group of people who truly care about the future of this football club.