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MuddyWaters
May 8, 2021, 12:47pm
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gtfc98
May 8, 2021, 1:02pm
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No longer Sick of the BlueSquare  
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buckstown
May 8, 2021, 2:16pm
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Before you sign up for the Athletic free trial, read the reviews of people who did and tried escaping. They might be wrong but there's a lot of unhappy people
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mariner91
May 8, 2021, 3:26pm
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Grimsby was once a relevant place. In the 1950s, its location on the east coast of England helped it become the busiest fishing port in the world. In the same decade, its football team was managed by Bill Shankly for three and a half seasons.

Later, the club provided international footballers. Gary Croft made his England Under-21 debut against Brazil on the same night as David Beckham. Grimsby were the mighty Mariners for a time, in the second tier of English football then.

Last month, they were relegated into the non-League system for the second time in 11 years. There are only a few trawlers operating in its waters now. Though Sacha Baron Cohen turned up at Blundell Park in 2013 and later made a film ostensibly set in the town, it was not meant to be flattering.

Grimsby Town
Sacha Baron Cohen on the set of the film Grimsby, which was shot in Essex (Photo: MWE/GC Images)
Croft is not from Grimsby but he played for its football team in two spells. His home is in Lincolnshire and this means a sense of loss is never far away. “It will hurt Grimsby as a town,” he tells The Athletic. “There’s a lot of pride in the club but it takes you off the map doesn’t it? Grimsby is a big club. It doesn’t want to be in the National League.”

For this to happen twice in such a short space of time is, according to Croft, “scandalous”. He thinks Grimsby’s directors, led by John Fenty since 2004, have not learned any lessons from the mistakes of the recent past. Grimsby were, after all, a non-League club as recently as 2016. “That’s why people are hurting so much,” Croft reasons.

Almost all of the anger, indeed, has been concentrated on the club’s board rather than the managers or the players. “I’d say 90 per cent of Town fans would say they’d rather have been relegated and have new owners than remain in the Football League with Fenty,” says Tony Butcher of the Cod Almighty fanzine and website. “We’ve been a laughing stock. The thing making the club go backwards is one man. This fish rots from the head.”

That is why Wednesday felt like liberation. Grimsby had been here before, close to a sale to someone else — local people — who were promising to engage the community more than Fenty ever did. Only last month that deal collapsed shortly before completion after one member of the three-party consortium decided to pull away from the takeover by email.

Jason Stockwood and Andrew Pettit had never met each other before they were introduced 18 months or so ago through Tom Shutes, a property developer who ultimately decided not to get involved. But they are now the club’s owners and, dressed casually in jeans and trainers at Blundell Park on Wednesday, they talked at length and with great conviction about their plans for coming home.


Despite relegation, there is now a sense of optimism. Lloyd Griffith, a comedian born in Grimsby who has been one of Fenty’s fiercest critics, was on Thursday morning, “elated, absolutely elated”.

Fenty will always be remembered as the man who took Grimsby out of the Football League not once but twice. Stockwood was brought up by his mother as a single parent and Pettit’s family ran a butcher’s shop before both became wealthy enough to buy their own football club through their business pursuits. While Pettit’s background is also in property, Stockwood has held significant roles at Skyscanner, lastminute.com and match.com. He says he wants “the next era of capitalism to be more inclusive.”

According to Griffith, Grimsby are “now in the hands of people who care about the club, the players and the fans.”

More importantly, he added, “They care about the town.”

Grimsby Town’s football ground is not even in Grimsby.

Blundell Park presents itself from nowhere. Great Grimsby, with its Grade 1 listed Dock Tower, fish market and fields of imported cars, comes and goes and becomes the outskirts of Cleethorpes. And there, flanked by rows of terraced houses, it appears behind a McDonald’s drive-thru.

The club’s home since 1899 is a relic. The main stand remains cladded in wood and rolls of barbed wire cuts across the top of its perimeter gates. The players and officials’ entrance, situated in a cul-de-sac, is nothing but a sheet metal door.

The Young’s Stand, sponsored by Grimsby’s biggest fish factory, is the only nod to modernity. From its back rows, there are views out into the Humber Estuary — quite handy for watching the boats if the match is dull. The ground’s floodlights, however, do not dominate the skyline as they used to. In 2019, they were reduced in size by a third.

Grimsby Town
Blundell Park feels like a relic in 2021
A train line, carrying tourists those final yards to Cleethorpes seafront with its pier, chippies and slot machines, is a corner kick away from the turnstiles. The seaside resort feels like the end of football’s line. Historic charm can only offer so much compensation.

Grimsby Town is a symbol of the decay in this corner of north-east Lincolnshire. A decimated fishing industry has left an awful void in a region that has struggled to forge a new identity. Its streets are tired and in need of investment, much like the area’s only professional football club. Both have been crying out for a saviour.

“We might urine on your fish,” new chairman Stockwood wrote on the Codalmighty fanzine website, referencing one of the club’s popular chants, “but the closest most get to the fishing industry these days is in the frozen food section at Tesco.”

“The town is downtrodden and people have looked for something better,” Butcher concedes. This partly explains why the appointment of Ian Holloway on New Year’s Eve in 2019 sounded so appealing: a former Premier League manager, a recognisable goatee-bearded squat figure who possessed the sort of unbreakable spirit that has carried him through a career in the game which started 40 years ago as a player at Bristol Rovers and since has involved experiences across all of English football’s professional divisions.

He took the job following an interview at Papa’s Fish Restaurant on Cleethorpes pier, where he was accompanied by his wife, Kim. It was important to Holloway that she was on board because the new role would involve the family relocating to an unfamiliar part of the country. Holloway had nursed Kim through lymphatic cancer and three of the couple’s four children were born deaf. According to sources close to the manager, he saw a long-term future and was planning on moving “lock, stock and barrel — he saw great potential in Grimsby, a sleeping giant, a bit like Blackpool (whom he previously taken to the Premier League)”.

Holloway believed the club could not fall any further than it was at the time. Grimsby were six points above the foot of the whole Football League. With his passion and a few signings, he concluded Grimsby would pull away from their problems and temporarily they did, winning seven of his 15 games in charge before COVID-19 ended the season.

Ian Holloway, Grimsby Town
Holloway – and his flat cap – impressed many at first (Photo: Pete Norton/Getty Images)
Holloway would also “win the hearts of more fans” according to local news sources because of a pilgrimage to another famous fish and chip shop, Steels Corner House. Kim did not accompany Holloway that night early in January 2020 and instead, he was photographed beside the restaurant’s grinning owner Fenty and Grimsby’s chairman Philip Day. Aside from his managerial duties, Fenty had persuaded Holloway to become a director of the club and this was expected to involve £100,000 worth of investment.

“He had lots of people on-side very quickly,” says a source familiar with the inner workings of the club, who on reflection now feels Holloway “came in and was full of bluster.” Seasoned fans like Butcher were wary from the beginning. Holloway was, “the music man”. He did not make outrageous promises but there appeared to be no realistic limitation to his ambition. “I thought he talked crap,” Butcher says flatly. “It was incoherent tosh but positive tosh. He said things would be better and because he’d come from outside, people wanted to believe him. They thought it was true.”

Holloway hauled Grimsby from 21st in the table to 15th. The summer came and Grimsby’s directors were not alone in wondering whether a second campaign in a row would be able to finish because of the pandemic. Fenty especially was wary of making too many financial commitments too early. On Tuesday, Day attempted to explain the thinking on behalf of the board via a statement on Grimsby’s website. Much of the blame was ultimately laid at Holloway’s door.

“Directors have a fiduciary liability to ensure that a company does not trade insolvent and with no guaranteed income but known liabilities, difficult decisions had to be made,” he wrote. “Notwithstanding this, we did ensure that the manager had the budget he required to build a squad. The decision of who to release and who to sign as players is, and always has been, the decision of the manager.”

Holloway told The Athletic he would prefer not to comment on Day’s claims.

Financially, Grimsby were not in the worst place at the start of the pandemic. The club’s accounts last season revealed they were in a pretty strong position considering five home matches were lost to COVID-19. In May 2020, Holloway claimed Grimsby was “the best run club” he’d ever worked at.

When The Athletic investigated what effect any potential bail-out might have on the lower leagues, indeed, it was made clear by those in charge of Grimsby that they felt other clubs were being rewarded through this uncertain period for their own mismanagement.

It has been said that the pandemic would expose those clubs running on the weakest financial footing and many of them would slip through the cracks. Grimsby were in a decent position, partly because of their caution. Yet prudence does not always mean that administrators are far-sighted and a club is being run well. The same caution would undermine Grimsby’s Football League status.

Nine of the squad’s out-of-contract players were allowed to leave at the start of July 2020. Those remaining had already taken a 25 per cent cut. Despite having an option to extend the stay of leading scorer Charles Vernam by another season, he joined Burton Albion on a free having been offered less money than he was already being paid. Influential midfielder Jake Hessenthaler followed a similar path when he signed for Crawley Town.

Grimsby, Crystal Palace
Vernam, here playing in the FA Cup at Crystal Palace in 2019, joined Burton Albion in July 2020 (Photo: Chloe Knott/Danehouse/Getty Images)
The club decided to keep staff on furlough for as long as possible. This included the groundsman. Photographs of Blundell Park at the beginning of September show a rutted pitch. “It was allowed to become the worst in the division,” says Butcher.

Holloway was blamed for a pre-season campaign that involved just one friendly match against non-League Cleethorpes Town. Half of his eight signings arrived from the semi-professional ranks but this was not a part of a coherent strategy that was focused on harnessing unproven talent.

Supporters wondered whether Holloway had even seen new recruits like Alhagi Touray Sisay play for Aberystwyth Town in the Welsh Premier Division. Meanwhile, Halesowen Town’s Montel Gibson was given a three-year contract, which to many sounded like an excessive commitment given the club’s concerns relating to what the future might hold.

Though Day says Grimsby’s budget was the twelfth-highest in the division, other potential signings have told The Athletic they were reluctant to agree deals with the club because of the stringency of COVID-19 clauses nestled in contracts which meant massive pay cuts if another season was curtailed, as well as the prospect of living in a relatively remote area in the middle of a global health crisis.

“The club struggled to attract players full stop with the wages they could offer,” says a source. “And when they did come, (more experienced) players like Sean Scannell, Danny Rose, hadn’t played for a long while and looked totally unfit.”

Another new face was the pony-tailed Bilel Mohsni, formerly with Rangers. His arrival prompted Holloway to describe the 33-year-old Tunisian as “my Van Dijk”. But he appeared in just one match, a 4-0 defeat to Salford City. Mohsni would travel around Grimsby on a scooter and this earned him cult status but within a couple of months of his debut, he was gone.


Holloway announced his departure after another crushing loss, this time by five goals at Tranmere Rovers. This prompted Mohsni to post a video of himself on Twitter training alone on Cleethorpes beach where he denied that he was leaving the club, vowing to be at training the following day. Though he was true to his word, by December he’d signed for Barnet.

The season had started, indeed, amidst similar confusion. Twenty-four hours before Grimsby’s first game, assistant manager Anthony Limbrick was placed back on furlough after he told the club it was financially untenable for him to continue travelling from his Surrey home and paying for temporary accommodation in Lincolnshire while on a 25 per cent wage cut. The popular Australian’s departure would not be confirmed until two months later.

Earlier this week, Day said “this decision was taken at the request of the manager…” in a statement that did not name Holloway at any point. Apparently, Holloway “did not wish to continue with Anthony as his assistant or with any other assistant… In the same way, the decision on the number of pre-season games to play was that of the manager. In hindsight, we should have perhaps challenged these decisions more robustly”.

Later in September, Holloway was supposed to take his team to Cheltenham but that game was called off because one of Grimsby’s teenage players had contracted COVID-19. This led to two further postponements across the next fortnight and resulted in Grimsby becoming the first club in English football to be fined for breaking safety protocols during the pandemic.


One of those infringements included an admission from Holloway that he played darts with players at the Cheapside training ground in an attempt to boost spirits. Despite the bad publicity and the fine that came Grimsby’s way, the newly-signed Gibson (now on loan at Altrincham) later posted a video on Instagram of himself and his partner hosting a gender reveal party with lots of guests during England’s third national lockdown. Gibson apologised, saying the matter had been dealt with internally following an investigation by Grimsby.

Holloway had vowed to deliver the fittest team in League Two. There would also be attacking football and most of all, entertainment. “Well, people were entertained,” says Butcher. “Just not the Grimsby Town fans.”

As early as October, sources close to the club wondered whether Holloway might be looking for a way out. “His team selection became very random. One game he was playing out from the back, the next they weren’t. It seemed very muddled. The players never seemed to know where they stood with him. But it was the total lack of quality that he brought in that was the main problem. It was dross.”

“It was like a slow death,” says Croft, who saw a lot of matches from his position in the commentary box as a match analyst with Radio Humberside. “Ian Holloway wasted so many games and I still don’t understand what he was trying to do. He was supposed to have that magic and at least attract good players. It just never worked.”

Grimsby were just above the relegation zone when it was revealed in December that Alex May, a convicted fraudster formerly known as Alick Kapikanya, was looking to buy £1 million worth of shares in the club. It soon emerged that May had led a Manchester gang of con artists who kidded elderly homeowners into a remortgaging scheme. He had since attended a number of Grimsby games at the invitation of Fenty, with whom he’d already set up a company called Town Centre Living.

Fenty soon resigned as deputy leader of North East Lincolnshire council to, he said, “avoid an unwarranted distraction to the enormous progress being made in the borough”. Banners were unfurled across open spaces in Grimsby and Cleethorpes calling for his removal from the football club too.

Grimsby Town
Fenty, pictured in 2004, is blamed by many fans for Grimsby’s demise (Photo: Adam Davy/EMPICS via Getty Images)
His biggest critics believe Fenty still has questions to answer relating to his twin roles in politics and football. Is it fair that a councillor can hold public office at a time where his football club is attempting to move grounds onto land under the same local administration? Fenty had also been the portfolio holder for regeneration and housing in the area, with council leader Philip Jackson saying in May 2019 he would have to be “very careful” in declaring any conflicts of interest and abstain from relevant discussions. “I have been meticulous in declaring any conflicts of interests throughout my time as a councillor and can hold my head up high,” said Fenty when he quit his council role in December.

“The club has stood still for so many years,” Croft argues. “How can a central point of a town remain so antiquated?”

A ground move has been spoken about in Grimsby for decades. There was one relocation plan in the Great Coates area off the A180 on the way into Grimsby almost thirty years ago but more recently, the council have pushed a proposal on Freeman Street, right in the centre of town. On Wednesday, Stockwood and Pettit suggested on the DN35 podcast that the future might actually be at a redeveloped Blundell Park rather than a “vanity project” elsewhere.

Ultimately, little has changed since Fenty bought Grimsby in 2004 following the £14 million sale of the fishing business that made him. Though he resigned from his role as chairman in 2011, he remained the majority shareholder and he was still involved in nearly every key decision.

He announced he was stepping aside from day-to-day duties at Blundell Park completely less than six weeks after Holloway’s arrival to focus on his role at the council but added he would “continue to support the club financially from afar”.

This was when Day, another local man, was appointed as chairman. While Fenty still owned £975,000 shares and more than 41 per cent of the club, Day had just £2,950, which amounts to 0.12 per cent.

After May was photographed at Blundell Park and Fenty left the council, Holloway hung around for nearly three weeks. Before Grimsby beat Scunthorpe in the local derby on December 19, he promised that he wasn’t going anywhere but five days later he resigned, citing that he could not work with a new ownership group that was close to buying the club.

Holloway never committed the £100,000 worth of shares or took his seat on the board of directors. The Athletic has been told by sources close to the former manager that his investment plans were genuine but the pandemic changed everything.

Fans, however, understandably remain critical of Holloway’s role in Grimsby’s downfall.

“My view is that Ian Holloway believes in what he says at the moment he says it,” Butcher concludes. “That’s part of the ‘music man’ stuff.”

Fenty and Holloway had initially got along “famously” according to one club source, partly because the pair were on roughly the same side of the political tracks. Fenty has represented the Conservative Party in Lincolnshire for the last 13 years.

The calls for him to sell Grimsby Town have been loud for longer than a decade but until December, it did not hinder his political career. Fenty represented Humberston, a wealthy enough area where people, according to one resident, “only really care whether the bins have been taken out.” He was re-elected in 2012 and 2016 but stepped down three months before this week’s local elections. He regularly referred to anyone who was rumoured to be interested in buying the club as “tyre kickers”.

According to Butcher, it is ultimately Fenty’s fault rather than Holloway’s that Grimsby have ended up where they are. “He’s a cheapskate,” Butcher says. “The consequences of that in running a football club are clear.”

Another source suggests there has been a culture at Grimsby of “we’ve always done it like that” and it has never changed. The infrastructure of the club that Fenty took down in 2010 is pretty much the same in 2021.

Old workers at Grimsby are keen to talk about their frustrations from Fenty’s earliest days. When it was decided to remove a water cooler from one of the club’s offices and Fenty was asked why this was necessary, he advised staff to use a tap instead. If there was a problem with the floodlights, he would pull out a wooden ladder and try to solve the problem himself. “Some might see this as initiative but everyone who knows the club sees it as penny-pinching,” says the former member of staff.

John McDermott had spent 20 seasons as the team’s right-back by 2007. Grimsby was his only club but he said Fenty kept reducing his wages while attempting to increase his duties. In his autobiography, McDermott said he was offered just £300 a week in his next-to-last year at the club — a reduction of £350 a week. “Less than minimum wage,” he wrote.

Another footballer, who spoke to Cod Almighty in 2020, claimed that when he signed for Grimsby on Christmas Eve, he drove nearly 300 miles thinking a deal had been agreed. On that journey, he received a call saying his appearance fee had been reduced by 50 per cent even though the contract had already been signed. The player could take it or leave it. Then, he arranged his own accommodation for a Christmas Day that he spent alone in Grimsby, away from his family on the other side of the country.

When Grimsby knocked a Tottenham Hotspur side that included Jermain Defoe and Robbie Keane out of the League Cup in 2005, the reward was a tie against an Alan Shearer-led Newcastle in the next round. Yet some of the players did not feel like they were being allowed to enjoy the moment because of interference from the chairman, who had joined the dressing-room celebrations in front of the cameras after the Spurs win. Ahead of Newcastle’s visit, Grimsby’s players were told they would not be allowed to swap shirts with their Premier League opponents because they were being auctioned, “but nobody knows where they went,” says one of the players in that team.

Grimsby Town, Spurs
Grimsby, then of League Two, beat Premier League Tottenham 1-0 in September 2005 at Blundell Park (Photo: Michael Steele/Getty Images)
In the social circles in which Fenty is most comfortable, he is full of confidence, “like a peacock” says another source. Yet amongst people who question his authority – be that footballers, supporters or the media – he is less sure of himself and this has manifested into regular confrontation.

Earlier this season, the club complained to the BBC about Griffith, who has filled in as a co-commentator for Radio Humberside over a number of years. After a fixture at Morecambe on Boxing Day, it was claimed Griffith had spent the 90 minutes shouting and goading both Fenty and his brother. Griffith, however, was able to confirm he was only doing his job in an otherwise empty stadium.

Fenty was a boardroom member with a majority shareholding when the club withdrew the accreditation of the club’s reporter at the Grimsby Telegraph in 2003 after the paper’s coverage of ambulance availability at Blundell Park. In 2007, the club decided to award broadcasting rights to Compass FM, a radio station that could barely be heard outside the immediate area of Grimsby and Cleethorpes and had no experience in sports broadcasting, rather than BBC local radio. Later that year, Fenty’s complaint to Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator, about BBC local coverage of the club he ran was thrown out on every count.

Mike Newell’s sacking as manager in 2009 led to a court case where the former Blackburn Rovers striker sued the club for £53,000, claiming Fenty smashed a chair and throttled him with a tie when they rowed. Newell was so “shocked” by Fenty’s “physically aggressive” actions, he suggested it would be better if the pair settled their differences in the car park. “The chairman denies robustly that he acted aggressively, or was affected by drink,” the club said in a statement at the time.

After a judge ruled against the club following their recruitment of Boston United’s joint-managers Paul Hurst and Rob Scott in March 2011, Fenty reacted to a ten-year-old boy waving a flag in his face in a game against Newport County by snapping it in half. He would soon demand that an independent supporter-ran message board was shut down. When Scott was suspended by Fenty three months later, he called a BBC Radio Humberside phone-in to berate journalists for their coverage of events.

On his way to scoring 30 goals in 2015-16, Padraig Amond was offered a new two-year deal, only on reduced terms because of the removal of a clause in his contract that stipulated he was due a 25 per cent pay increase if Grimsby, as expected, earned promotion from the National League.

Amid the excitement of the club’s return to the Football League, the 2016-17 season began with the club’s mascot, the Mighty Mariner, getting the sack after he called for a boycott of any fixtures in the Football League Trophy that involved the under-23 sides of Premier League clubs. This view did not correspond with those held by Fenty who had earlier admitted he was in favour of B teams, only he’d “rather see the introduction of Premier League reserve teams in an expanded, regional League Two… Games against, say Man United under-23s would be sure to enhance attendances”. It is fair to say that this is not an opinion that has aged well.

When Hurst left for Shrewsbury after five years in charge later that season, Fenty blamed fans for driving him out. Hurst, however, revealed he made the decision because his appeal for a new strength and conditioning coach was belittled by Fenty, who asked him to name an occasion when a fitness coach had last won three points on a Saturday afternoon.

In total, there were 13 managerial changes at Grimsby in the 17 years since Fenty first became chairman. Marcus Bignot, Michael Jolley (who left after swearing 58 times to reporters in a four-minute tirade) and Holloway would go the same way as Hurst, who returned only because he was told by people he trusts locally that Fenty’s position was untenable owing to his resignation from the council.

The mood in the squad “has never been worse” according to a source with close links to several players. This manifested itself on the pitch a month ago at Bradford when Stefan Payne head-butted his own teammate Filipe Morais and was sent off.

They travel to Cambridge United tomorrow without a hope of staying up. When relegation was confirmed a fortnight ago, Hurst admitted little had changed at the club since his last spell ended five years ago. Even the balls used for training were the same. “Paul’s right,” says a training ground source. “They barely look round any more. What chance did we really have?”


Looking forward to a brighter future now Fenty has gone.
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mariner91
May 8, 2021, 3:29pm
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Apologies for the random sentences in there, it's the captions from the photos which weren't copied.


Looking forward to a brighter future now Fenty has gone.
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lew chaterleys lover
May 8, 2021, 3:43pm
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Why is it the same old cliches about Grimsby the place?

The football club has been run shabbily for 17 years and we are in a terrible state, nobody can deny that. The stadium is old, but compared to a lot of stadia we will be travelling to next season it is still a cut above.

However, the town is not on its knees. The demise of the fishing industry was decades ago.

Unfortunately for us, the stadium is situated in just about the worst place possible - approached by the dreary A180 and Cleethorpe Road /Grimsby Road which have seen better days, but most of Grimsby is fine, far better than so many towns in the UK.

It is just so bloody depressing for people to put us down all the time.
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Mariner Ronnie
May 8, 2021, 4:10pm

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Brilliant article that. If I’d have been a member of staff and had been treated like that (in reference to the water cooler) I’d have jacked on the spot.


Today we got our team back - town fan leaving Wembley may 2016
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WOZOFGRIMSBY
May 8, 2021, 4:50pm

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When I first read the title, I thought it was gonna be about a polish lad that had moved over and worked for birds eye or something and used to play for lech Poznań!

Brilliant article, and, it’s a very damning synopsis about how many felt about JF. We all, well 90% of us according to that, knew to a certain degree what was happening not only during the ‘COVID era’ but way before.


He’s one of our loans
He’s one of our loans
Harvey Cartwright
He’s one of our loans
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KingstonMariner
May 8, 2021, 5:40pm
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Pretty good summation of Fenty’s time. And lots missed out.

Wouldn’t be surprised if he complains to the publisher or tries to sue for telling the truth.


Through the door there came familiar laughter,
I saw your face and heard you call my name.
Oh my friend we're older but no wiser,
For in our hearts the dreams are still the same.
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forza ivano
May 8, 2021, 5:45pm

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good article. Shame they didn't mention about him leaving with £1.5 million and the 200,00 Trust shares that he was given but never returned
when it's described like that it just makes you very very angry
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