Just watching Newport giving 'Boro a hard time in the cup replay. Lennie Lawrence is on the bench in his role as 'consultant'. I merely wondered if he was at BP last Saturday and, if he was, what sport of reception he got from the fans. He's had more jobs than I've had hot dinners. Why is he considered such a guru? Didn't do too well for us.

Liverpool

He did a decent job. We were always fighting the tide in that division. Winning at Liverpool was one of the greatest moments I've ever had. He was paying a Chinese centre back £14500 a week at Town in the early noughties which forced Peter Handyside out on a Bosman which was a shame.

£14,500 a week my @rse.
I've seen about 40 different figures quoted confidently over the years about what we paid Zhang, but you can bet your house it wasn't yours. Hogwash masquerading as truth as usual.

11k I heard

Quoted from hampshiremariner

Just watching Newport giving 'Boro a hard time in the cup replay. Lennie Lawrence is on the bench in his role as 'consultant'. I merely wondered if he was at BP last Saturday and, if he was, what sport of reception he got from the fans. He's had more jobs than I've had hot dinners. Why is he considered such a guru? Didn't do too well for us.

Had a chat with him,albeit brief, Lennie is a nice guy who has probably used his personality to have a long career in football. He said that they were trying to win Saturday and Tuesday but they wanted Tuesday for financial reasons. Made sense but didn’t want to talk about his time with us.

Quoted from chaos33

£14,500 a week my @rse.
I've seen about 40 different figures quoted confidently over the years about what we paid Zhang, but you can bet your house it wasn't yours. Hogwash masquerading as truth as usual.

The most common figure I’ve heard bandied about over the years is £13k - whether that makes it true is another thing.

I’m fairly sure it won’t have been insignificant though. Whilst I don’t blame the regime at the time for the ITV Digital fiasco, it certainly didn’t help that it came at what must have been our peak spend on wages and transfer fees (even allowing for inflation we won’t be anywhere close nigh on 20 years later).

The likes of Enhua, Neilsen, Willems and co would all have been on a decent whack - the first two in particular. You have to question the wisdom of some of that.

Quoted from livosnose

11k I heard

The first figure I heard was back around the time he was here, or shortly after. That was when it was rumoured to be £6000. So it gets bigger all the time.

I thought we got a fee from QPR for handyside......seem to remember they bought 2 center halves at same time for around 500k

Quoted from Brazilnut

I thought we got a fee from QPR for handyside......seem to remember they bought 2 center halves at same time for around 500k

Handyside went to Stoke on a free. I think you might be thinking of Andy Tillson, though that would’ve been a good decade earlier.

yeah my strongbow fuelled  mistake .......sorry

Some big figures being banded about. I want to know how much was in the brown envelopes.

I always thought Lennie played apart in nearly ruining the club along with the ownership of the club at the time, I heard 13,000 a week Zhang Enhua, David Neilsen would have been decent wage aswell, £160,000 on Menno Willems.

A experienced manager like Lennie Lawrence should have been more responsible.

but we had the promisded bsb money  ;D ;D ;D ;D

Remember Lawrence famously accused us (or rather the board) of having a small club mentality and that was holding us back.  ;D

In the end, I think he was just high expense and had to go.

I think him and the then board wanted us to move forward, but with the On Digital crash it all went pear shaped.

I was always under the understanding the package Zhang was on was worth £12k a week, but that included everything including his accommodation, flights etc.

I don't know how much blame can be apportioned to LL for the spending.

Isn't it the board's job to give him a budget? And then say yes or no to any requests above and beyond that initial budget?

We could debate how he spent the money all day long (Enhua was overrated IMO and it killed me at the time losing Handyside at the end of that season), but the fact that he spent money he was allowed to spend is hardly his fault I wouldn't have thought.

Quoted from KingstonMariner

The first figure I heard was back around the time he was here, or shortly after. That was when it was rumoured to be £6000. So it gets bigger all the time.

Chinese whispers ;D

Quoted from fiveallive

I always thought Lennie played apart in nearly ruining the club along with the ownership of the club at the time, I heard 13,000 a week Zhang Enhua, David Neilsen would have been decent wage aswell, £160,000 on Menno Willems.

A experienced manager like Lennie Lawrence should have been more responsible.

Yeah the £13k figure is one that I've heard many times, I seem to remember David Neilsen wanted £6k a week to make his loan permanent but we wouldn't sanction it - which at the time seems a bit odd if the Enhua figure was correct.

Completely forget that we paid a fee for Menno, didn't we pay that fee for him even though he was due to a free agent a matter of weeks later?

Lawrence has had a good career in the game because he was a decent manager and knows his stuff.  He came in here at a time when we were in a bit of a rut.  Buckley MK II had run out of steam and was stagnant.  In the previous six months we had sold Lee Ashcroft and Jack Lester for relative pittances and were relatively toothless. The summer recruitment consisted of Paul Raven and Michael Jeffrey, the previous season had ended with a whimper and in all truth Buckley had probably run out of ideas - possibly the new board had lost faith in him too.  The way money was afforded to Lawrence yet Buckley had to make do with bargain basement signings probably summed it up.  That summer we also failed to hold onto Mark Lever who left for Bristol City, a league lower but no doubt better wages.

Lawrence recognised what we needed straight away, a more physical approach.  We lacked pace and presence, he set about bringing that in straight away.  Yeah he wasn't exactly tight with the purse strings but he only spent what he was told he could.  It was actually quite exciting at first as he brought in a Foreign Legion of trialists and signings, some good-some less so.  He also recognised that there was a massive gap between the youth team and the first team, we had nothing in the middle so he tasked Paul Wilkinson with bringing in lads released or due to be released by other clubs who would give us a number of 18-21 year olds who would be the next generation.  I can't remember them all but Simon Ford, Chris Thompson, Chris Bolder and a couple of Dutch lads came in.  Ford looked like he would be a break-out star, Thompson had all the ability in the world but just lacked the attitude and Bolder made a fair number of appearances for us if failing to be spectacular.  He found Michael Boulding who was just released from Mansfield and managed to play a big role in turning his career around.  9 months after getting lobbed on the scrapheap as an erratic left winger from Mansfield, he had secured a free-transfer to Premiership Aston Villa as a pacy and lethal striker.

His time here tied in with the boardroom upheaval with Bryan Huxford and Doug Everitt heading it up.  They had big ideas and plans and Lawrence was the man they saw to deliver it.  He had contacts and for all his faults, you can't claim he didn't have ambitions.  I remember soon after coming here he addressed a fans forum with something along the lines of 'Charlton were a smaller club than us when I took them to the top flight and there's no reason I can't take Grimsby to the top flight either'.  The place absolutely erupted!

In the end he just ran out of steam.  He kept bringing foreign lads in who were no better than what we had, the first influx were decent and an improvement but the quality dwindled.  I think the players began to lose a bit of faith too.  Putting Peter Handyside on the sidelines when he was still the best defender at the club was just odd.  Especially when we were going with a centre-back pairing of Zhang Enhua and Paul Groves instead.  Groves was a class midfielder but wasn't fit to lace Handyside's boots at the back.  Enhua was average at best in my opinion, in fact I always felt his defending left a lot to be desired.

Don't really recall any of the fans complaining about the money being spent at the time. Remember some grumbling when Handyside left but personally didn't feel he was quite the same player when he returned from a season long injury anyway. I think Lawrence just did what he thought was right for a club in that league. All the big clubs were spending money to bring in good players and he hoped searching overseas for good players would work. In some cases it worked and in others not so much but in the end the lack of cash,size of the club and everything else caught up with his ambitions. Some players he bought in did well, some we couldn't afford to keep though.

I think he was right about the board though. We've never had very ambitious people running the club who are willing to raise money to drive the club forwards but that's kind of the town mentality too. This is why the council have never bothered to be on the club's side when it comes to a new stadium and why a good portion of the town would rather the club would not have one because they might one day be inconvenienced by traffic.

When you're a small club, you can't really compete financially with the big boys in the division so you have to look in other areas of the game to create excitement.

In my opinion, Lennie wasn't necessarily splashing big wages on foreign players because he truly thought they were the long-term solution. Rather, I believe he was trying to generate a bit of a buzz around the club - a bit like the Ivano effect.

Just for a few weeks (or months) we began to dream. Naturally it helps if the exotic players make us better - Lennie's were hit (Nielsen) and miss (Willems) - but who'd have thought we'd have a Chinese international playing for us?!

What Lennie was doing at 'little old Grimsby' was trying something different; getting us noticed and spoken about; raising our profile and doing everything he could that money wouldn't quite allow.

I appreciate some of the foreign imports were rumoured to be on large wages while they were here, but I think deep down he - and we - knew it was just temporary. The thought of holding onto Nielsen was fanciful, but it was nice while it lasted.

I don't think Lennie was erratic or wasteful. He had enjoyed some success as a manager, he had ideas and he tried something different with us. It worked, in the short-term, but the way it fell apart the following season was sad to see.

I was a little surprised to find out that he'd been sacked when he had. Groves then endured a tough couple of months trying to turn it around, but we really accelerated to safety in the end with what was largely Lennie's squad.

Quoted from chaos33

£14,500 a week my @rse.
I've seen about 40 different figures quoted confidently over the years about what we paid Zhang, but you can bet your house it wasn't yours. Hogwash masquerading as truth as usual.

It may be hogwash but do you know? In the book The Grimsby Town Story it does say he " reputedly earned in the region of £13,000-per-week during his brief spell ". I don't know how accurate that figure is , do you?

I honestly don't care mate.
We might ask why there are so many figures quoted confidently as facts and how they could all be true, and, who would indeed know?
Personally I ask if it's really believable that we could pay just 1 player the best part of £1m a year.

Quoted from chaos33

I honestly don't care mate.
We might ask why there are so many figures quoted confidently as facts and how they could all be true, and, who would indeed know?
Personally I ask if it's really believable that we could pay just 1 player the best part of £1m a year.

£1M a year?? Maths not your strong point then?

I said 'the best part of' clever clogs. 14.5k a week is roughly 750K p.a plus appearance and goal bonus and any other additional payments. Best part of a million.

Quoted from chaos33

I honestly don't care mate.
We might ask why there are so many figures quoted confidently as facts and how they could all be true, and, who would indeed know?
Personally I ask if it's really believable that we could pay just 1 player the best part of £1m a year.

Well if you honestly don't care mate, then why post in the first place?

Quoted from Kris2

Don't really recall any of the fans complaining about the money being spent at the time. Remember some grumbling when Handyside left but personally didn't feel he was quite the same player when he returned from a season long injury anyway. I think Lawrence just did what he thought was right for a club in that league. All the big clubs were spending money to bring in good players and he hoped searching overseas for good players would work. In some cases it worked and in others not so much but in the end the lack of cash,size of the club and everything else caught up with his ambitions. Some players he bought in did well, some we couldn't afford to keep though.

I think he was right about the board though. We've never had very ambitious people running the club who are willing to raise money to drive the club forwards but that's kind of the town mentality too. This is why the council have never bothered to be on the club's side when it comes to a new stadium and why a good portion of the town would rather the club would not have one because they might one day be inconvenienced by traffic.

Handyside was also carving out a reputation off the field as well which wasnt helping his football.

Quoted from chaos33

£14,500 a week my @rse.
I've seen about 40 different figures quoted confidently over the years about what we paid Zhang, but you can bet your house it wasn't yours. Hogwash masquerading as truth as usual.

It was in the accounts as we are a PLC. For some reason that year, it showed the wage of the highest earner.

Quoted from fishboyUTM

It was in the accounts as we are a PLC. For some reason that year, it showed the wage of the highest earner.

Could have been the manager

Quoted from KingstonMariner

Could have been the manager

Lennie was dripping in gold on Saturday to be fair,  :X :X :X