Of course, we knew all along that this whole thing was blown out of proportion (didn’t we? DIDN’T WE???). I don’t expect the UK press to be intelligent enough to research their stories, so it’s up to our friends in the Norwegian press to give us what’s really going down at WFC. The craic is this : the story of us selling our best players is a bit of a red herring.
Neither Roekke nor Bakke have suggested this themselves – the possibility of this has arisen in the future, but I think that the original plan of getting rid of our deadwood is much more acceptable to KIR. The suggestion of putting Svein Bakke in was not KIR – it was Jan Petter Storesdvet (I’ll get his name right one day), who is widely perceived as a “football man”, not a businessman.
JPS is the most senior non-coaching person at the club most in contact with Drillo, who himself has publically stated that he doesn’t want to sell JH and others. KIR himself didn’t really know that Bakke was coming until a few days ago. This arrangement may sound weird, but I would imagine that somebody like Richard Branson doesn’t know all the directors of the different subsidiaries of Virgin. Call it standard business practice.
Got all that so far? Well, the next piece to the puzzle is that Bjorn Rune Gjelsten, seen as the more “romantic” of the R&G double act, is still a great big part of WFC, despite he not being a part of Wyndmore any more (or something). It also transpires that he is also in day-to-day contact with Drillo.
All of this leaves SH, and I think his outbursts make him look even more like a general being stripped of his powers. I refuse to believe that he doesn’t know what’s going on, and it does make me even more firm in my beliefs that he was using all of this as a major pro-SH PR exercise. Whilst I don’t doubt that he still an integral part of WFC, I don’t think his conduct (which I still think was appauling and made him look – to quote a Samism – small fry) is going to exactly endear him to our real owners.
SH will in the days to come still claim that he has most of the power at WFC. If I was him, I would be very careful what he says in the future, otherwise he could well find himself not welcomed at WFC quicker than he expected.
It shouldn’t surprise you to hear that REMBE is backing SH 100% in all this, giving the rather cliched quote that “it will be back to the bad old days when we used to sell players”. Er, Mark Kennedy and Chris Perry ring any bells, Robbie? Don’t forget, he is a mate of Greenberg, the kiddie raper who concocted this story in the first place. It will be interesting to note where the player’s loyalites and motives lie in all of this – we can probably work out the SH loyalists, they were probably the ones larging it up after the Sunderland game, saying that is was because they got back to “their” way of playing. I would imagine that the vast majority of them would wish that this whole farce would sort itself out ASAP. Bit like the supporters, really
Of course, there is a sinister side to all of this, and it comes that the man who broke all this, one Simon Greenberg, is a supporter of the team who has come sniffing round our backsides again, much like a sex-craved canine.
Yup, it’s been rumoured that Carl Cort and JH are “certs” to be Spurz players by this time tomorrow. And the Thatcher to Liverpool rumours – for £3.5m of course – have flared up again. Is this the real motive behind the story? Fortunately, none of the main 5 players have come out and said that they want to leave, indeed JH has stated that he’s very happy here. Remember, he’s been at big clubs before, and knows exactly where the pitfalls lie.
I suppose I’d better mention the on-the-pitch stuff for once – the Bolton match in on Tuesday, 8pm kickoff. SW19 will be stuck in Bolton that night, so no after-match updates. Not unless you’re willing to give me a laptop.