If during the celebration, happiness and tears that the Premier League promotion-winning day at Wembley or the subsequent memorable days at Liverpool, Wigan and numerous home performances against Manchester United, City and Newcastle, someone had put a hold on proceedings and told me that within 4 years Blackpool Football Club would be regarded as the laughing stock of the European game, then even I wouldn’t have believed that Karl could have achieved such a feat.
Blackpool FC has always been a ‘roller-coaster’ of a club with those images so beloved of broadcasters from the pleasure beach perfectly summing up the up and down nature of supporting this great club — even Manchester City fans with their perennial conviction that it can only get worse no matter what, have a certain sympathy with the trials and tribulations of being a Tangerine. It’s always been this way and this is from someone who watched as we seeked re-election to the Football League, had William Cartmell as our Chairman and played in a crumbling wreck of a stadium in front of 1400, but now it SHOULDN’T be this way. Why? It’s simple, the Oyston family, without any talent or forward-planning, won the lottery and have since compounded their complete inability to run a business by emptying the coffers and bringing a great institution into disrepute.
It’s astonishing that just 4 years after Olly and the team took the English game by storm that we have had a summer that has seen the most disastrous pre-season in the history of the game with a new and exciting manager at odds with a chairman who simply is incapable of telling a truth or behaving in a normal and decent way towards either his employees or his customers. Although Matt Williams wasn’t to everyone’s taste, his absence has shown Karl up for what he is, a complete and utter bumbling buffoon who has absolutely no right to be allowed to run any company of any description, yet the famous Blackpool Football Club is at the whims and fancies of a man who was ‘born’ into the role. I was never a big fan of Owen, but he at least had a bit of business acumen about him, whereas Karl appears to wear as a badge of honour is ability to insult and upset every person he deals with. This is a community based club and the community are being turned away in their thousands. The much talked about ‘legacy’ of the Premier League did actually result in a new sprinkler system and a lot of money for the family.
There’s little we can do as fans except keep on the pressure in the hope that someone out there is willing to buy the remnants of this once great club and rebuild it, and for the few Oyston apologists who still talk of ‘better the devil you know’, then all I can say is — watch this space. It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better — if it ever does!
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