Well that’s been one interesting year hasn’t it? As I write this (at the start of the festive season), our beloved chairman, who has taken incompetence to new levels over the past 12 months, is currently reaching a new low in all-time unpopularity, not only with Blackpool fans but seemingly everyone who has even glanced at a football, never mind played it. It’s frankly astonishing how this man can seemingly alienate nearly everyone he ever comes into contact with and how as a chairman of a ‘thriving’ business, he constantly ridicules and aggravates the very people who buy into his ‘business’. The current controversy is Karl at his best and certainly classiest. Even if the FA and the FL decide not to press charges (which I seriously doubt so don’t get your hopes up Karl), his position is now totally untenable (to use that familiar opposition government speak we are so fond of nowadays).
It’s really hard to understand how someone who effectively won the lottery in May 2010 could have completely and totally destroyed it within 4 years, like some drunk in a brewery who’s found himself locked in for the night! If someone had said to me at Wembley that sunny day, that the man sat immediately opposite would somehow contrive to bring the club to its knees within four seasons, I’d actually not believe it was possible — but he’s managed it! This year is a case in point. From taking far too long to sack Paul Ince when it was clear things weren’t working (and then of course doing it by text — turn off you phone Karl!) to then appointing one of the best managers in recent years in Jose Riga and seemingly never speaking to him in advance to see if the two would fit together, to interviewing candidates publically to replace a manager who was still employed (of which of course everyone said no, and one of them quite vocally), to this latest shambles — oh of course I’ve forgotten the classic standing by the cash cow banner, the tennis racquets, the contempt he showed on the message boards and the latest rather unsavoury moments, it just goes on and on and on and on..
When Karl sits down at the end of the year and drinks his non-alcoholic tipple can he seriously see 2014 as a success? Maybe the empty ground, the protests, the ridicule from virtually every media outlet at his stewardship and the fact now thousands are signing a petition to remove him and install the loved Vaeri Belokon might just resonate with him…?, but of course this is Karl.
A friend of mine follows Chelsea, yet she watches in abject horror when she reads and hears of yet another crisis to befall our once proud and famous club and now genuinely feels sorry for me in a way that goes beyond just friendship. The answer to all of this is quite simple — Karl HAS to stand down. Nothing he says or does is believed by the fans anymore and the relationship has ended in the most dramatic way possible. If Owen has to step in then he must do it now. Get a Chief-Executive in who can run a business that doesn’t treat its customers with contempt, who won’t chase them through the courts, who won’t threaten to ban them, who will understand that in fact the paying spectators are the MOST important part. The club belongs to the fans even if the ‘business’ at the moment belongs to the Oystons.