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Juggy

Anybody got the old Robert Chase interview?

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I''m intrigued at the clip (sorry for taking the discussion a bit OT) that shows the chap having a go at the supporter handing out the red cards pre-match as he clearly has what looks like another teams scarf under his Norwich one-and its blue and white!!

 

Surely not, he can''t have been????

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[quote user="Hairy Canary"]

The year we came third in the Premier League we could have been champions had we strengthened. We had the money only Chase decided to buy a flour mill and a car park.[/quote]

That is too simplistic a view.   If we had have gone down that route we would likely have ended up like Portsmouth are now.  Chase was a lot of things but he wasn''t a magician who could wave his magic wand and buy us success without ruining us down the line.  

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I agree with hairy

We unravelled in April. Had we been given a bit of cash to strengthen we could have won the league. We will never get that chance again, and if we had won the league maybe the club would be a very different club now.

Our best chance to bounce back after relegation was under o''neill. Chases reluctance to properly back his manager set us further back.

At the end of the day, to have sold so many players for big money and spent so little on replacing them will always leave fans wondering where the money went. Especially with £7m of debt.

Those questions have never been answered.

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[quote user="lake district canary"][quote user="Hairy Canary"]

The year we came third in the Premier League we could have been champions had we strengthened. We had the money only Chase decided to buy a flour mill and a car park.[/quote]

That is too simplistic a view.   If we had have gone down that route we would likely have ended up like Portsmouth are now.  Chase was a lot of things but he wasn''t a magician who could wave his magic wand and buy us success without ruining us down the line.  

[/quote]

?LDC. I am obviously not getting your drift.

You cannot say we would have likely have gone down the Pompey route. We could easily have gone from strength to strength.

Or are you in fact blaming Chase because he wasn''t a magician, and would have ruined us down the line, no matter what great managers he had here, or players that would have improved a very successful team??

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I think we pretty much did go down the Pompey route. The banks were about to move in and sold any players we had left of any real value. How close were we to the abyss? Gordon Bennett had no doubt : -

 

"I was brought in in the last week of March and I realised within three days that the club was technically insolvent. To be honest I did not think that it would even fulfil its fixtures last season," admitted Bennett, as the administration of ex- chairman Robert Chase began to fall apart.

 

 

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[quote user="crabbycanary"][quote user="lake district canary"][quote user="Hairy Canary"]

The year we came third in the Premier League we could have been champions had we strengthened. We had the money only Chase decided to buy a flour mill and a car park.[/quote]That is too simplistic a view.   If we had have gone down that route we would likely have ended up like Portsmouth are now.  Chase was a lot of things but he wasn''t a magician who could wave his magic wand and buy us success without ruining us down the line.   [/quote]

?LDC. I am obviously not getting your drift.

You cannot say we would have likely have gone down the Pompey route. We could easily have gone from strength to strength.

Or are you in fact blaming Chase because he wasn''t a magician, and would have ruined us down the line, no matter what great managers he had here, or players that would have improved a very successful team??[/quote]

It just seems as if people always want it both ways.  We were £7m in debt, so where was the money ever going to come from to strengthen?   Whether the debt was down to Chase or not, the money simply wasn''t there to strengthen.   We had gone as far as we could.  The selling of players for a profit had been going on for years - ever since Kevin Reeves - that''s how our club survived the escalation in wages etc, so that policy wasn''t just down to Chase.    

Chase for all his faults was not the reason we did not win the premiership that season - United were simply a class above us and proved it at the 1-3 at Carrow Road.   The ship started to sink as soon as people got expectations of more money to be spent - but there wasn''t enough money there to make a difference.  Chase knew it, most people knew it.   There is no guarantee of success - if Chase had been irresponsible and spent £5m of the bank''s money, we would then have been £12m in debt - and we still might have been relegated - and once into the mega-millions of debt - like some other clubs - we might have gone under.    Even as it was, the level of debt was just about manageable and we eventually got into the premiership - but we have - like other clubs - always had significant debt - to the point in 2008 where things must have been becoming very scary.  A lot of clubs have been in admin.  We didn''t and through a mixture of luck and judgement we are where we are now.  

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Ok, so what if Chase with his hand on the till, knew what was happening, but still persisted with his agenda? Who''s ''fault'' is that?

Ignoring the possibility of actually winning the Prem, finishing 3rd was an amazing achievement, and why did we go from that to relegation within 2 years? There has to be blame for it somewhere. He was at the top of the tree, knew everything that was going on.

Chase had taken us to that (£7m debt) yet it seems people want to defend that last days of his tenure, not what had got us into that position int he first place.

The Managers/Team were effectively told (by all the actions going on around them)that the team would not be strengthened, so jumped ship (Mike Walker) or were weakened by big player sales.

Tommy Docherty spoke sense on the interview regarding losing players/downward spiral etc.

Like you say, we are where we are now, through a bit of luck but plenty of sensible judgement (since we were in League One a far more precarious position), something we never seemed to have sitting third in the Prem

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Absolutely unbelievable to think that luck had anything to do with us not going into administration. Football business is not some fantasy world filled with fairy dust. The reason we didn''t go into administration was primarily because of benevolent people who had our club in their hearts. Geoffrey Watling first time and the current owners second time.

 

 

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Nutty - I am not advocating that luck has got us to where we are over the last 4 years (although what would have happened if we had a ''Chris Hughton'' type manager instead of PL in League One? - that''s for another thread!)

You are spot on, and was more my point, that we sat at the top of the Prem, yet still completely cocked it all up, to the extent of 2 years later, we came within days (hours?) of going under. That really takes maladministration and incompetency to new levels

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[quote user="crabbycanary"]Ignoring the possibility of actually winning the Prem, finishing 3rd was an amazing achievement, and why did we go from that to relegation within 2 years? There has to be blame for it somewhere. [/quote]

You could blame the players and the manager - the fans didn''t help with the rebellion - that in itself must have affected the players and manager. 

Chase - and he wasn''t perfect - can you blame him because the money wasn''t there? Not willing to send our club millions more into debt could be said to have been a responsible attitude.   People complained about lack of ambition.   Leeds were ambitious and almost got to the promised land - look what happened to them..............

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You could blame the players and managers, after all they are the ones that are having an influence on games. But if the players see their favoured boss get disillusioned , and go (then O''Neill also, who any player who has played under, respects or loves him), then the teams best players get sold, they will lose faith. I am not accusing them of not trying btw. It is just that a team that finishes third is getting weakened makes life very hard to maintain success, a la Tommy Docherty''s words

Also you are talking about the later stages of his ''reign'', how did we get into that mess in the first place with Bob in charge?

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I don''t remember a fans'' "rebellion" until after we were relegated.  When we went into free-fall from January onwards, I think most fans were just shocked.  The protest movement against Chase didn''t get going until after the Martin O''Neill departure and the Dean Windass fiasco etc.  Don''t think you can attach any blame to the fans for that relegation.

 

The concern for me about Chase was that after he''d been to Bayern Munich and saw their facilities, he got complacent and assumed we were now in that sort of league and could afford to spend money on facilities like that, rather than keeping a tight grip on the non-football spending.  The obvious symptom of this was when Bryan Gunn was injured and we didn''t have a decent backup.

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Hindsight is a wonderful thing...

i think there''s a time in our history, perhaps which will never be made public, where the club simply got found out in some way financially...

Chase was a Norwich fan and wanted his best for the club, in a vain attempt to save us he sold our best players, tried to find land that would grow in value quickly and sold Trowse...

was some of it Depseration? who knows.. but Carrow Park, the car park, Colney and the land behind the river End have all served the club well over the years... Chase''s vision never happened for him.. 20 years on it has for someone else...

did he sew the seeds?

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I think that one line may sum it up nicely Jas;

''Chase''s vision never happened for him''.

Him, being the operative word, not ''the Club'', not ''the Fans'' but ''him''

It looks like he was using the Club to feather his nest, if you watch that interview. He ran out of ''luck'', time or never had the footballing business nous, required it would seem.

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[quote user="crabbycanary"]Nutty - I am not advocating that luck has got us to where we are over the last 4 years (although what would have happened if we had a ''Chris Hughton'' type manager instead of PL in League One? - that''s for another thread!) You are spot on, and was more my point, that we sat at the top of the Prem, yet still completely cocked it all up, to the extent of 2 years later, we came within days (hours?) of going under. That really takes maladministration and incompetency to new levels[/quote]

 

Sorry Crabby. Yeah you''re right. It''s incredible to think that one man can possibly be responsible for that. Especially one man who wasn''t even a majority shareholder. So how did it happen? Barry Lockwood shed some light in this old interview : -

 

Barry Lockwood''s assertion is somehow both disarming and startling in its candour.  "All directors and the vice-chairman received monthly management accounts including the bank position and the cash book position. So we were all aware what the position was."

Pause as bamboozled interviewer scratches head. For a man purportedly under fire, the 58-year-old King''s Lynn-based businessman appears curiously disinclined to bolt for the one, perilous escape hatch still just about ajar to anyone associated with the remarkable deterioration in Norwich City''s financial fortunes.

"Blame Robert Chase?" Lockwood pauses briefly, with eyebrow half-raised and the faintest trace of a sardonic smile. "That''s the easy answer," he continues. "I''d be failing in my responsibility if I said that."

 

I think that maybe Chase''s greatest strength became his weakness and the lesson learnt from those times is that the current owners always put a team in place to run the club where as Chase was to quote Delia "the all singing all dancing" chairman. Even without a majority shareholding it seems he got his own way about everything.

 

 

 

 

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