A few things struck me today regarding today’s Bristol Post interview with new Bristol Rovers chairman Steve Hamer. First, an unprecedented level of transparency and openness about what is now happening at the club and second, far more worryingly, the sheer mess the club was in before the Al-Qadi family stepped in. The Wonga-type loan, at an interest rate of 1.2% a month, has now been repaid, some £3 million. How does one imagine this would have been paid by the old guard who, it now transpires, had taken the club a long way up Shit Creek without a paddle? To this financial non expert, I don’t see how it could have been. What a mess.
And what can you make of Mr Hamer’s comment that the UWE Stadium planning was on the basis of a “lone wolf approach”. Who do you suppose that “lone wolf” was? It does not require the intellectual capacity of a rocket scientist to work that one out. Step forward Nick Higgs. It can be argued that by selling up to the Al Qadis, he gave the club a once in a lifetime opportunity to steer the club forward to a relative footballing stratosphere. I see it as the last act of a desperate man who had run out of ideas and borrowed money.
Let us make no mistake, here. Had not the new owners entered centre stage, Bristol Rovers may have been stuck at the barely fit for purpose Memorial Stadium forever, assuming that they were not forced to sell it and move to somewhere like – oh, let me think – Twerton Park. In administration, back in the Conference – that could have been the final legacy of a totally discredited bunch of tired old men.
At least Mr Higgs was truthful, it seems, when he said he would not sell the club to anyone who did not have the interests of the club at heart. His actions in his last few years at the helm do not represent compelling evidence that this proviso applied to himself.
