I’m a big believer that timing was crucial for JB and his motley crew.
The period immediately after the Hillsborough disaster, and prior to the mid-to-late 90’s renaissance in stadium design was a period when almost no new football league stadia got built. Aside from Glanford Park, Huish Park and the Deva Stadium, there wasn’t a lot of new construction going on, until Huddersfield kicked off the renaissance with their McAlpine Stadium in 94 (I believe).
This is when most clubs were waiting for the full impact of the Taylor report, and also waiting to see the impact of the newly introduced Premier League. To a canny fellow, this lull could be exploited - knowing that more finance was coming in to the game than ever and that stadium design was being radically overhauled, meant he could build a stadium on his kind of budget (cheap), to his kind of design (crap)…so long as he got it done quickly.
If the whole Denglen/Bonser/Gilman situation had arisen 5 years later, building Bescot would’ve looked rather stupid, 5 years earlier, and the need for an updated ground wasn’t really as pressing. I certainly think Uncle Jeff benefited from an element of luck in the timing of Bescot etc.
Remember as well ,we weren’t the only WM team with problems in the early 90s. Blues and Albion both dropped into the third tier,and I don’t think either bounced straight back. So our plight then can’t be used as an excuse.
Any commercial building needs a major refurbishment once a generation and many retail outlets are more frequent than that. We are well overdue, with the exception of the former Alsop stand. I can’t imagine The Venue has missed out either.
This is something that you could do some extremely interesting and damning analysis on. Even if you only use the clubs who are playing at the same level or lower than they were then it would be interesting to see how many are now getting smaller crowds like we are.
A little analysis on us v our neighbours, 1987 v 2018:
Great problem about the possible action of us not attending, and starving Bonser of his Pension fund, is, that the likes of WalsallOne etc would still be at the Bank’s’s every fortnight, even if Bonser was at the turnstiles robbing everyone of their wallet as they tried to enter! So the 4% will ‘remain’ (now where have we heard that word before?) for ever, until either they die or the club does!
Its great to see these stats. Just shows the amount of bull this board thinks it can get away with feeding us. The stats don’t lie. Pretty much a continual downward trajectory under Bonser at a time when football was/is booming.
Without the inspired appointments of Graydon and Smith, I hate to think what that graph would look like!
That’s another factor. Since sacking Lee, he’s appointed off the top of my head, Merson,Broadhurst,Money,Mullen, Hutchings Smith,O Driscoll, Whitney and Keates.
Only two of those were unmitigated successes. Many are some of the worst we’ve had. He’s lost the touch with which he could mitigate the rest of his influence.
Yes I would be there and why shouldn’t I be there? The graphs show clearly that the gates go up if we have some success on the pitch over a prolonged period.Unfortunately when we had some good players in the Championship the gates did not go enough to sustain that. Other similar sized clubs have had the same experience.
Well he appointed 3 good managers Nicholl,Graydon and Lee who did really well for us…since then only Smith comes into that category in my view. The jury is out on DK at the moment and the next few months will tell us a lot.
