Purely coincidental 
Allegedly yes. 20 plus years in the championship and league 1 just by luck apparently
As I say above, if heâd have walked in 2005 there would have been a case to support your argument. He didnât. So his legacy is the damage rather than the times you mention. And there will be more and more people around who suffer the damage rather than have happy but hazy memories going back over two decades.
The rebuilding job is huge. It transcends the eleven men on the pitch. We are now an absolutely bang average fourth division club - thatâs all of it. From our support, our facilities, infrastructure to the 222 weâve seen in our first six games.
Itâs not necessarily because we went backwards. Itâs just that our peers moved more quickly forward and we therefore competitively lost the status weâd held for most of our history. Those clubs moved forward because they took models like ours and built them better. Moved grounds like we did and created a foundation from which to grow rather than stagnate.
Five thousand gates are now bog standard fourth division gates. The game moved on whilst we complacently and smugly did the whole âwell run clubâ chutzpah. He outstayed his welcome by about a decade and a half and in doing so set us further behind our peers than we have been for a long time.
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Some good times indeed.
Still, I think he has been rewarded handsomely enough, no need to keep his name hanging around and leaving a bad smell as a reminder of what he did. (You donât need me to explain)
I doubt he is bothered one bit either.
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Letâs not also forget that it was under Uncle Jeffâs astounding leadership that we managed to sink to League 2 at the end of 2018/9 season, prior to Leigh taking over temporarily before handing over to Trivela. So stating he knew how to run a club doesnât really ring true to me.
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Accepting your point, why was JWB happy to hand the running of the club over to him, if he had any thought about its future well-being?
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Like PT said, he hung on to long, bailing when he had seen us drop back into the basement league. Canât imagine there would have been many outsiders queuing up to purchase us, especially with the freehold situation at the time.
Ironic really given some on here herald him as some architect of our success (which could easily be argued came about despite him not because of him), he wasnât bright enough to sell during those successful times when the stock/value of the club would have been higher. Guess he could never see past that monthly rent cheque.
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Like everything with JWB, it was done when it suited him, not when it would have been of benefit to the club.
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Two good posts there young man (I can say that because most are younger than me) and I am thankful for those first 12 years.The Club was rebuilt almost from scratch after the Ramsden debacle and we signed players like Samways, Merson , Corica etc who were some of the best we have seen. The victories over Wolves and Albion live long in the memory BUT then the decline set in. ITV digital etc and it became much clearer as the rent spiralled that JB had lost interest in trying to rebuild and give us more success. He became even more isolated from the fans and that is when he should have gone around 2005/6. If had sold up then he would have left if not a hero then a man who would have been remembered fondly by most fans.
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I donât claim to speak for any fan other than myself but I doubt most fans would think fondly of someone who had snapped up the freehold for a snip and then saddled the club with ever increasing rent.
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I said âmostâ fans not all. Most at that time werenât concerned with the rent issue. You may recall at some early Trust meetings it came up and I made the point that the real problem with the rent issue would come when JB wanted out. The success of those years blinded a lot of us but that changed over the years as inflation increases took it up every year. This coupled with no success on the pitch awakened the wider fanbase to the issue and ,of course, it became the dominant issue in the last decade before he eventually sold up.
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I think he could have - if heâd reunited the club and the ground and then sold it on to others who had more resources to advance things then his tenure would have been looked on more kindly - even if he had made a big profit personally.
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Fair points mate.
I think a lot of fans were critical of Bonser very early on. The trouble was breaking through the feeling of many fans that they were helpless to do anything about the situation.
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I knew a lot of fans - usually a couple of generations older than me - for whom Bonser becoming owner was the final straw and they stopped attending games when the obvious, straightforward questions which many were asking about how we ended up not owning the ground were rarely addressed and never convincingly answered
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That is a really good point. He had chances to do it so you have to ask why not? I can only presume that like a lot of people he became greedy.That is an answer to your previous post.I am a bit slow!!!
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@P.T Thank you for those brilliant posts. Describes exactly how I feel & sums up Bonser both fairly & perfectly.
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Sums up perfectly
All of them were longstanding Walsall drinking and dancing establishments. Nothing to do with London.
As owner, is it not a bit self indulgent to name a suite after yourself in the first place?
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