Quote Mirfieldbull="Mirfieldbull"Just musing a thought, Mr. Guilfoyle will be spoilt for choice won't he, surely both Caisley and Hood are presenting their rescue packages to him as they were both cast iron to win but only depended upon a) The other not being there; and b) the level of debt being reduced. Will there be white smoke rising from the Coral Stand when the deal is done!'"
If only.
If I had to write a fictional future history of how this might all pan out, I'd maybe pen something like the following, since it could never really work out this way, could it?
We are now late next week, hours from the payroll having to be submitted, with seemingly no realistic expressions of interest. Everyone has been whipped up to a frantic state and become increasingly desperate as the deadline has come ever closer is upon them. The hero rides in as the "rescuer" of last resort, saying that since no-one else seems prepared to save the club he feels it is his responsibility to. What a selfless public-spirited hero, indeed!
Since the situation is by then very dire the terms are necessarily not entirely to the Bulls' advantage, of course. The Bulls go to VP, cutting BCFC's costs significantly and making their board look like heroes. The RFL surrender the lease to the council, for somewhat more than they paid for it, so the RFL board (for once) look like heroes for turning in a tidy profit. A well known guy with interests in distribution etc buys the Odsal site from the council, who make a big profit on the sale and so look heroes to the council taxpayers. He in turn creates new jobs on the site as a result, so he looks a hero to the people of Bradford.
Everyone, indeed, claims to be the hero. Its win win win all round. What a result!
And the Bulls fans and staff? Those who are retained? Well we are told we too are the winners, since we should be grateful we still have a club to support, even though with lot less to spend than previous budgets.
In my fictional account, I'd probably need to indicate whether or not this was all the plan right from the start, and whether the delay in going into administration was also planned notwithstanding further tax liabilities building up in the interim, which would then be defaulted upon. I'd probably also need to indicate whether the pledge was extremely helpful in that it reduced the amounts the new owner had to shell out, so he had no reason to have wanted to see it fail. Even if he may have been pleased that any prospective alternative funders may have been frightened off at the last minute by becoming aware of all the infighting, even though most of the pledge funds had been committed by then.
But, as I said, it would be a work of fiction and doubtless events will soon show that it never actually happened anything like that way, so it would be out of date well before I finished writing it. Wouldn't it?