Come on Mr I my views on Thatcher must be more bollox than that as far as your concerned.

Totally agree - and its so easy to address by those concerned - the fact is they dont want to which is a bit rich with all the criticism levelled at the fans

My 'doubts' about Scotty were confirmed by the Yeovil game, very early in the season, the Tranmere away leg and the playoff final set the alarm bells ringing for me. Since Coopers departure, we've had a sucession of boring football obsessives for whom the fans have no meaningful role to play and could be safely ignored.... and ultimately alienated.

summarise this thread

adg rant never read opener or any of the other posts as the will all be utter bollox

there you go

next

Unlike your post which is eloquence personified

cough cough cough cough

SPOT ON!

i cant understand peoples hostility towards ior, who the fuck else would come in and put as much money into the club as they have done? meat loaf? any of the towns respected businessmen? this is probably the first time in the clubs history it has been run properly, i sometimes wonder what people want.

simple fact is success in football is (probably) like Heroin, it's pure unadultarated bliss, and once tasted it's almost impossible to get over the 'buzz' it creates.

What you see in the original post is a smackhead (no offence) who has been without a hit for a while (so to speak)

or a dickhead who wants a smack, one of the two

How do you know what herion is like?

i dont! but if you read or watch tv programs about it, you hear a lot about it being the 'ultimate' buzz. hence the high rate of people who become addicted to it, and the desperation to do ANYTHING for another hit

Seconded.

Dibble wants free pies.

I don't believe some of the posts on this thread. Some people appear to operate in a parallel universe detached from the realities of life as we know it. There are no knights in shining armour riding over the hill to rescue us as the long and mostly undistinguished history of Pools will testify, We hit the jackpot when IOR took over and had the best years of our lives ever since and some of us have gotten a bit drunk on the wrong kind of expectation . I'm old enough to know what real shit's like and this aint it, ..... and while I'll freely rip into managers and occasionally some players, I will never bite the hand that keeps this club in existence. I'm pissed off with snide comments and inuendo from some posters with demands for the equivalent of a magic wand to sort things out, the little people who want it doing their way, the people who by their posts seem to go looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it totally wrongly and offering unsuitable remedies.

For a 'fan', you appear to have an unhealthy obsession with trying to find fault with the club.

Summed up perfectly. Spot on.

No body would argue with the financial investment, how could you. We are correct to be worried about the present owners leaving. The gate size will not help keep the investment on their behalf viable. I don’t need to reiterate the obvious but IOR do own the club! Yet they need people to reciprocate this by supporting the team through the turnstiles, corporate sponsorship etc.

In my opinion the only way the owners can sustain the current investment is to own the ground. They could then use the ground as a guarantee against loans to invest in future project with in the club?

One of the problems we face is the lack of communication between the club and the supporters. You can’t keep put the onus on the supporters for the lack of support if they are kept in the dark. More dialogs on which way they wish to take the club etc would be a positive.

Some posters on this (which is only a small community of Hufc opinion) site will always have their own agenda. This is a fact of life as in any debate, but one that makes it more interesting.

We are in our centenary year and one would have wished not for the gate to drop to around 3,000. The squad that is now looking more like relegation rather than making a mid/play off position. A total wall of silence on an appointment of a manager. CT has lost three out of the last four games and is performing as bad as Wilson’s four points from eighteen in his last games.
A loose of faith by the home crowd is for all to see in the attendance….

Please correct me if you do think this is not a shambles. lm looking at a team that could be relegated and will not gain promoted for a long time. How low will the gate fall if this comes about… As a supporter l don’t see any positives to pick out from this season that marks a 100 years of our club…

For the club being run properly for the first time in its History? I think Harold Hornsey era should take some credit for taking the club forward for IOR to take over the mantel. He invested a lot of his” personnel “wealth

l think Pools would have a health gate in this division if we had a manager/team in the top seven to support. The problem we have is investing/challenging for the top half of the table with the resources available.
A manager with fresh idea’s and some hunger to be successful would be a step in the right direction.
The blame game is immaterial as we have to find a way of surviving this season or we will be in the wilderness for a long time…

Yesterday...


Today...

I think the majority of Pools supporters are thankful to IOR and especially the money they have ploughed into the club. There have been many improvements over the years. What I would question is ‘could the money have been spent more wisely’?
I don’t know how much money other clubs in our division can draw upon, but most appear to rely upon the occasional big transfer. Looking down the league, of the top half I can see Leeds & Leicester as probably having good funding although both have recently had financial problems. Of the rest I would think our funding is probably as good if not better. MK Dons and Colchester are paying for new stadiums and Huddersfield, Walsall and Millwall will also likely still have a debt on that score.
We have seen quite a few mediocre at best players come in over the last 4 years and in the last couple of years a slowdown of players coming through youth and reserve sides.
I realise that money cannot guarantee success but I think with the funding that has been available and there is nothing I have heard to say that it will not continue, we are underperforming.
I take the point that our attendances are bad, second bottom in the league with an average of 3771. If we were in the top 7 I’m sure they would be better but still at the lower end of the attendance league. Maybe Chip is right, if we did well in league 2, with lower costs (wages) we may attract more supporters and if successful the cycle would continue.
Over the years Hartlepool has shaken off its old image of defeat and negativity nationally, shame the good folks of the town haven’t bought into the new era with their support.

Rhetorical question mark ?
The rhetorical question mark was invented by Randall Dillard in the 1580s and was used at the end of a rhetorical question;

A rhetorical question is a figure of speech in the form of a question, Hence the use of question mark at the end of a sentence.

just to complete to copy and paste.........


however, it died out of use in the 1600s. It was the reverse of an ordinary question mark, so that instead of the main opening pointing back into the sentence, it opened away from it.[7] This character can be represented using the reversed question mark (؟) found in Unicode as U+2E2E.

Rhetorical questions in some (informal) situations can use a bracketed question mark, eg. "Oh, really(?)", for example in 888 subtitles.[8]

Some have adapted the question mark into various irony marks, but these are very rarely seen.

The question mark can also be used as a "meta" sign to signal uncertainty regarding what precedes. It is usually put between brackets (?). The uncertainty may concern either a superficial (unsure spelling) or a deeper (truth, real meaning) level.

I think its use died out because people started getting the point.

Why do Spaniards use upside-down question marks?

A younger new generation of supporters follows Pools along with the Ord - Hornsey era. It’s refreshing to see optimism with today’s supporters as they have only known play-offs and promotion in the last decade or so. Apart from Pol Scott reign….

I think one of the biggest plus on the PR front for the club/town has been J.S on sky television. He has single handed raised the profile of his home club...

I don't blame IOR at all but it'smore a case of 6 of one and half a dozen of the other if you ask me.The people in this town should support the club as there is a massive interest in football. We can hardly use the "Big 3" as an excuse as they are all a laughing stock and have done nothing for decades!
I feel a massive opportuinty was missed after...

the Sunderland game in the FA cup and
the Play-off final in Cardiff.

All stop should have been pulled out to keep as many of these glory hunters as possible.

I feel the club shoots itself in the foot, time and time again with stupid stuff such as the awkwardness of the staff who sell the tickets who seem to be on some bizarre power trip, through to the fact that you can't pay in on certain turnstiles, despite the fact that there is no queue and it would make absolute sense to let people do so.

I know for certain that there are a number of people who avoid going to Pools because of daft, niggly shite little things like this. It makes the club look like a tin-pot outfit from the word go.

People just want things to be straightforward.

The club could make it more appealing to fans by doing the simple things well.

I'd personally be happy if the following two things happened...

The players always give 100% and acknowledge the fact that people are spending money that they can scarcely afford to part with. No one minds getting beat, but some of the recent defeats were hard to take.

The stupid pre-match ritual of the same crap songs prior to kick off. Needs to change I reckon

Oh and get rid of Tom Hark. It's now embarrasing. There are loads of songs they could play after a goal goes in.

It's their way of saying "watch your heads, here comes a question!"

That's three things.

You're right. I edited it and still missed it!

One snag to this explanation.....did the Inquisition used punctuation?

I wasn't expecting that!

Like you I am a fan of many years and have seen a lot more shit than we currently have - I did not say I was looking to find fault - merely wanting to understand a bit more - which if the club was run as well as many appear to belive we wouldn't need to look into things more - its the air of secrecy that surround the club that causes the fans to question things

Surely if you were to invest in something then you'd look into their financial dealings in some details before making a commitment

who mentioned the Spanish Inquisition?

Fetch me..... the comfy cushion!!!!

The original post was hardly likely to convert anyone, however a number of issues are worth a debate.

1. Foley and Mackay are conference standard strikers
2.The centenary celebrations have been a shambles, 500 crowd for the centenary tournament against poor opposition, no book of the official history of the club out yet, no merchandise to speak of in the club shop.All the club have arranged are a series of drink related gatherings for the benefit of the in crowd at the club.
3. What is Turners role at the club, you would think we had state of the art training facilities , a megastore club shop and 24/7 corporate facilities at the ground to justify employer a Director of Sport, you would think we were AC Milan. Basically Turner hasnt got a job, the fact he can carry out the role as the clubs manager shows just what a nothing job this is. He is just the eyes and ears for Hodcroft when he is out of the country.
4. Why are IOR so secretive as regards plans for the ground and not letting the supporters know why Managers were sacked?

The club are not a disgrace and are punching above their weight, but the way we are going we will end up back were we started in 1998. There is no reason why why cannot emulate Scunthorpe and Colchester etc and get into the championship, but I feel we have miissed our chance.

Top post, Ronaldo !!!!