If Pools intend to be anywhere near the playoffs we must win on Wednesday to even stay in touch. If Southend are not saved which by no means looks certain, then they could be expelled from the league and we would loose 3 points.

At the moment I cant imagine anything other than a loss. Maybe if Pep does us a favour and loans us Haaland for a week or two.....

We couldn't afford him for 10 minutes, never mind a week or two!!

The deal would be that City paid his wages and in return we gave him as many kippers as he could eat.

No lets have Spurs player Son Heung min.

We could have both and still concede more than we score.

I am genuinely a 100% positive person but its got to the stage with pools that I now find it totally impossible to predict anything other than defeat in any game. I am proud of my little club but embarrassed by the so called professional people who run it.

I'm generally a positive person too, however given recent results and performances it does seem hard to see where the next win is coming from

However we did still create some good quality chances yesterday - but obviously it's stopping them going in, which is more worrying.

We need a hell of a lot of luck on wednesday, we need something or before long were going to be in a relegation scrap, its a good job we started so well.

more likely someone who has never heard of the player that includes fans from his previous club. Lai Zee Sod from north korean 5th division

surely its about time we get our share of luck. its only fractions of inches and seconds difference in shooting that can make all the difference.

Are you not embarrassed by the people on the pitch/dugout.

If the club was run professionally those on the bench could get better players on the pitch. With the crowds and potential at pools it's a crime that we struggle to build anything close to a proper squad. Imagine what the likes of Dorking / Oxford would be with our attendance figures.

Sheffield Wednesday are in the news at the moment due to the fact that the owner is no longer financing the club because of abuse of him and his family. He has been chairman for nine years and injects £2million a month into the club to keep it going. Their average home gate is 25378 at the moment. They are bottom of the championship having just been promoted from Div one.
They are by no means the worst supported clubs in the championship yet are struggling to make ends meet with gates over twenty five thousand.
A lot of emphasis is being put on gates but the successful clubs have megabucks owners and very few clubs rely on gates alone.
Twenty years ago our owners were pumping over a million per season into Pools on top of very good gates as we regularly filled the rink end on top of our home support. We had two successful seasons in league one in those days. That's the sort of spare cash needed to get anywhere near where IOR took us.

IOR weren’t physically putting a million pound a season into Pools, they only had 20 employees, in conjunction with IOR the company they were registered in the Virgin Islands and some how losses were being written off, watch Switch of Play with Ken Hodcroft who explains why he bought Pools and how they financed Pools also why IOR sold Pools, tbh for me he sold Pools because Larsen Oil and Gas pulled the plug.after Borg Larsen the owner was done for tax evasion in Norway.
https://youtu.be/mliugJG0tZk?si=5Fak9kgawz97s2BH

The dark arts of accounting. You missed out the bit where Pools owed IOR around £13 million at the point of IOR's departure and they wrote it off. Hodcroft also said that if we had been successful at Cardiff money would have been made available to compete in the Championship but never went into any detail I guess we'll never know the inner details of how they went about it but Hodcroft always said they were propping Pools up and often threatened that the investment by whoever the real owners were would dry up. That threat was often targetted at the council who were uneasy when it came to the owners wanting the ground. Murky waters, Jamie.

I think Hodcroft was a bit liberal with the truth, £13 million never changed hands one way or another, it was written off with some form of accounting.
I have always thought the Council should never sell the ground to anyone, it’s all Pools have got, the ground goes so could the club.

Keeping the ground was the only good thing that the council have done when it comes to helping Pools.

They bought the ground for £10,000 in 1961 which is probably £186 grand now. Wonder how much rent they have had since?

Can't understand comments like "embarrassed at the way the club is being run"? Can fully understand being embarrassed by team performances and results, but really?
We've been embarrassingly run in the past with owners running off with gate money, stands where bits of the roof were prone to being blown off in high winds, having to apply for re-election year on year, constant court cases for non payment of bills and taxes, bucket and blanket collections at the ground to fund the club (not for charity), sub 1500 gates, etc to the point we were the butt of almost every comedian and pundits jokes. Now we are financially stable, have a tidy ground, we're well supported, and are well respected around the lower leagues. Yes recruitment has not been of the necessary standard for a few years now, but we really do need to give Askey time to get things right - he's shown from day 1 that he's capable but he needs the right tools, unfortunately too many of the squad are remnants of his predecessors and we are going to have to bear with him until he can remedy that.
It's amazing that in the space of a month after our best start in 20 odd years so many can become so negative.
I'm proud of our club and how well we are run compared to many others, and dread to think where we might have ended up without the likes of IOR, Harold Hornsey, and yes Raj Singh to name a few.

its only a distraction though of who orwho didn,t throw money at pools. the fact is it happened and until the day arrives that someone else does we,ll struggle in todays world of football. there will be clubs at our level who could get zero crowds but still are financially better off than us. the game needs to change where the only edge one club has over another is the numbers through the turnstiles like why the big north east 3 have always had more success than us. you can take that as a fan and expect it, but not teams who get giddy getting a four figure gate a couple of times a season doing better. somehow bankrolling needs stopping before its curse kills the game quicker than it was expected in the covid period.

The difference is though sheff wed will be paying astronimical wages compared to clubs like pools etc. In some cases probobly 20 to 30 times more than what some of our players are on. There crowds are only 5 to 6 times the size of ours. So they need a lot more revenue from elsewhere .

How do we know we are financially stable until new owners take over? Fans thought we were financially stable under coxall. What happens if raj says hang on you lot owe me 4 million quid?

At this moment in time we don't have any publicly known debts hanging over us like the sword of Damocles as we have done in the past, not impending court hearings, or an owner publicly stating he's going to pull the plug. I'd say that's fairly stable given where we've been in the past and compared to say Southend and even the once massive Sheffield Wednesday.

We are stable until raj leaves and wants his money and as he has said he is willing to leave im not sure how stable that is. As for southend they will probobly be in a far better position than us in a few months, if they are taken over, thay already have a team on the pitch capable of winning more than enough games.

None of us know where we or Southend will be in a few months, but at the moment we have a better long term outlook imo.
As for the owner leaving and wanting his money back surely any owner at any club can pull the plug at any time, we have no reason to believe Raj is going to do that do we?
If he was going to screw us he'd have done it close season and not given Askey a 3 year deal I would have thought. That way we have gone into administration or even been liquidated for maximum vindictive effectiveness, plus he'd have saved a few bob on signing players. Obviously none of us know the true facts and details of the financial stability of the club but the signs are there to say we're doing ok.

IOR sold Pools debt free, how did Coxhall rack debt up then ?

imagine that sheff.wed. are paying quite a lot more than clubs like rotherham are for players that actually might not be as good. is it their fault though or the players via their agents expecting more from them and demanding it if they come in for them.

Mr Billy. we don't know how financially stable we are.
Just like we don't know what the budget is compared to other clubs, or how much Raj has put into the club, but that doesn't stop you and others speculating without any tangible evidence. If we happen to owe Raj four million he wouldn't be the skinflint you and others suggest he is, would he.

Ah so you think there is at least a possibility of Raj's departure causing instability within the club and yet you seem hell bent on driving him out. You also seem to suggest that we might owe Raj money and he probably could want it back, which means he has financed the club with his own money and yet some of your criticism leans towards making him out to be a skinflint.

Once again you are making assumptions based on your imagination against hard facts. Let me give you an assumption. It has been widely publicised that Hastie for example is on around £2600 per week. Now I don't think that is true but let's use it anyway. At the top end of your example a player at Wednesday would be on £78000 per week. (£2600 x 30). Hastie is a fringe player, so I could never imagine a fringe player at Wednesday being on anywhere near that, in fact I would question if any player is on that.
Also you say that their gates are only 5 or 6 times ours. That is true but there are other aspects of that to take into consideration. We have a basic adult ticket price of £21 per head. They have categories ranging from £27 per head to £59 per head for an adult ticket. I have no idea what the ratio of our ticket revenue per gate is to theirs but I think a fair assumption would be that theirs is significantly higher that 5 or 6 to 1 compare to ours. Their season ticket prices are higher than ours but I can't be arsed to go further than that. They have a massive income stream compared with ours and yet need a subsidy of over £20 million per annum just to stand still. The owner claims he is putting £2 per month into the club. I can't verify that but the media seem to accept that the figure is reasonably accurate. In case he is exaggerating I have reduced it.

Think you reduced it by £1999998

Once again your not listening to what raj has said. He said when he arrived the top earners were on 1500 to 1700 a week. He said he wanted to get rid of this. So no matter what hastie is on id be very surprised if he is on 1500 plus and he apparently is one of our top wage earners. Not an assumption its what our own chairman said. Now sheff wed players or some of them will be on 15 to 20 k a week barry bannon is reportedly on over 20 k that will be 10 to 20 times more than most of our players.

Or look at it another way when we were last in the conference our wage bill was rumoured to be some 750 k, not bad for the conference. Shef weds wage bill is 9 million.

So when chesterfield sign will grieg from wigan and we sign diseruwe from halifax who do you reckon is spending more money on wages? Is a lot of it not down to a bit of common sense? What we owe raj is down as a loan so no matter what it is we owe him.

If we owe him that proves conclusively that he has risked his money to help the club when no one else was prepared to. If you want to bring common sense to the table why can't you see that continuously attacking Raj could lead to him walking and putting the club on the brink again. Is that your common sense in action?
As for Grigg Vs Mani D, who got the most value? This has been pointed out to you time and time again. Grigg is a gamble that our owner either can't afford or isn't prepared to take. What Chesterfield do is their business and until we get an owner who is prepared to take gambles with his/hers/their money to sign the likes of Grigg et al then we have to accept where we are. Like it or not. You've spent a lot of time and effort attacking Raj for not doing what Chesterfield are prepared to do. That is a lot of time trying to tell someone else how to spend his money. Have you had any success.....NO. Has he listened to you.....NO. Are your tactics working......NO. Common sense ought to be telling you that you are flogging a dead horse. We all want what you want but common sense tells us that unless someone comes along that is willing to finance our dreams and ambitions then they remain as they are now.....dreams and ambitions. Raj saved the club, the fans want him out, he is keeping the club ticking over until the Knight on a white charger emerges over the horizon. That is the reality.

when we had that good start and everyone was happy you never heard the name of raj singh or the sale of the club being mentioned. good or bad results should have nothing to do with the situation of how good an owner he is or that we want a takeover by some decent people with more money to burn.