Hull’s on-field fall from grace is well-documented. This time last year, they were a breath of fresh air, with even the cynics raising a smile when they won at Arsenal. A year on and Match of the Day thought the half-time whistle was a highlight of their first-half against Portsmouth. Attention has focused on the increasingly egotistical and orange manager Phil Brown and only now that the accounts have finally arrived, late enough to have been originally drafted in Latin, has the spotlight finally turned on the real problem. A quick look at the accounts shows Paul Duffen as chairman and Russell Bartlett as vice-chairman. Bartlett is the owner, something which was not originally disclosed when Adam Pearson sold up and moved to Derby in 2007, and it is with Bartlett, not the departed Duffen, that much of the responsibility lies for the financial morass.

Bartlett was only named Hull’s owner in the latest national newspaper snapshot of Premier League clubs, in The News of the World earlier this month. Just over a year ago, The Independent listed Duffen as owner, and even when Pearson announced in 2007 that he was selling up he said it was to “Paul Duffen and his investment associates”. Only in July, when the Premier League introduced new regulations enforcing public disclosure of all shareholdings larger than 10%, did it become apparent that Bartlett, not Duffen, was the main man, but a flow chart of Hull’s ownership and loans structure would be something Jackson Pollock would have rejected as “a bit messy.”

There are a number of inter-linked Hull City companies. The accounts which have propelled Hull back into the news are for “The Hull City Association Football Club (Tigers) Limited.” Bartlett bought Hull in 2007 via “Tiger Holdings”, which remains the club’s ‘parent company’ and whose accounts were also filed late and contained the magic words “material uncertainty”. Bartlett is the ultimate beneficial owner via an offshore company, naturally, the Jersey-based Isis Nominees and somewhere in the mix is “Superstadium Management”, which runs the council-owned KC stadium and “Superstadium Holdings”, which is owned by “Superstadium Management”.

Money has been loaned regularly between these companies, sparking vigorously denied rumours that Bartlett was either using football club money for other companies in his portfolio or chasing debts in the manner of a latter-day Robert Maxwell. No evidence whatsoever has been produced to back these rumours up, and the “Hull City AFC” accounts suggest nothing of the sort. They do, howevr, suggest is that Tiger owed the football club £3.2m, Superstadium Holdings £2m and was owed nearly £2m by R3 Investment Group, another Bartlett company, and that the club owes Superstadium Management £1.2m, who, in turn, owe Bartlett £1m and R3 £6-700k, which, in turn, invested £4m in Tiger. Sorry if I’ve missed anybody out.

None of these loans have repayment dates or attract any interest…unlike the £22m loaned to the football club by investment bank Investec. None of this attracted mainstream media interest until now. Private Eye published the details while others featured Brown’s inappropriate facial hair and sub X-Factor singing voice, as Hull avoided relegation. So maybe Duffen got tired of toeing the party line on the increasingly tardy accounts, especially as the ‘line’ was often preposterous. “If it was a tyre repair firm that had put its accounts in a bit late, no-one would care”, he noted, but the analogy was hardly exact. People “care” about Hull City AFC, in huge numbers compared to even the world’s most popular tyre repair firm (unless there’s a fetish involved here that I don’t, and would rather not, know about), and his interpretation of “a bit late” was “a bit” elastic. While reports suggested the accounts were due on May 31, they were actually due by then at the very legal latest (“it is not a crime”, he told the Yorkshire Post last month, incorrectly). Arsenal, for example, produced accounts two weeks earlier than Hull but for this year, not last.

Duffen protested that the delays were due to “auditing standards having changed…and we are in negotiations with our auditors over a way round it, as are a number of football clubs”. Naturally, the global economic crisis (nee ‘credit crunch’) got its share of the blame: “Auditors have become much mores stringent about signing off accounts since the global economic crisis hit,” he told the Guardian last month. You suspect that the postal strike would have copped it for any delays beyond this week. But leaving aside why Hull would want to negotiate “a way round” universally accepted auditing standards, this still begged the question why this “number of football clubs” all managed to deal with this months earlier – even financial basket cases such as West Ham and Portsmouth.

But whatever the intricacies of Hull’s ownership, the bottom line remains the bottom line and the bottom line is not good. Hull need “to generate a surplus of £23m over the next 12 months through player trading, commercial income and/or through additional finance raising”, and that comes in the wake of a “pre-tax profit” of only “£2m after player trading” for their first season among Premier League riches, according to “draft, unaudited statements for the year ended 31 July 2009”.Player trading wouldn’t raise tuppence if recent displays are a guide. Maybe Jozy Altidore will prove a big enough hit for someone in Europe to overpay wildly for him. He is a talent, of that there is no “material uncertainty”. Maybe Jimmy Bullard will quickly fulfil his undoubted potential, sneak into Fabio Capello’s World Cup squad, where he’d surely be now if it wasn’t for his injuries, and be faced with a choice of Hull City or Real Madrid come next July. Or maybe none of these things will happen.

Other financial initiatives seem equally shaky. Commercial income? Unless there’s a rush on Phil Brown fake-tan products, there won’t be millions coming from this direction, and “additional finance raising?” Bank loans and re-financing, similar to Liverpool’s in the summer, only with the decimal point one place to the left. Of the £22m owed to Investec, £12.6m is due by next July. Whether Investec will take the liberal attitude towards Hull that banks have done towards Liverpool remains to be seen. Of course, the banks only re-financed Liverpool after insisting that their co-owners cough up some of their own cash. With so many loans between his companies with no repayment date set, nor repayment imminent, it is far from clear whether Bartlett would, or could, do likewise.

Yet some Hull fans still don’t get it. Some interpreted “material uncertainties” as the accountants “covering their back” Others thought the Premier League riches which post-dated these accounts – all £2m worth – would solve their problems (”and those accounts don’t have to be filed until May 2010 at the earliest” said one fan, missing the point to an Olympic standards), and an “accountant” from Hull suggested in the Hull Daily Mail that parachute payments would save the day, and that “If this was such a big issue, the BBC and the national media would be all over it”, which rather overlooked the fact that, with two features articles on the subject in “The Guardian” in recent weeks, the national media – or at least one corner of it – has been “all over it”.

It’s hard to know where to start if rose-tinted spectacles continue to sell so well on Humberside. Bartlett bought his majority shareholding on the back of a property boom which is already taught as history in some schools, and he has clearly borrowed excessively, but has been unable to provide a happy ending in football or in ‘real life’. The mooted return of former chairman Adam Pearson, from an ostensibly unsuccessful time at Derby, is being trumpeted as a return to the good old days by those who lived through the good old days when Hull rose through the Football League ranks. This, however, overlooks the fact that Pearson sold up in 2007 because “I had taken the club as far as I could and really needed the support of a financially stronger board”. He still does, and Russell Bartlett doesn’t appear to fit that bill anymore. It’s seems likely to be a long 12 months for Hull City off the pitch as well as on it.

Should we be surprised by King’s behaviour and conviction? Probably not and possibly are the answer to those twin questions. We probably shouldn’t be surprised by the fact that a footballer has found himself in prison for such behaviour. The drinking, pack mentality has been a feature of professional football, and it is difficult to escape the belief that a sense of entitlement has come from the extraordinary wealth that such young men acquire also informs such behaviour. That it should be King that was involved is little more of a shock. Going back to his younger days, he was imprisoned for five months for handling a stolen car in 2002. When he went to Hull, things took a turn for the worse for him. He fought with Dean Windass at a Scarborough casino in November 2008 and was banned from driving for speeding less than a month later.

There is nothing about the story of the events of the evening concerned that don’t cause one’s shoulders to sink with the gaudy grimness of it all. Five days after the end of his ban King was out to celebrate the twin achievements of a rare Premier League goal and his wife’s third pregnancyat the (now closed) Revue Bar in Soho. He appoached the twenty year old student with the killer line, “Don’t you know who I am? I’m a millionaire” and, when she spurned his lurid advances, groped her and then punched her to the floor, breaking her nose. He claimed that this was a case of mistaken identity, but the jury didn’t buy this and he was sentenced to spend eighteen months at her majesty’s pleasure.

That three such incidents should occur in the space of a few weeks hints at another story, perhaps one that isn’t in the public domain. His playing career will probably resume once he is released from prison, because morals are in short supply in football. Somebody, somewhere will reckon that his past doesn’t matter if he can score them twenty goals per season. After all, a spell in prison didn;t do Lee “Death By Dangerous Driving” Hughes any harm. Such an offer will probably come at a lower level than the Premier League (King has seldom looked much like scoring twenty goals per season in Premier League for the whole of his career so far), but another five years in the game after any release from prison would probably make him a millionaire, even if he isn’t one by the time he gets free.

It’s easy, meanwhile, to be cynical about Wigan’s motives for sacking him, but we should probably be grateful for the fact that they have at least taken a stand. The financial aspect of their decision is one thing, but the very public condemnation of his behaviour by Dave Whelan makes a change from the usual veil of silence that is drawn over anything unsavoury that happens in the peculiarly insular world of football. To an extent, he was only saying what most of the rest of us were thinking, but it’s a start. The face of Marlon King, gurning and out of control as he punches a young woman to the ground is one that the whole game of football would be better off without.

The week started with quite a sensible decision – the apparent jettisoning of the mad scheme to bring Alan Shearer in as the club’s full-time manager on the basis that he had been a very good player and was from the area and the appointment of Chris Hughton on a full-time basis. Hughton, whose steadying of a sinking ship during the summer and ascent to the top of the Championship table at the start of this season has demonstrated beyond any doubt that he is the man for the job, deserves his chance in charge at the club. He has earned it during a spell during which the club has been under unprecedented pressure and in a state of flux that frequently resembled chaos.

His next announcement was one that may have made sense, as long as you didn’t even think about it superficially for a few seconds. Ashley announced that he is withdrawing the club from the market and putting £20m of funding in himself. On the surface, the notion of having £20m to spend may seem appealing, but this story clearly has more down-sides to it than up-sides. Most significantly, it ends Barry Moat’s interest in the club, even though he was heading in the direction of Ashley’s (frankly absurdly overpriced) £100m valuation of the club. In a rational and sane world, most businessmen would have bitten Moat’s hand off for the £80m that he offered (£60m down and the remainder in instalments), but Ashley showed worrying signs of pig-headedness in his refusal to shift any further in his valuation of the club.

Secondly, the withdrawal of the sale has come at a strange time. Newcastle United, of course, owe Kevin Keegan £2m after having lost their unfair dismissal case against him last month. On the pitch, meaniwhile, although they remain top of the table in the Championship, the team is stuttering. They have won just one of their last five matches and that win, against Doncaster Rovers last Saturday, came thanks to a goal in stoppage time from Kevin Nolan after Doncaster had missed a penalty deep into the second half with the scores still level. With Gordon Strachan having now taken over at Middlesbrough, their time as leaders of the division may prove to be numbered.

All of this, however, pales in comparison with his most recent announcement – that he intends to sell the naming rights to St James Park to the highest bidder. In this single announcement, he has shown his true colours. The talk of being a “genuine supporter”, “one of the lads” and all the rest of that utter garbage that he himself was keen to perpetuate when he took ownership of the club is now shown up for what it was. No genuine Newcastle supporter would even countenance changing the name of St James Park to, say “The Northern Rock Stadium” (no matter how apt that may be in some respects).

There can ony be two rational explanations for such a decision. On the one hand, Ashley might simply be openly displaying his contempt for the club and its supporters, in which case he deserves all the contempt that is thrown back at him. The other possibility may be that the club’s financial decision is so desperate that this needs to be done. This, however, seems unlikely. For one thing, considering that the club is now off the market, it would be common sense to appease the supporters by coming clean and saying, “look, we’re in a bad way financially and we need this money in order to secure our future”. For another, if the club really was in that bad a financial state, he would surely have cut his losses and sold up to Barry Moat.

The announcement certainly seems to give scant regard to the almost unique place that St James Park plays at the heart of its community. Newcastle is a one club city, and St James Park is both literally and metaphorically at the heart of it. Alongside the Tyne Bridge and the Angel Of The North, it is one of the defining monuments of the entire city in a way that perhaps no other football stadium in Britain is. To throw away the name that it has held since 1892 for a couple of milllion pounds is not just an insult to the supporters of the club, but also to the wider population of the city and the area. Maybe Ashley is doing it with a heavy heart. Maybe he doesn’t give a tu’penny damn. No matter which of those two applies, though, the end result will be the same.

Stadium naming rights remain a thorny issue. They are usually associated with small-time clubs that simply don’t have that many options when it comes to securing sponsorship to underwrite their futures or clubs that have built brand new stadia and need to offset some of the hideous costs involved in such a project. When it works well, it can be a seamless transition (Stoke City’s Britannia Stadium, for example, is a good case in point), but nothing in the announcement made by the club gives any indication that any thought has been put into sensitivity towards the feelings of supporters:

Newcastle United now aims to move forward on and off the pitch. The Club aims to maximise its commercial revenues; this includes renegotiating its Club sponsor and kit deal, which expire at the end of this season, as well as welcoming offers for the stadium naming rights for next season.

In this statement, this cold, unapologetic statement of a commercial decision which ignores the feelings of supporters for a shilling lies the heart of the matter. It doesn’t really matter that Mike Ashley is a southerner. What does matter, however, is that his motives seem to be being betrayed by his actions, and selling a big chunk of the history and tradition of Newcastle United down the river for a couple of million pounds (which, if the club’s financial situation really is that bad, will be a mere drop in ocean compared to what they will need to raise should they fail to get promotion at the end of this season) seems nonsensical, in both business and moral terms.

Of course, in modern football we all know that morality these days counts for little. The bare fact of the matter is that this decision doesn’t really make much business sense either. The anger towards him now seems likely to reach even more incandescent levels, and protest, discord and disharmony doesn’t seem to be likely to engender an atmosphere in which a settled team can achieve what Ashley wants (and, one suspects, needs more than anyone else), which is a quick return to the Premier League. If they don’t manage that and if Newcastle are, as many suspect, still haemorrhaghing money through their bloated wage budget to a dangerous, a couple of million pounds won’t make that much of a difference anyway.

The answer to that question is now public, and it is that – for now, at least – no-one will share the television rights for the FA Cup with ITV. Two live matches from the First Round of the competition (Paulton Rovers vs Norwich City and Northwich Victoria vs Charlton Athletic) will be shown live on ITV1, whilst a third (Oldham Athletic vs Leeds United) will be streamed live on the FA’s website. For the replays, ITV4 will show show one match live whilst the FA’s website will show a second match. The question is, however, one of why the FA has been unable to secure a television deal for the world’s oldest football competition.

The answer seems be three-fold. Firstly, this is a very depressed market in the media. The other commercial “Free To Air” channels don’t seem to have shown any interest in broadcasting the competition. Advertising revenues are currently in the doldrums, and commercial broadcasters have very little spare cash at this time of the year, having spent such of their programming budgets elsewhere. Secondly, when the FA moved the competition to Setanta and ITV it is rumoured that the BBC and Sky both had their noses put out of joint, leaving neither broadcaster particularly inclined to do anything other than play hardball with the FA over the FA Cup. Thirdly, it has also been said that the FA were a little too dependent upon ESPN stepping in to buy the rights to the FA Cup when the truth of the matter is that Paulton Rovers vs Norwich City, for all of its charms, doesn’t exactly fit their profile.

What seem to be seeing here is the final stages of a total reversal in the roles of television companies and the football authorities. or decades, broadcasters wanted to show matches on the television but the game’s authorities, mindful of the potential effect on attendances on matches, were reluctant to allow the cameras in on anything like a permanent basis. During the early 1980s, however, this viewpoint started to change through necessity and television was demonstrated to have a beneficial effect on the game. Far from affecting attendances, television coverage seems to have had the opposite effect. It seems as though people are more likely to go to live matches if they see them on the television.

By the early 1990s, the game was being used as a loss leader for the then-ailing Sky Sports and the amount of money being thrown at the game has risen stratospherically. The game, in turn, has become dependent on the money that television brings into the game. The FA, with a large staff and the onerous costs of the construction of Wembley Stadium hanging over its head, might be more dependent than most on this contsant source of income. To an extent, it could be argued that they have been lucky in securing so much money for such a long time, but the worry is that they have become too used to this money. We’ll probably never know what was said during their negotiations with Sky, ESPN and the BBC, but it seems at least possible that the FA held out for money than they would get in the current environment.

It seems unlikely that the FA received absolutely no interest in the early rounds of the FA Cup from any broadcasters. More likely is a scenario in which they have decided not to allow the price to be driven down by desperation. It’s a high risk strategy and we will not know whether it has worked until after the First Round has been played at the absolute earliest. It remains possible that a broadcaster will step in at a later stage in the competition – the Third Round, for example, when Premier League and Championship clubs join the competition – but the lingering suspicion that FA will live to regret its decision to move the competition away from the BBC and Sky Sports remains.

This is what came to pass at recent derby match in the Carlsberg South Western Peninsula League between St Austell and Newquay. During the second half of the match, St Austell’s Lee Whetter and Ben Douglas were both sent off, but Whetter – the St Austell captain – didn’t see the funny side of the taunting that he was receiving from the visiting supporters and decided to, well, take out his frustration on a visiting supporter, wading into the crowd and attacking him. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the visiting supporters went to his defence and pretty soon what has come to be known in the press as a “mass brawl” had broken out involving more than twenty people.

The post-match news for Whetter has been mixed. On the one hand, he won’t face a criminal investigation from the police, since the supporter concerned has elected not to raise the issue with them. On the other, however, he has already departed from the club and surely faces a lengthy ban for his actions. He was, at least, man enough to turn up on the league’s forum to apologise for his action (although the punctuation police may want a word for him, as you will see below) and he has reportedly contacted those involved to apologise personally.

would just like to say sorry 4 all those at the st austell , newquay game. my mind was nt with it and instead of reaction to the banter should have walked away and went to the changeing rooms,would like to say sorry to all the newquay fans ,players and the st austell commitee ,fans,team mates.nothing more i can really say to what people keeps putting on here will take what ever punishment i get and take it on the chin,never done anything like this before but cant turn back time with i could, oh and a big sorry to the judge banter is banter end of the day,and i should of just laughed it off , just hope they dont punish the club as not there fault at all

Perhaps because of the proximity of the supporters to the players, this isn’t a completely unheard of occurrence in non-league football, although it remains thankfully rare. The difference between now and days gone by, however, is that many, many people have cameras with them and this particular incident was caught on camera by a local photographer. Pretty soon, the story had been picked up on by ITV’s “The Westcountry Tonight”, The Sun and The Daily Mail. It would be a little unfair if added punishment (which is likely to be punitive enough to start with) was laid upon because this particular story happened to catch the national press on a slow news day, but what is striking from the photographs is how, well, funny it all looks.

There is always something faintly ridiculous in the sight of fully grown men in shorts fighting on a football pitch. This is amplified further when said men aren’t even on a football pitch and a sense of absurdity is added to the situation by the apparent desperation of the man being attacked not to let his cigarette fall from his mouth. Whether this was some sort of a defence mechanism or a subliminal comment on the cost of a packet of twenty these days is anybody’s guess. It does, however, serve as a reminder that, yes, they do hear what they shout at them and that no, they are not professional players and may occasionally see the red mist descend. It could be argued that perhaps there should have been stewards present to break it up, but it’s coming to something when a match at Step Seven of the non-league pyramid (six promotions from the Blue Square Premier) have to start being policed, and this was clearly a one-off incident.

Fortunately, most concerned have taken the incident in good spirit and those from the “Won’t somebody please think of the children?” school of thought on the matter seem to be in a minority. Whetter faces a heavy ban, a heavy fine and will probably never live the incident down. The supporter concerned may have learnt a humbling lesson about the pitfalls of shouting at grown men when they can hear what you’re saying and can identify that it is you shouting at them, and the rest of us have a mildly amusing set of photographs to look at which will brighten up a dull afternoon in the office. Western civilisation remains, broadly speaking, intact and the Earth remains on its axis. The Premier League could learn a lot from the subsequent behaviour of all concerned, if perhaps not from what went on during the match itself.

So the battles that permeated the sports pages last week are still there to be fought. Just under a year ago, after Arsenal were taken apart on the break by Villa at the Emirates, the talk was of how the Gunners would cope financially with fifth place and a season outwith the Champions League. Before long, Villa’s Inter Toto Cup exploits caught up with them, as did Arsene Wenger’s men. But Villa won’t be so tired this year. Manchester City…well…you know. And, of course, Liverpool might face a season and a half among the Europa League not-so-elite. The divisions over whether this will even happen at all, let alone be so apocalyptic, are as wide and visible as anything Abbott and Costello have produced in the proverbial boardroom.

In the red corner is the ‘Spirit of Shankly’ supporters union, drawing informed comparisons between Liverpool ’09 and Leeds ’01 and trying to get their message across via banners, protest marches and the occasional hijack of a co-owner at Liverpool’s Kirkby academy. A few “Yanks Go Home” beach balls might do the trick at the minute. In the other red corner, meanwhile, is George Gillett Jr, the Liverpool co-owner whose dad lacked imagination in the son-naming department and who, in his own mind, possesses an economic mind to match the best around, combining the optimism of Alastair Darling with the foresight of Alan Greenspan. The ‘club’, in this debate, is personified by new managing director Christian Purslow, another remorseless optimist, although that is partly what he is paid to be.

SOS, the acronym surely no accident, have combined with ‘Share Liverpool FC’ in providing more detailed analysis of Liverpool’s finances than they are given credit for, certainly by the club, who accuse them of un-necessary ‘scaremongering’. SOS argue that such scaremongering is entirely necessary. In citing Liverpool as the ‘next Leeds’ they describe a club reaching “the semi-final stages” of the “lucrative” Champions League, “reliant on its continued appearance” in the competition, “doing well in the Premier League”, with “an ownership that has borrowed heavily against (the club’s) success and money from ever-increasing TV deals”. That was Leeds United in 2001. Leeds only made the “semi-final stage” once of what was then not such a “lucrative” competition, compared to Liverpool’s “continued appearance” in the business end of the competition, (to the quarter-finals and beyond). But the other component comparisons are precise. And “doing well” in the Premier League, which meant fifth place and qualifying for the UEFA Cup in 2001, is no longer enough when you are “borrowing heavily” against “TV deals” that are no longer increasing in line with salary inflation and when your matchday income is 16-33,000 punters short of two of your major rivals.

Gillett’s defence of Liverpool’s current financial position to an SOS representative at Kirkby last month was truly astonishing and perhaps didn’t garner the media attention it deserved. Most of what was attributed to him either required no further analysis or defied analysis altogether. The headline-making debate about who said “the shovel needs to be in the ground in the next 60 days or so” at the new stadium site was about as important as any internecine strife between himself and fellow co-owner Tom Hicks, one notch above arguing over how many angels you could fit on the head of a pin. Gillett and Hicks’ first appearance at Anfield was as carefully stage-managed as such things come. And neither would have dared say anything which might have brought an inadvertent “what the…?” from the other. However, the fact that the words came from Gillett (it’s on YouTube, so it must be true), allied to the vehemence of his denial at Kirkby (“bulls**t, that was not me”) calls into question his memory…or, as many Liverpool fans may choose to see it, his fundamental honesty.

Next up was his chronologically-suspect insistence that global economic conditions were responsible for all the broken promises about the new stadium: “In that period of time,” he says of the afore-mentioned ’60 days’ “the world credit market collapsed” . This times the collapse at March 2007, when one observer suggested it was: “a year and a half later, when the credit crisis hit”. You may have guessed already that this too was Gillett. The really remarkable thing was that he said this only moments previously. Then there was his revelation that “We have put more money in than anyone, than Manchester City, with the craziness they have got”. Yes, that craziness.

More bizarre was the news that Abramovich “didn’t put his own money in (to Chelsea). He used loans borrowed from Russian banks and that’s why he’s in so much trouble”. How many back, and front, pages would you have to hold for news like that? More bizarre still was, well, this: “If I told you that Arsenal by law cannot spend as much as we do… would you say we were underspending?” Well, no. That wouldn’t be the first thing I’d say. “What the **** are you on about?” might be. Still, as he says, “the media don’t understand how to write about cash flow and profit and loss”. So it’s our fault (yet) again. Unfortunately for this argument, it wasn’t the “media” that wrote about the “significant doubt on the group’s and parent company’s ability to continue as a going concern” before the banks came to the club’s rescue in July. That particular statement was made by KPMG LLP, Liverpool Football Club’s accountants.

Yet amid the pensioner-at-bus-stop ramblings Gillett gets to the fundamental point and confirms that all the scaremongering is necessary and that the financial analyses of ‘Spirit of Shankly,’ ‘ShareLiverpool FC’ et al are pertinent. “The budgets are based upon a relatively limited run in the Champions League.” And without Champions League football, for a season anyway, “the debt wouldn’t go up”. That Gillett and other official club spokespersons don’t see this as alarming is, itself, alarming, a manifestation of the parallel financial universe in which these people live, where debt is good and doesn’t have to be repaid.

Admittedly, the banks are quite happy to continue propping up the club and raking in the debt interest repayments. But a year and a half of Europa League football – always assuming Liverpool hold onto fifth spot from Villa and/or Spurs…or Sunderland – won’t do much to help meet those repayments. The precise earnings differential between Champions League glory and Europa League drudgery is difficult to quantify – it has to be if even David Conn in the Guardian can’t quite be sure (“it is impossible to put a figure on what Liverpool might lose out on”). It must be safe, however, to asume that it would run into tens of millions of pounds. Even the much-trumpeted new, £20m-per-annum, sponsorship deal with Standard Chartered will only draw itself up to its full height if they win the Champions League, never mind simply being in it.

As the papers eventually reported, once Christian Purslow’s hyperbole machine ran out of fuel, “a significant element of the deal is performance-related with bonuses to be paid out should they win the Premier League or the Champions League”. In his rush to equate the deal with Manchester United’s new arrangements and to bang on incomprehensively about “strategic and cultural fits,” Purslow overlooked this key fact, and who would dare suggest that he didn’t think such performance-related issues would be an issue, when Liverpool strode confidently on to the Stadio Artemio Franchi pitch in Florence, a few short weeks ago. Of course, it isn’t an issue any more, now that Liverpool have beaten United and all’s well with their world again. After all, even without Gerrard and Torres, they still have Lucas and Ngog. What could possibly go wrong?

It was another feeble, supine decision, which yet again lends credence to the idea that actually the game is being run by a bunch of spineless fools that turn up for meetings with people that both they and we know deep down inside have been laughing at them behind their backs. They failed a CVA because they couldn’t even prove that they owed the money that they claimed to owe to a company owned by the chairman (who had, of course, transferred ownership ofsaid club into his son’s name a couple of months prior to the club entering into administration) and then, under the self-imposed veil of secrecy that these meetings carry with them, continued to fail to pay their football debts.

Fittingly, Chester City played Barrow in the FA Cup on Saturday and, after a 1-1 draw, they will play them again at The Deva Stadium tomorrow night. It is fitting because the last time the two clubs met, both clubs were owned by Stephen Vaughan, who sold his shareholding in Barrow to his painter and decorator a couple of days before the match for a token amount and bought them back on the Monday after the match. Considering the lack of official censure that he received over that little escapade, it would be hardly surprising if he felt that he could get away with anything. Whether that many people bother to turn out to watch the match tomorrow night, however, is a different matter.

Yesterday lunchtime the football gods shone down with a degree of providence at the FA Cup draw when they awarded the winners of the tie a First Round match against Eastleigh – mid-table in the Blue Square South and based barely ten miles from the south coast of England. This wasn’t the money-spinner that Vaughan may have been hoping for. The three week stay of execution, however, is significant. In three weeks’ time, the winners of the Eastleigh match will know who their opponents are in the Second Round match. If a little extra money has come through the gates of The Deva Stadium by then, it is likely that the club’s significant current football creditors, Wrexham and Vauxhall Motors, will be paid in full and the club will be permitted to stagger on for another few weeks, or months, or however long it takes until the next crisis rears its head.

When this will crisis will be remains unknown, but Vaughan won in August even after his club’s proposed CVA was thrown out by a court for “material irregularity”, and he is still there now. Will Director of Football Eric Whalley, who jumped ship from Accrington Stanley during the summer, presumably having not paid the tax man for some time considering the £308,000 that they have had to find over the last few weeks to stave off a winding up order brought by HMRC, put some money in? Have the Football League been leaning on the Football Conference to keep Chester afloat no matter what?

And when the Football Conference’s General Manager Dennis Strudwick says that, “All sides have responded to the situation and are willing to enter talks to come to a resolution. The Football Conference, Football League and Chester City will be sitting down for formal talks soon in order to give everybody a fair chance to put their case and work towards a solution”, what does he mean? These questions and more have yet to be answered. Anyone hoping for full, frank and clear answers to the ongoing questions – both moral and practical – concerning the ongoing existence of Chester City Football Club would be best advised to not hold their breath.

Towards the end of the 93/94 season, Raith’s first in the Premier League, the seventeen year old Potter found himself for a time as Raith’s sub ‘keeper in back-up to Scott Thomson, and when Thomson broke his cheekbone after a clash with Duncan Shearer, Potter found himself making his debut in the final game of the season, away at Dundee United. Raith were already relegated so the fans were their just to enjoy their day out in the sun, maybe the last in the Permier League ever, for all we knew at the time. I don’t actually remember an awful lot about Potter’s part in proceedings: I remember him looking a little amused when we sang his name during the warm-up, but he did give us a shy little wave once he realised we weren’t taking the mickey; and I have a vague recollection that he may have punched his first corner worryingly close to his own net. But that aside he did okay, and by half-time Raith had a 3-0 lead thanks to a Jason Dair brace and a thirty yard screamer from David Sinclair. (Two summers later, both of those players were to follow manager Jimmy Nicholl to Millwall, where they were about as successful as he was.) I can’t rightly remember either of United’s two late comeback goals, but I don’t remember thinking either was a goalkeeping error and Raith hung on for the 3-2 win.

The following season – back in the first division – started a little inauspiciously, with only a decent run in the League Cup to make up for stuttering early season form. Potter was still the only reserve ‘keeper, at first, but Nicholl was nervous about having only a trainee to fall back on and by mid-October had signed the experienced Ray Allan to provide more solid back-up. That left Potter out of the picture. Except in the League Cup, for which Raith had reached the semi-finals but for which Allan was cup-tied having been an unused sub for Motherwell in an earlier round.

A Scottish League Cup semi-final against Airdrie might not sound much to you, but it was a huge event for us, and it took place at McDiarmid Park in Perth on 25th October 1994. It went pretty well too, at least to begin with, and with an hour or so gone Raith were looking pretty good for their 1-0 lead. But then Thomson had to coming racing out to the edge of his area to snatch the ball away from an onrushing forward. I’ve watched the replay many times and I’m still not convinced he was over the line, but the ref decided he was, that it was a goalscoring opportunity, and out came the red card.

Step forward then, Brian Potter. Within five minutes he was picking the ball out the net, the equaliser being drilled home by Stevie Cooper (RIP); and thereafter it was backs to the wall for the rest of normal as well as extra time. Nicholl was quite happy to admit afterwards that we played for penalties – he didn’t see the point in coming off beaten and saying “at least we had pop at them”. Big forward Ally Graham came back into defence – there was a 37 year-old David Narey in there too. And Raith held out to a shoot-out. The first nine penalties were scored, Airdrie’s Alan Lawrence took the tenth, Potter dived to his right – you’re ahead of me here I know – and parried it away to send us into only our second final (the other was in 1949). A month later it was Thomson’s turn to be the shoot-out hero, saving from Paul McStay to secure the only major trophy of Raith’s 125 year history. It even produced a European campaign, and the famous photo of the half-time scoreboard in the Olympic Stadium in Munich which is now the desktop picture of pretty much every Raith fan.

But for Potter the story had already ended, he was an unused sub again in the final but never quite made the grade and never played for Raith again after that penalty save. Just a bit too small for a ‘keeper in the modern age, I guess, though he had a reasonable subsequent career in the junior leagues with Oakley United. (Note for English readers: “junior” doesn’t mean youth, it more or less means non-league. Although there is senior non-league as well – I never really understood it myself.) Also, for most of the intervening years in which I’ve recounted this heroic tale to various bored-looking people in pubs, that’s been the end of the story. But it wasn’t, quite, because he’s now goalkeeping coach at Hamilton Accies, and in April 2008 an injury crisis there saw him on the bench when, sometime in the second-half, Tomas Cerny had to go off after a blow to the face, Potter found himself making his third appearance, some thirteen and a half years after his second. He came within a moment or two of his first clean sheet but conceded a last-minute equaliser.

That game might so easily have been a crucial one too, it had been billed for some time beforehand as the critical title decider. As it turned out, results had gone Hamilton’s way and they had secured the league the previous week, but since this was the last game of the season it meant that, technically, Potter could add a promotion to his list of achievements, alongside his earlier relegation and cup semi-final. Add in the winner’s medal for being on the bench at the final and it makes for a curiously incident-packed career for one so sparse in appearances. And perhaps it’s not finished yet – he remains registered as a player at Hamilton, and he is after all only 32 years old yet. So maybe in another ten years, or twenty, he’ll come on for his fourth game. But it would probably have to be a Champions League final, or maybe a World Cup, for it to be worth his trouble.