http://tinyurl.com/6n25jh
being fairly typical of their response to Fowler's arrival.
In the short term at least, it seemed that Fowler's signing had captured the imagination of the local sporting public - thousands turned up at the club's open day to catch a glimpse of him and we were told that sales of "Fowler 8" or "God" shirts were going through the roof (unfortunately, the club never got to benefit from this as much as they might have because most of the profits went to shirt manufacturers Joma as part of a deal struck a year or so before). When this and the fact that, strangely, City got some of their worst gates of the season in games when he played, you have to conclude that the Fowler deal was not the money spinner the club hoped it would be.
City brought the curtain down on their pre season preparations with their only appearance at Ninian Park before the league campaign got under way. A crowd of around 8,500 saw the team beat Dutch outfit Twente Enschede 1-0 - the visitors, who had finished fourth in the previous season's Dutch First Division, were clearly a useful outfit and they dominated possession throughout, but they lacked a cutting edge and some good defending ensured that Ross Turnbull had little to do in his first game as City held on to the lead given them by Warren Feeney in the first half with relatively few alarms. As for Robbie Fowler, apart from one lovely little shimmy that took him away from his marker, it was a very, very low key debut and those who had doubted whether he would ever be fit enough for a season of very physically demanding Championship football got the first evidence that they were probably right when he jogged off the pitch never to return after twenty five minutes - nobody was expecting him to complete the full ninety minutes, but less than half an hour?
I would have thought that anyone who saw Fowler play that day would have known straight away that we wouldn't see him in a City shirt again for a few more games yet and this helped bring into focus why I found it so hard to predict what the league campaign, which started with a long overdue first day home game, had in store for us. Whilst we seemed to have something like adequate cover in most areas of the pitch, Fowler's lack of fitness only served to emphasise how few strikers we had available for that first match. Losing Michael Chopra was bad enough, but a Bosman free transfer deal for Hibs target man Chris Killen had been hijacked at the last moment by Celtic and the six weeks since then had seen no sign of us bringing in a similar type of forward. Steve Thompson was still at the club but remained on the transfer list and, anyway, just when it appeared that he was on the brink of a move to Preston, he fell off a banana boat while on holiday and picked up an injury which meant that he missed the whole of pre season training and the first month of the league campaign!
All of this meant that our strike force for the season opener against Stoke would consist of Steve MacLean and Warren Feeney and, with Matt Green being made available on loan and Paul Parry still being thought of as a winger, there was no other natural forward on the bench. Both Dave Jones and Peter Ridsdale made it clear that City were still looking for another striker, but it seemed inevitable to me that, having dealt exclusively in free transfers, loans and Bosman signings throughout the summer, we would finally have to pay a transfer fee to get one - surely all of the best strikers that wouldn't have commanded a transfer fee had found new clubs by now?
The summer of 2007 had been a thoroughly miserable one weather wise with what seemed like continuous rain throughout June/July, it was ironic therefore that August 11, the day of the big kick off, was a beautiful sunny day and I can remember going down to Leckwith very early in the morning to film the latest chapter in a video diary I am keeping on the building of the new ground. I got some decent shots of the new athletics stadium which was well on the way to completion at the time. However, the sense of irony increased as I struggled to get some pictures that weren't affected by the brilliant bright sun that was rising - for most of the summer there had been some doubt as to whether the all weather running track would be laid by the deadline date of the end of August because of delays caused by the rain drenched British summer!
My attempts at filming over the other side of the road were less successful as I found myself being chased off by builders arriving to start their days work on the site of the new ground and retail outlets - while this was a nuisance, I did find myself quite admiring the fact that they seemed to be starting work at quarter to six in the morning!
Anyway, back to the football. What turned out to be our biggest crowd of the season (18,840) was present to watch our first match - I would assume that a fair proportion of these were drawn to Ninian Park by the Fowler factor all of which begs the inevitable question of where did they all go when he actually started playing! For the first half an hour or so it looked like the big crowd were inspiring the side as, with Trevor Sinclair prominent on the right wing, they dominated proceeding only to be foiled by a combination of some last ditch defending and fine goalkeeping by Steve Simonsen. However, the first sign of a weakness that was to haunt City in the first few months of the season surfaced in the twenty seventh minute when they went a goal behind. Stoke were a typical Tony Pulis team with ten of their side being over six foot (the other player was five foot eleven!) and it was inevitable therefore that they would cause problems from dead ball situations - so it was that centre back Shawcross was left criminally unmarked to fire home from a corner, it was the first of many such goals conceded by the side over the next three months or so.
City never really recovered from this blow - a shocking tackle by Cresswell that led to Steve McPhail's eventual substitution didn't help matters, but our limitations up front became more apparent as the game went on and it seemed to me that a few heads dropped as well. City still threatened every now and then, but it looked like Stoke would hold out pretty comfortably until MacLean was pulled back in the area with three minutes to go and we were awarded a penalty. Much was written and said at the time about Steve MacLean's tremendous record from the penalty spot, but you would never have guessed that he had a 100% cent record as his weakly struck effort was blocked by Simonsen. The Stoke keeper could only parry the ball back to the City striker though and it seemed inevitable that he would score from the rebound, however, if Simonsen's save from the penalty had been a routine one, he now produced a magnificent stop as he got up and dived the other way to turn MacLean's follow up around the post.
There was no way back for City after that and the season started with a 1-0 defeat. To be fair, City didn't deserve to lose the game, but it was of some concern that this loss continued the miserable run of form with which we had ended the previous campaign - whilst, it was too early to start panicking yet, it was very important that the team ended their losing run in the league sooner rather than later because it would be more of a factor with every passing winless match.
Three days later City had what looked a great opportunity to get a win when they entertained League One side Brighton in the First Round of the League Cup, but, in the hour before kick off a story broke which was to cast a shadow over most of the season - surprise, surprise, it was all about money with the supposedly departed figure of Sam Hammam playing a prominent part in proceedings!
I popped on here just before setting off for the Brighton match and saw a couple of posts saying that Sky Sports News was reporting that a law suit had been issued against the club regarding the outstanding £24 million pound loan notes debt. Details were sketchy at this stage, but it did appear that, as had been stated on here from time to time, the holder of the loan notes were a company called Langston and they were not happy with the way the club were paying off the debt - or, to be more accurate, weren't paying off the debt! As I drove to the game, Radio Wales was able to go into a bit more detail and their reporter at Ninian Park stated that the club would be making a full statement on the matter the following day (I'm, sorry but I can't remember whether the word "robust" was mentioned at this stage!).
This story from the Western Mail
http://tinyurl.com/5lhgo5
does a good job in summarising the situation and here is the club's detailed response to Langston's claims
http://tinyurl.com/6nawvz
Without going into too much detail, there appeared to be two main planks to Langston's case;-
1. The agreement of October 2006 which saw Sam Hammam step aside at the club to be replaced by hedge funds who later became new investors had been rendered invalid by a subsequent change of structure at the club which had seen responsibility for the building of the new ground pass to a company called Cardiff City Stadium Limited. Langston alleged that this meant that the previous agreement which said that the club had until 2016 to pay off the loan note debt no longer applied and they now wanted immediate payment of the debt plus interest - a total figure of £31 million.
2. The agreement between Sam Hammam and the new board required the club to inform the loan note holders that the new ground had gone unconditional by 31 May 2007, otherwise the agreement would be deemed null and void - Langston were claiming not to have received that notification.
City fans were able to hear things straight from the horse's mouth so to speak when Peter Ridsdale appeared on the GTFM phone in the night after we played Brighton. Our Chairman was in bullish mood and produced a document which he said proved that Langston were mistaken in their interpretation of events. The clear impression was given that the whole thing was a storm in a teacup which would be sorted out very quickly and I believe that most people were pretty reassured by Mr Ridsdale's comments at the time.
To be honest, I think City supporters were more interested in what our Chairman had to say about the player he was going to meet that night with a view to signing him within the next few days - Mr Ridsdale dropped some very heavy hints as to the identity of this player and, by the end of the show, callers were openly asking him when Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink was going to sign for us!
As it turned out, the Hasselbaink deal was completed the following day. Although he was available on a free having been released by Charlton at the end of the previous season, it was obvious that Hasselbaink wouldn't come cheap - in fact, I would say it is very likely that he and Robbie Fowler became the two highest paid employees in the history of Cardiff City Football Club. Given this, you would have thought that Hasselbaink's signing sent out a clear signal as to what the club thought of the Langston law suit and it's demands for an immediate payment of £31 million.
Langston's law suit had been served just before the season opener with Stoke so the club knew of it well before the Hasselbaink signing and yet they were still prepared to commit themselves to a contract which would account for a sizeable proportion of the Michael Chopra fee - surely if the club were concerned about Langston's claims they would have ditched the Hasselbaink deal, wasn't this confirmation that Langston didn't have a leg to stand on?
Well, subsequent events tell a different story because as the season went on, supporters were told that the legal costs of the Langston case were preventing us signing new players and they saw the very promising Chris Gunter sold for a fee the size of which has never been revealed to pay the wage bill. Peter Ridsdale also told supporters on more than one occasion that the club would immediately go into administration if they lost the court case. Set against this backdrop you have to wonder as to our Chairman's judgement, because it seems to me that, by sanctioning the Hasselbaink deal, Mr Ridsdale seriously misjudged the threat that the Langston law suit represented - failing that, I can only conclude that the club's financial situation wasn't as black as he kept on painting it for the rest of the season.
Leaving financial considerations aside, Hasselbaink was the last of our signings before the transfer window closed on 1 September (we haven't signed an outfield player since then actually!). What was immediately apparent about our summer transfer dealings was that we hadn't spent a single penny in transfer fees. Given that Peter Ridsdale had told supporters that all of the Chopra fee would be ploughed into the playing squad, some supporters were critical of the lack of spending on transfer fees, but this wasn't really fair.
City director Steve Borley had said on one of his appearances on this message board that a boardroom decision had been made to use the transfer budget to pay "enhanced wages", hence the arrival of the likes of Fowler, Hasselbaink, Sinclair, Rae, Capaldi and MacLean.- for those supporters who were, not unnaturally, concerned that our wage bill was heading back in the direction of the bad old days which saw wage costs outstripping turnover, the club would answer that the increases in salaries were covered by the Chopra fee.
Given the way things turned out, I think it is only fair that I say that, at the time, I wasn't too critical of this policy. Given the age and injury record of some of our new players, Dave Jones and Peter Ridsdale had obviously embarked on a risky course of action, but if Fowler especially could remain fit and firing, then I thought it was a gamble which could well succeed - my only real concern was that, by refusing to spend on transfer fees, we had, effectively put ourselves into a position whereby we would only be in competition for a pretty small percentage of the players that were available in the summer 2007.
TBC