Tony’s Statement.

[SamTheMouse]

The Mirror are as bad as The S*n. They can all fuck off, offensive rags.

As a general rule of thumb, if it appears in one of those two, it's likely total bollocks.

When it appears in the "broadsheets", I *might* start giving it some credence.

[Steve67]

Again, whilst they can't and shouldn't comment on every piece of rag shit, an interview with Xia, or with Bruce to clear things up, wouldn't go amiss.  I would really like them to show some bite. Don't tweet, make a proper statement.

[Louzie0]

I believe we’re not in the healthiest position right now. However I wouldn’t believe the Mirror and their need for hyperbole if it told me Aston Villa was based in Aston, Birmingham.

Neither would I.

Keep the faith

[kippaxvilla2]

Mirror or not, it would take someone leaking information to be as precise as the league getting interested in the current management structure.  My bet is on Wyness and/or Round.

[andrew08]

I notice the article finishes with letting us know the squad is jetting off to Portugal for pre season training.

I suppose the costs of that are minor compared to everything else but you’d think our players retained a degree of fitness in the last month or so to enable our training facility to top em up but what do I know.

[Ads]

The EFL is going to come in and ask them all to explain the offside rule?

[cheltenhamlion]

The Trust need someone on board who can improve communications like this. It's poorly written, and though heartfelt is amateurish in execution. The tone is wrong too, it needs to be far less demanding, which does nothing but wind people up, and more questioning and collaboration.

It is deliberately antagonistic. I think this needs to be seen through the prism of the relationship between the Trust and the club.

Wyness did a Q+A at the Trust AGM just a matter of months ago where he told everyone that everything was hunky dory financially and we had a robust Plan B if we were not promoted. So that was clearly bollocks.

The Trust are also the club's preferred conduit of sharing information with supporters. That goes two ways though. You can't use them to organise the SCG's or be the club's "right to reply" to issues raised in the media, and then go mute when the club is falling apart in front of our eyes.

Wanting to know who the Senior Executive is surely isn't such a challenging question to answer? When our very solvency and existence is in question, how hard can it be to say who is in charge after they binned the CEO? Particularly as the question was first asked when Wyness was put on gardening leave, we still don't know the answer and the nearest we got to one was "it might be Tommy Jordan but he is on holiday". That is a terrifying response on many levels.

Just look at the shit this week with the away scheme and Claret members. Nobody has a clue to whom questions should be addressed and, if the Lions Clubs want a meeting to disagree with it, who is in charge of convening it.

Not a word has officially come out about our financial situation either. One brief statement saying "we hope to cut a deal" with HMRC and then another saying "we can pay the bills this month". But nothing to confirm finances are in place to stop us living hand to mouth or that we now do have a plan in place to avoid Administration and start living within our means.

We aren't daft enough to expect them to say every player is available for sale for a pound or to expect detailed information about a forthcoming sale of the club. But the not knowing the most minimal information about the state if the club is ridiculous.

The indications are that Xia is not a fan of Bruce and doesn't want to sell up. So how does that work? The players are back in next week but we don't know how many we might have to flog. There is a world cup on and the transfer window shuts a month earlier than normal. How competitive can we expect to be?

The Trust can't hold a gun to the owners head and force him to sell but they can try to coordinate pressing the club into giving some meaningful answers to its fans rather than just getting an occasional statement that says nothing or gobbledygook tweet from Xia.

[aj2k77]

Xia is a twat, we won't be getting anything that remotely smells of the truth or makes any sense out of him. I wouldn't be surprised if we start getting some Lerner style ramblings from him soon just to top things off.

He can call an uber and feck off as far as I'm concerned and take his Aston regeneration cloud cuckoo land bollocks with him. He couldn't run a piss up in a brewery.

[VinnieChase84]

All the leaks about budgets for playing squad etc are blatantly coming from Bruce’s camp. Goes hand in hand as why none of them have questioned his poor use of our squad/budgets and promotion failure.
He’s feeding them so when he does walk away/gets the chop the myth of Steve Bruce can continue

[Clampy]

All the leaks about budgets for playing squad etc are blatantly coming from Bruce’s camp. Goes hand in hand as why none of them have questioned his poor use of our squad/budgets and promotion failure.
He’s feeding them so when he does walk away/gets the chop the myth of Steve Bruce can continue

You don't really have any evidence of that though. The only thing we've heard about budgets is some paper saying Bruce will be pleasantly surprised and that's it.

[mike]

I’m putting off getting my lad a Cubs membership until I’m sure the club can honour it. They need to create a bit more confidence than that amongst fans and indeed other parties.

[Risso]

Chelts, I don’t think anybody would dispute anything you say, the main issue though is that the trust statement is just badly written.

Why not put in an explanation of the Trust’s relationship with the club as you describe? That would have given the statement more authority. Eg something along the lines of “the club has chosen the Trust as its preferred means of disseminating information to fans, so we now feel it is incumbent on us to try to find out....”

Just a suggestion.

[cheltenhamlion]

It's out there now so I can't change it. It is supposed to be dovetailed with a bit of media coverage though should no response be received early next week so the notion was to get the explanations in there.

I think we were caught between two stools of not wanting to ramble on too much but also you might lose a bit of gravitas by not giving the full back story.

 The club won't respond anyway, I am pretty confident of that. The only person you can get hold of is Lee Preece and he went on holiday on Friday.

Next steps were always to try to squeeze the media into actually investigating the matter rather than running sensational stuff being briefed to them by Wyness and Bruce.

We will do our best to get the message over a little better this week but I am struggling to wrap my head round the fact that we seem to be being run by an average press officer (Who is currently holidaying himself) or the work experience kid from China.

I was expecting my summer to be complaining about Bruce and moaning about signings. The fact we can't get a straight answer on remaining solvent? Not so much!

[pauliewalnuts]

It's all a bit of a mess, really, isn't it?

The most frightening thing is that nobody seems to know who is running the club right now. For the only statement out of them to be the usual meaningless Engrish tweet from the chairman is unforgiveable.

I am not expecting them to come out and tell us precisely what the financial situation is, and I am not a fan of the saying something for the sake of it thing, but what would inspire a bit of confidence right now would be for something to be said about who is running the club, because just now it all looks like a knackered old trawler heading straight for the rocks.

[mr underhill]

maybe that's your answer - I don't want it to be that, but we have to accept that it might well be.