Within a matter of days you exiled and a few others were talking about owning the club and plans were in place how to do this. Far fetched as they were. I think this hindered the support you would have got.
I've properly read the notes now. Earlier I'd scanned them while at work I think I was wrong with my first assumption (you were right to question it Chazz) At first it all sounded so ridiculous that I think I read it all with the sarcasm font turned on. I now think I was wrong I'm not going to massively criticise those being overly polite to AA, but there didn't seem enough calling out of the ridiculousness of the name 'shortening' in the notes, although I accept they're not verbatim minutes Regarding the fan ownership, I can't really remember the sequence of events as to whether that was odd, but now I've turned off the sarcasm font it does all sound a bit desperate and certainly overly reverential to Mr A. And as for mobilising fans against the Council? Most of us at the time thought not giving the stadium away was absolutely correct so that would have been interesting! What I definitely think is that these notes should have been published as soon as the bare faced liar changed the badge!!!
That's because I thought he was an honourable man and meant what he said. I've often been wrong and made mistakes. That was one of them. In the longer term it caused no lasting damage to the campaign.
I think apart from the bit about calling brady a cheat and a liar, I don't think that should be in even now to be honest, there was absolutely no reason not to publish them at the time.
That they were coming to the ER Barcelona owned by an actual doctor who was surrounded by his eager lackeys keeping HCC at bay and under control?
You'll be for it when me and Askew take over 50% of the club as fan owners Just waiting for KCOM to pull out of sponsoring the stadium so we can change the name to Camp Nou...
Hang on a minute. This cannot be right, it's not Friday. It's always a Friday, usually before a crucial game, that such **** is brought out to deflect away from the real matters on the pitch. Just realized that it was OLM bringing it up and not the megalomaniacs that run our club / disrupt everything. Carry on.
The bits about fan ownership are the only reason I can see for not releasing the minutes, as Allam asked for that to be kept quiet, but then as you say, it wasn't anyway.
At the time Dennis no one knew what a **** he was, just that he'd made an error. He was a very popular owner and I think people forget this. In terms of calling out the name change, there was a presentation at the start about it.
Immediately after the meeting, we knew we had a problem with the minutes, some of the comments made Allam look daft, some were potentially libellous, some were quite obviously things that the club wouldn't want made public (for the record, outside of Coops, nobody thought fan ownership was a realistic proposition). They were sent to the club, who accepted they were an accurate record, but requested a great many redactions. Not just the fan ownership thing, but pretty much everything about the council, the assurances on a badge change, even stuff like Nasri being Spanish, Coventry being an example of how to run a stadium and someone dying at the KC between games. The redacted version wasn't considered an accurate record of the meeting and was pretty much dismissed by everyone as being misleading and inaccurate. That left us with a decision on whether to release them in full, or to just do our own redactions and it was simply the lack of agreement between the board on what should and shouldn't be included that resulted in them not being published. It was a very different landscape four years ago, there was still a hope that we could defeat the name change, but then move on with it put behind us. That may look daft with hindsight, but at the time it seemed a perfectly reasonable aim.
So to sum up, it's everyone else's fault. Paranoia, monomania, vitriol. Fascinating insight into his mindset.
So what you meant to say is that at the time when Dr Allam was a nice man and said that football should be free and clubs owned by supporters you gathered up a few of your mates and went off to get him to give you Hull City, and then tried to keep it quiet. For those who hold that view, you must be off your rockers.
In November 2013 the most important thing was stopping Assem Allam changing our name. A group of supporters meet with him and were nice to him. Nice to a man who had saved Hull City from administration and invested £70 million. A man that had just overseen us getting promoted automatically to the Premier League for the first time in our history. A man that had given millions to a local hospital for cancer research. A man that offered to discuss alternatives to the name change. What reason did anyone have not to be nice to him? I think there was only Stinky Docker seriously opposed to Allam's ownership of Hull City from day 1. Shortly afterwards Assem Allam showed his true colours. How nice the supporters' representatives were to him on that night had no effect on the CTWD campaign. We used the experience that night to make the campaign more, not less, effective. Has anyone changed their minds about changing our name to Hull Tigers because we were nice to him? Does anyone think a discussion about how nice we were to him shortly after the meeting in November/December 2013 would have been helpful in stopping him changing our name? Does anyone seriously believe it had any effect on what was a professional, well run campaign that successfully kept Hull City as our playing name. Five pages suggests we did the right thing in not publishing the minutes at the time.
From the notes He used family inherited money and company equity (to buy the club) Now that is interesting.
