right, this is a difficult subject. in 1996, i was on the demonstrations, i threw eggs, i wanted rid of the cancer at the club.
with the use of hindsight i tend to stand somewhere in the middle.
we had tremendous success on the field during the majority of the chase days. we spent 9 of the 11 seasons he was chairman at the club in the top flight. we finished in the top five on three occasions - the only three times the club has ever finished this high. this wasn't a coincidence. overall, he made some excellent managerial appointments, really excellent. we would have played regularly in europe during this period had it not been for heysel and i suspect, although i'm purely guessing, that we'd have been able to attract even better players had we had the chance to feature in european football and the club and it's reputation would have grown quite rapidly as a result. he improved the ground out of all recognition. granted, that can be held against him as it stopped funds going into transfers, but it HAD to happen at some point regardless - football was changing off the pitch and he was very financially driven off the pitch.
this led to sales of our best players, the likes of drinkell, linighan, woods, phelan, fleck, sutton, ward, bruce, gordon, fox, townsend, sherwood to name just a few off the top of my head! it wasn't the sales of these players which led to our downfall - we made excellent returns on all those players - it was the failure to spend wisely and replace them that cost us. replacing someone as good as chris sutton with someone as ****e as mike sheron is suicidal. chase deserves the blame for not shedding out more cash for new players to replace the lost ones but it was also the bad managerial appointments of deehan and megson towards the end of his reign where his judgement badly misfired. had we appointed two good managers during that period i think they'd have signed better players with the limited cash available to them, just as walker, stringer and brown before them had managed to do. it never stopped those managers being successful on the pitch.
after relegation, he once again made a cracking managerial appointment in martin o'neill. the rot had set in in terms of chase's reputation with the fans - it was never going to take much to start a riot and despite sitting 2nd in the table and looking on cruise control during the opening few months of that first season down in the football league, the bombshell landed in the rather rotund shape of dean windass. chase failed to stump up the extra cash hull wanted (which was fairly minimal as i recall) and the player went on to aberdeen and had a very good career. i have little doubt in my mind that norwich would have gone straight back up with o'neill and windass in tow and we would probably have led a similar path to that of o'neill's next employers, leicester city, who went on to consistently finish in the top half and win trophies. but that's not relevant to chase - he ****ed up by being too tight too many times. his philosophy of buy small, sell big had worked for a decade and the club had been successful on and off the pitch as a result, but times were changing in english football and his downfall was inevitable.
he made some brilliant decisions and some horrific decisions. he has little respect from me because i want to know where all the money went - all that money that was never accounted for. the ridiculous purchases outside the club were questioned at the time and some were stupid. others, such as the land at riverside have given the club huge finance since he was booted out.
people won't want to admit it, but there are similarities between chase and mcnally. both fiercely driven to get the best deals. the difference is, the premier league money these days mean we are under no pressure to sell the family crystal anymore. so for me, the good probably outweighed the bad overall during the chase regime but when he was forced out he was forced out in the best interests of the club at that time and in delia i think, despite a turbulent 10-15 years, the club is in loving hands and it wasn't under chase and never would have been. he was all about business. delia is all about the football.
that's where i stand
) but bless his old heart he got me in as well so there were two mascots that day. Never forget that day, best thing in the world for a 9 year old and of course I'll always be thankful of that.
... I can remember him coming to our house for a drink around tea time (can't remember if he had something to eat at ours or not) but he certainly invited me to come along to a game as a mascot too. I ended up going to one of those super cup games against Everton I believe and sods law was sick on the night - found out I am allergic to Walkers Cheese and Onion crisps that day!!! 
