robbie chase ?? The thing that always really irked me about Chase was the fact that when he did leave he also took a £100k pay off from the club even though we were absolutely skint. Having said that, it was probably £100k bloody well spent ! So much for being an astute businessman, under his stewardship we sold more £1M+ players (which was a lot of money back then), than any other club. PLUS we sold Chris Sutton for a then record fee of £5M. Where did all the fecking money go ? A question that has never been answered.
Nasty lying ****bag full of self interest. I would love some kind of full investigation into his deals and management of the money as well as a published report.
Best will in the world, robbie, you will end up preaching to the never-to-be-converted. They ended up as dark days - Bruch Rioch, Bryan Hamilton? Clueless, desperate appointments both. Delia was pilloried by some after Grant and 'Ro**er-gate' and our slide into he third tier. But she sure as hell has always had the club's best interests at heart - rather than her own purse.
Wasn't meant as a slur at all, it was just a genuine question because I have never seen or heard anyone defend him so vehemently. You seem to know all the ins and outs of his time at the club so I thought perhaps you had a personal connection with him. Not that a ridiculous thing for me to suggest on that basis I wouldn't have thought. I'm sorry that you apparently took offence, not sure why you did though because surely if he's such an amazing guy then I'd have thought you'd be pleased with the suggested association
The best, most balanced response to this debate. Yes, Chase's era disintegrated in turmoil but what preceded that was our finest sustained top flight run. To achieve such consistency and progress ultimately rested upon his calls to fire and hire certain managers. People were ready to lynch him for sacking Ken Brown but then back tracked when Stringer took us further than ever before, then when we were in dire straights he fired out most successful manager ever and replaced him with Walker who again took us further than ever before. Somebody may be able to clarify this for me but am I right in thinking that one of his biggest mistakes was to rebuild part of our stadium out of our own money following the Hillsborough tragedy when there were funds in place to help clubs redevelop. This tied money up in bricks and mortar and left nothing for decent player recruitment. There is only so long you can keep unearthing lower league gems although by the end of his reign we were so far in the mire that we ended up with no forward line when we got relegated, as they all had to be sold! If he was such a villain and the worst board member/chairman in history, where were all the Chase out brigade for the preceding 10 years before his departure? I didn't hear many Chase out chants when we were consistently in the top half of Division 1 or sitting at the summit of the Premier League, or playing in FA Cup semi finals or beating Bayern in their own back yard! Football fans are fickle people (and I am including myself in that appraisal!) Both Hero and Villain in my eyes.
Some of that is pretty fair Chris and NB, and whilst I'm certainly no fan of his I can recognise that it certainly wasn't all bad, and I do remember him steering us through some difficult times into the 80's and into the heady days of the early 90's. And on a personal level I'll always be grateful for him arranging for me to be mascot during our division 2 winning season in 1986. My mum bought one of his new builds in Ormesby and for some reason that I'm not entirely certain of (must ask her) he came round for dinner one night and as a kind gesture he asked me if I wanted to be mascot and to choose a game. There was already a mascot arranged for the game I asked for (last game of the season against Billy Bremner's Leeds, we beat em 4-0 ) 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. Still think overall he shafted us in the long run though, I bet there were all sorts of dodgy deals going on and as others have said I'd love to know where all the money went because we didn't pay big wages (see the David Phillips story on the @pinkun1993 for an example), we had a massive net profit in terms of transfers year after year, we had sell out crowds and some lucrative cup runs so it must have gone somewhere. Perhaps that is naive of me to think like that, and I do appreciate running a football club is an expensive business, but surely we should never have been in the state we were when Delia rode in and really saved us from going to the wall.
He must have made a habit of doing 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!!! He obviously knew our family's weak spots as, although already supporting NCFC, going to a game had been a fleeting experience for me up til his invite and once I went, despite being sick, I was hooked in a much stronger way from that day forwards. Mum and dad had no choice but to take me regularly after that!
Tony, I accept that you intended no slur, but to assume that I must have some unacknowledged personal connexion with Robert Chase simply because I question those who trot out unsubstantiatiated, in some cases slanderous, and in almost every instance one-sided accusations against him, the more serious of which, if true, would almost certainly have led to prosecution, embodies the cynical assumption that only someone biased towards him would question the "received wisdom" standardly and incessantly trotted out. And just to put you straight on other things in your post: I have never posted anything which suggests I "know all the ins and outs of his time at the club". I have simply questioned how much his critics actually know about it; nor have I ever said anything that implies I think "he's such an amazing guy", I have simply questioned whether he truly deserves the treatment standardly handed out by his critics. So let me repeat, I have no connexion at all with Robert Chase, and I make no claim to have any special knowledge of the club under his chairmanship. As I said yesterday, unless and until someone undertakes to provide a fully researched and balanced account of the Chase years, we will never achieve a fair and reasoned assessment. It is not me but his critics who think they know all the ins and out of his time at the club and have made up their minds about him as a person.
Not entirely sure anyone said anything that would "almost certainly lead to prosecution" but I do get what you're saying so fair enough mate, I'm happy to leave it there
i lived abroad for most of the Chase era so had the PinkUn posted to me. i seem to remember an article stating that there were 30 people employed by City, each on at least £100,000pa, and none of them anything to do with the football side of the club. it was inferred that they were Chase cronies, and they were taking over £3m out of the club each year. if this was true we were well and truly ripped off.
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
should just say, i hadn't read anyone else's post when i posted so there's some ground covered by others before me
One of the questions re the ground development is whether it could have been achieved at significantly less cost to the club as it was his company that undertook much of the work and therefore with clever but legal accounting - well we may not have had to sell quite so many players. There was a self interest that ultimately backfired.
The most relevent theme to come out of this thread is that even just looking at the Chase era there are roller coaster ups and downs in a short period of time. Are the downs made worse because they follow ups? Do the ups seem better because they follow downs. In my lifetime at Carrow Road I experienced the downs of financial ruin and being bottom of the lowest league in 1957 followed by reaching the Cup Semi's in 1959 and promotion the following season. This was followed by spells in the 60's when the football was so dire that what we saw a lot of last year was a lot more entertaining and to say crowds plummeted would be an understatement!! This was followed by the Saunders era which saw promotion to the top league for the first time. I won't go through the constant ups and downs since then as most of you have lived though them and seen it for yourselves except to say that following the down of our first visit to the 3rd tier in 50 years we have enjoyed 2 successive Promotions and 2 mid table finishes in the hardest league in the world. My philosophy on football built on 63 years of attending Carrow Road is quite simple - you can't see it coming but ups followed by downs ( and downs followed by ups ) are inevitable and that probably comes through in some of my posts as being negative - I call it realistic. What I can say however is that not only have I lived through all those ups and downs my attendance record at Carrow Road has been no different in the ups as it has been in the downs and that, in my simple book, is a proper supporter.
Have you any evidence for the suggestion that the ground development cost more because it was done by R G Carter? You make no mention of the other possibility, namely that the club actually benefitted financially compared to if the contract had gone elsewhere. If you are saying "for all we know", why mention only the negative possibility and ignore the positive one? Also, regarding self-interest, there is no incompatibility between something being in one party's self-interest AND ALSO in the interests of others, in particular of NCFC. Furthermore, what would people have said (and be saying on here) if the contracts for the redevelopment of Carrow Road had gone to a non-local company? Quite apart from the question of the cost to the club, what about the cost in terms of local employment, local pay packets, local spending, business lost to local sub-contractors, and so on and so forth. NCFC's relationships with and responsibilities to the community do not stop with the club's fans. I would be surprised if the club DIDN'T have a policy of awarding contracts locally whenever they possibly can. Did any other local company have the capability to do the job at a competitive cost? Did any other local company tender for the contracts? Doesn't the fact that R G Carter was the company chosen for the 2004 and 2008 developments suggest that maybe, just maybe, they were actually the best choice? longsight's post is just another example of what I have been complaining about, and reinforces what I have already said. I see no point in carryng the debate on further.
we're on dangerous ground with carter's. they've been used since chase left. i have my suspicions on the links but i'm not going to post them on here.
