OLD HAM HOLDING ON BUT FEAR STILL FLICKERS
BURY’S DEMISE HAS LEFT FANS ASKING ‘WILL OUR CLUB BE NEXT?’
The sign outside Gigg Lane states ‘Forever Bury’. Last week Bury realised that forever had arrived. The club were to be swept away — and there are those who think forever might be coming for Oldham Athletic.
The land around Boundary Park and the stand named after Joe Royle, the man who took Oldham to the Premier League and grand Wembley occasions, is owned by Brass Bank, a company that are in danger of going under for failing to file accounts.
Unless Brass Bank satisfy Companies house by next month, they will be dissolved and their assets passed to the Crown.
As Oldham’s chairman, Abdallah Lemsagam, said: ‘I’ve got 100 people working here and I have got the badge of the club. The rest? Nothing belongs to the club.’
ever since the toughening up of the egyptian driving test, which previously involved going six metres forward and six metres back, there are few lower bars than the fit and proper persons test to own a Football League club.
even so, the Morocco-born, Dubai-based Lemsagam had difficulty passing it. he was required to give up his work as an agent before buying 97 per cent of Oldham (ground not included). he claims to have put £5million into the club and fought off a winding- up petition as recently as May.
Oldham have got through five managers in 14 months, including Paul Scholes, who only put up with the job for a month. The last to leave was Pete Wild, who had supported Oldham all his life, kept the club up and engineered an FA Cup victory at Fulham. Lemsagam claimed Wild ‘wanted time away from football’. Time away from football involved joining halifax Town.
Pete and Chris Mainka are brothers who have been going to Boundary Park for half a century. Asked for their best memory of Oldham, they cited beating West ham 6-0 in the 1990 League Cup semi-final. They know those days will never be repeated.
‘What has happened at Bury has been promising to happen to lots of clubs for years and now bank managers will be thinking: “It doesn’t matter if I pull the plug on this club, a precedent has been set”,’ said Pete.
‘We loved going to Bury. It had history. They had won the FA Cup twice. Gigg Lane was such a pretty ground. home- roots football is dying and we are all worried. The guy at Bury (Steve Dale) hung on in the belief that someone would save them. Well, they didn’t and here we are.’
Chris said: ‘We don’t know what goes on here. This is a very secretive club and we have been through a lot of managers who were perfectly good at their job.
‘This is a big town. Oldham has a population of a quarter of a million and they are getting gates of less than 4,000.’
On Saturday, the gate was 3,091 to watch a 1-0 defeat by Colchester. The latest figure in the dugout is Laurent Banide, who has managed Monaco and in the Arabian Gulf, places where cash is easier to come by than at Boundary Park
he spoke of the ‘need to maintain our philosophy’. Whether you can afford a philosophy when you are third-bottom of League Two is open to question.
Oldham played well. Though there are veterans such as David Wheater, the language of the dressing room is increasingly French. Mohamed Maouche, offered £4,000 a week to sign from Tours, struck a post. There were flashes of electricity from the boots of Dylan Fage, brought in from Auxerre’s second team.
If there is hope on the pitch, it is flickering off it. Bury’s motto was
vincit omnia industria (work conquers everything). They discovered it was not work that mattered but money and Oldham have always had problems with money.
Royle’s instructions on arriving at Boundary Park in a lorry because his Jaguar had broken down on the M62 was: ‘You have to sell a player and quick, there are creditors everywhere.’ It says something that Lemsagam can still park at Boundary Park, which Dale could not do at Gigg Lane. he is in an immaculate suit and, as he gets into his Range Rover, he tries to sound reassuring.
‘We are not like Bury,’ he said. ‘They were crazy, they spent money they did not have. We have a budget and we will survive.’