One of the men at the centre of all that has ‘helped’ get us in the financial position that we are in has told BBC sport that he would like the chance ruin, sorry run, Portsmouth football club again!
Asked if he would ‘love to return’ to Fratton Storrieteller said: ‘my wife would say never in 100 years but my heart tells me ‘yes’.
‘The criticism I’ve received hasn’t been from all the supporters. I’ve had a lot of support from people who understand what happened.
‘At the end of the day, you can only do what the owners ask you to do. I brought the club a lot of success.’
To be fair, to a degree, Storrieteller is right he was just ‘doing’ what an owner said could be done but as the CEO surely it was blatantly obvious to him that the spending was not sustainable and the debts, as a result of ‘borrowing’, were building up more and more over time?
A CEO surely has to question such things and look to reign things in, but he never did…
One season back along we changed ownership at least three, maybe four times, and two of these owners were ‘found’ by him, but he refuses to take any level of blame for their failures either: ‘I did all the checks you can do – more checks than the league did – and it all came out that they were multimillionaires and the club would be safe.
‘How do you know when you can’t get to the bottom of it?’
He does now concede that he does not know if Ali Al Faraj ‘even exists’ though!
Storrieteller is trying to sell the club to someone though as he finished up by saying: ‘I had eight of the most enjoyable years of my life at Portsmouth. It’s a fantastic club.
‘I just think there must be somebody out there who will listen to what I and other people have said about the benefits of the club.
‘There is a potential development scheme there and the club has already proven it can hold its own in the Premier League. There’s no reason it can’t do that again.
‘I just hope there is somebody out there to take the club forward.’
Quite why this has come about at this time is strange?
The ‘rumour mills’ will go into overdrive now that a ‘reported’ consortium, mooted back along, involving him is preparing itself to strike again as why else would such talks come about at this time…
Like I have said you cannot lay all the blame at his feet, but a CEO should be more aware and alert to dangers than he was and he also seemed more than happy to milk that gravy train for personal gain himself.
Another major floor of his is that he refuses to accept any blame, he merely continually palms it off to everyone else…
He is part of a ‘legacy’ that brought us triumph, granted but at such a cost – admittedly as desperate a situation as we find ourselves in would we really give up the FA cup win and European tour? – but such a legacy that cannot be returned to!
Put it this way despite us being up to our necks in the brown stuff he continued to dish out ludicrously high wages and long-term contracts to players, TBH on some £30,000 plus p/w on a 4-year contract that only he could break with his ‘relegation release clause’ is a prime example of the Storrieteller ‘legacy’…
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