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Whilst we sit here in silence with over 24 hours since the last post - eleven days remain before our fate could be sealed. I suspect this drama will drag further on than (this is Torquay United after all!) that but make no mistake – the club has just one option left which it is tied to – and if that does not work out then it is goodbye for the club as we know and love it.

We all know the club has never come off life support since the day Kelvin Thomas disappeared with a big pay check for delivering nothing and since that day we have been hoping and praying for a white knight to ride in and save us. But hey – this is Torquay United and despite much hard work and exploring of options we are facing the beach at Normandy and waiting to run into a shit storm of god knows what.

Much can be said of the board and where blame lies but in truth this path was laid out long before they stepped in. Without them then we were gone – a fact that we all need to remember when judging them. However – I honestly believe the sharks smelt the blood of a well-intentioned but inexperienced few and they were soon providing ‘help’ and ‘advice’ which was interpreted as support without a realisation that there was a lot more to it than that. This is no criticism of those few who stepped up to the plate as I am positive in their shoes I would have done exactly the same thing and looked at that arm round the shoulder as true guidance and friendship without the realisation of the dark agenda which lay behind it. Promises of a shiny new stadium and a way for the club to find its way back to the football league status we all so desire masked the ugly truth of what really was on offer. Truth told – the loans taken on at this stage was always going to be the deciding factor in where the club has ended up and those who provided them knew exactly the state of play and how to manipulate it.

The board may tell you that without these loans the club would have faced its final day before the end of last season. I suspect this is true but I do not recall this situation ever being made public and perhaps if it was done so then the fan base would have reacted and rallied in order to support the club financially and seen it through to a place where it could reflect and re-evaluate. Had this been the case then this seasons hunt for new owners would have been a much easier task.

So – what lies ahead? Well it is no dream of a midlands consortium coming in last minute to take on the club with their love of football as the underlying factor. It is GI. A period of exclusivity signed and sealed. No one else at the table which means they hold all the cards and can play as aggressively as they want.

What happens next? The million dollar question to which we can only surmise.
It is important to note however that with no other option and with the coffers gone we are reduced to hoping and praying the only ones playing takeover do not walk away! (a very scary realisation!). Should that hurdle be cleared then what do they want and how will they go about getting it? Well – we all know the Council own the land Plainmoor sits on but did you know Torquay United owns the stands? The Council will only deal with the owners of these stands (which will default to GI if things turn out how they are proposed). I suspect this talks will start almost immediately should the takeover be completed.
Make no mistake – GI have little to no interest on the on field side of the club. This can be seen by the fact the cared not what division the club would be in when the initial loan was taken. Therefore enter a second person to the circus which will be no other than (you guessed it!) Peter Masters. Much more in tune with the actual football side of things there is no doubt in my mind he will be the lead figure and the one that sits in the directors box come match days.

Onto the next big questions (should we even get to that stage) – what happens if GI/Masters push through their plans? and what if happens if the they do not succeed? and the overriding question in all of this - is what do these plans hold in terms of Torquay United as a football club?
No amount of speculation at this stage can answer that but one thing which is sure is that we are all now holding on to the hope a takeover can be completed by a group who are very poorly thought of. These are the type of things I have read and feared on Hereford and Salisbury forums and these are the things which are now happening to our club.

There is no escaping from this but whilst the club breathes I pray for it to continue and I will carry on do so until it is no more. Who knows (despite very little reason to suggest it otherwise!) may be (just may be!) GI and Masters will bring a better future to TUFC!

Anyway – just my ramblings. You can ignore or pretend they are not happening if you choose to do so!

What happens next is that we wait, either for the club to be sold or for it to fall through. After that we'll look back with hindsight on whether what has or hasn't happened is or isn't good news.

We're being sold in private to a person or persons unknown, which isn't exactly conducive to an active forum. Communication from owners to fans has been pretty much non-existent since they took over 18 months ago, and in this instance they have very clearly said that no further comment will be made until it is a done deal. Either way, we're just waiting for it to be finalised and then wait for any information to be revealed.

What happens next?

You have completely ignored TUST and the Community Shares Pre-Issue. How about...the fans get behind the club, put £100 into the fund, a community share issue is launched and the supporters buy, own and run the club?

And before all the anti-TUST brigade start screaming "Burn the TUST militant at the stake", it has been done and works at other clubs of our size in the lower divisions.

Well done for breaking the silence though.

Join TUST. Dream in yellow.

What happens next?

We the fans get a say.

Come on Board explore EVERY option. Put them on the table and let us know what is and isn't possible. Call another public meeting and give us the facts.

We want Football League football back. How do we get that ?

Where is you're information coming from Richinns? You seem to think you know the truth, presenting facts to us without an inkling of modesty that these may just be your opinions. Do you have an source inside the club?

As for what next, well that is more obvious - we, the fans of TUFC will roll over and take whatever is given to us. Was there an appetite for a fight among more than just a few we would have seen it already. If the people of Torbay had any care for the club they would have been outraged already. We would have seen walkouts, demonstrations. If Newcastle have the most vociferous fans in the country, turning up at St. James Park to fight against the smallest thing that Mike Ashley does then we are at the other end of the scale. The people of Torbay, and the wider South West region don't care for their football teams, or any team sport for that matter (save for the few glory hunting Chiefs fans clogging up my Facebook feed). Professional football will die in Torquay in the very near future and no-one will notice, let alone care.

Crap Phil...

This thing is - and history proves this - that the 'people of Torbay' do care if they have a winning team. That is the bottom line.

wivelgull wrote:This thing is - and history proves this - that the 'people of Torbay' do care if they have a winning team. That is the bottom line.

Well obviously, hence the popularity of Man Utd across the country. But clubs, any club, cannot survive on glory hunters alone. We are a long way from having a winning team.

Not everybody can have winning teams all the time. That's the very nature of the game. Personally I can't think of anything more boring than supporting Man Utd solely through the television. It must be like eating all food without being able to taste it.

We don't need a winning team, necessarily. That would be helpful in getting the additional 1000 through the gates, of course, but the most damaging part of the calamities of the last few years is that it's eroded the hardcore support. The people who were showing up when things were at the bottom of the barrel in the past won't come any more. It's not because the team is bad - let's face it, if supporters stopped coming because the team is bad, we'd have gone bust decades ago - it's because there's no apparent desire to not be bad. Most supporters want to follow a team who they at least feel is trying to improve. Trying to either move up through the divisions, or trying to become a more important part of the community. The most successful sides in the lower reaches of the pyramid are those teams who can do both.

We don't need be in a promotion push every year. We just have to feel that the club as a whole is working towards improving the situation. The rot seemed to start in the arse end of Bateson's time at the club, when it was obvious to all and sundry that he had no desire to have the team making promotion drives, that he knew it'd be better financially for the team to do well but then fall away. Hell, even the relegation battles back then were good for the bank balance!

That's why the lack of communication from the board, and the murkiness of this takeover, is draining the will from the fanbase. Without knowing who is coming in, and what their intentions are, it's hard to be enthusiastic about...well, anything really. Yes, the game as a whole has changed hugely in the last 20 or so years, and it's harder for teams on the fringes to make things work. But that's why it's more important than ever to try. We're never getting to the Premiership. That's really ok. We just want to go to our local side, give them our twenty quid (christ!) and enjoy ourselves for a couple of hours. If the football is bad, well...that'll happen occasionally, but the pall hanging over Plainmoor for the past few seasons is not solely down to the quality of the team, and that improvement has to come from the top.

Agree with everything Happytorq says. Its not about a winning team, its about a club that tries.
What with the take over fiasco, the team match day transport shenanigans (which are just one of the symptoms of the general malaise) I have come to despair of the situation, perhaps more than in the Dave Webb era and that's saying something.

I agree with most of what you say.

But is it really anyone's fault. ?

Have we really had anyone with necessary revenue to prop up the club and allow it to turn round. That person is likely to need ?? 250k in annual revenue they are prepared to inject so that person has to have at least an eight figure annual salary. Yes they do exist- more and more of them every year according to statistics.

People like that don't however come easy or often. They have seemingly propped up at many clubs but not at Torquay. If there is such a person out there reading this ( we don't mind you have red hair\tattoos and a peculiar sense of humour )' please please please come forward.

Dazza wrote:
( we don't mind you have red hair\tattoos and a peculiar sense of humour )

Are you suggesting our only hope of salvation is a **** hipster?
**** hell they'll be serving exotic breakfast cereals and craft ales in the gulls nest.

Accepted - when can you pay the money Hipster.

PhilGull wrote: The people of Torbay, and the wider South West region don't care for their football teams..

I think you’re right. But why should they? Just because TUFC has a long and proud history, being able to trace its origins back to 1899 and having played The Beautiful Game on the same spot on the planet since 1910, does not give it the God given right to expect the general public to file through the turnstiles handing over their hard earned cash.

In the early 21st century most blokes believe that being into football means sitting in the pub in their Man U shirt watching the match on a big screen. (Other foreign owned, foreign funded, foreign managed clubs with foreign players are available.) And why shouldn’t they? After all, the Premier League can be seen as a world league played on English soil. They’re simply doing what footballs fans are doing the world over. Sky and BT Sport have seen to that.

However, I do know blokes who, with their kids and sometimes with their wives, will come up to Plainmoor when there’s a big game, or they will go down to Plymouth to watch a match or occasionally they may travel up to Manchester or London to watch a Premier League game. It’s these football fans that the club needs to be targeting. And it’s not just about having a winning team (although obviously that helps).

I lose count of the people that ask me how we got on at the weekend, or know how we got on and want to know what sort of a game it was or to ask about the bloke who scored the hat trick. These people are interested and if there was a positive buzz around the club and there was a good chance of seeing an entertaining game and a good possibility of a win they would be going through the turnstiles and handing over their hard earned cash.

And a buzz around the club that is all about a take-over that nobody knows anything about coupled with stories in the press about players going to matches in their own cars, Nicho driving the minibus and the coach breaking down is anything but positive.

The sooner the club has new owners (which includes TUST) who will invest in the club and understand that they are in the entertainment business, the better. Think of the buzz that buying and having a player like Kieffer Moore would create… local lad, loads of class, bangs goals in like they’re going out of fashion. Priceless.