Post by Dave on May 22, 2009 16:48:18 GMT
I will do this a bit early as I have to go out to a party tonight.
As we got our very first winner when we started the Best Poster Award, so we have now come to the last one of our very first year in existence, as the TFF is very nearly one year old.
What a great week it has been again and we have been treated to not only top posts but fantastic photos of Wembley etc. I thank you my fellow members for all the work you put into your posts on the forum, its you who make the forum such a great place to want and come and spend some time in.
Remember to get votes you need to post and as always its so good to see members making their first of what we hope will be many posts on the forum.
What can I say about this weeks winner? well he really is a nice man and someone who I'm so glad joined the forum, not only for his excellent posts, but the fact that I have got to know him as a person and love being able to enjoy a chat with him on matchdays at Plainmoor.
He is also a man who knows his history of our club, you post one thing that is not a historical fact about our club and he will soon let you know for sure. I'm also very pleased that he has formed a good friendship with Barton Downs, when they get together I bet they talk for ages and ages.
Our winner made a post this week that had you the members voting like mad on it and he came very close to getting a record score. Please don't forget to keep voting if you read a post that really does deserve a vote, without your votes we won't get a winner.
This weeks winner is Jon Great post Jon and one as someone said must be close to being the post of the year.
Here is Jon's post
I don’t mind admitting that I was crying on Sunday. You can’t explain to people who don’t understand just what this means to us. Every time I hear a news headline that mentions “Torquay United back in the Football League” it brings a tear to the eye. Now I’m going to bore the rest of you to tears with a long rambling post – feel free to scroll on by.
Hindsight does rewrite history and paint things differently. Chris Roberts was so close to being the man that killed our club, now he’s the irritant in the shell that formed the pearl -not that I’m giving him credit for that! I thought that Exeter had killed our best chance of getting back to the League last year and even the mention of that match has always made me feel sick – not just that it had happened, but that is was them that did it. I can put that behind me now. I might even re-watch the last twenty minutes to see what went wrong – something I thought I would never be able to bear to do.
In my mind I’ve been playing down the importance of Sunday’s game – probably as a psychological defence against having my guts ripped out again. I’ve been trying to convince myself that “all good things come to those who wait” and that we would definitely make it back to the League – it was just a question of when. I know the club is well run and there are other clubs that had to knock on the door for a lot longer.
After our last (I can say that now – as it clearly means most recent rather than final!) League game, Chelston and I walked down the hill into town for a curry and stopped for a pint at O’Connors. We got talking to some Hereford fans - great lads who clearly understood our pain. It took them nine years to get back in the League, and if you’d have offered me a pact with the devil for us to do the same then I would have bitten your hand off. I was thinking more of Accrington Stanley who had topped and tailed our miserable season – introducing us to our new “saviour” at the home game and kicking away our escape ladder in the away game. It had taken them forty-four years. I honestly asked myself if I would see League football in Torquay again in my lifetime.
There was unbridled joy shortly after when the news of the takeover was confirmed. Utter despair turned to hope, but I think it was John Cleese who said “I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand”. The last two seasons have brought far more torture and heartache than if we’d trodden water two thirds of the way down the table under Merv and Leroy.
How would our new regime go down in history? “During the relentless decline of the club, there was a brief period of hope just after we were relegated from the League. The new Board threw money at the club and achieved some decent results, but just missed out on promotion twice. Crowds fell away and the Board was left with no choice but to return to severe cost-cutting and the downward spiral continued ….”.
The crowd for our first game with Grays was fantastic – there was real hope that the people of Torbay would get behind the club. But crowds fell away even though we were hardly ever out of the top two. We had a wobble at the start of this season and crowds deserted in droves. I would hate to think what the financial loss for this season would be if we had not had the FA Cup run and the play-offs.
How much further would or could the Board back the club? If they had stared down the barrel of an unmanageable loss this year, would they put their necks on the line again? I don’t know the answer to that. I hope they would but I wouldn’t blame them if they didn’t. I wouldn’t have given up in disgust if they had started to rein things in a bit. I asked myself if I would axe the youth scheme or slash the first team budget. I would hate to make that decision because I wouldn’t want to do either.
I would have stuck by the club like the fans of Barrow and Southport, Halifax and Scarborough have. But I certainly wouldn’t have been happy – and I wouldn’t blame anyone who gave up.
It has really annoyed me when people have talked down the BSP. It is a vibrant league. The quality is little different from League 2 – we’ve certainly seen better football in the last two seasons than in the previous two. The stigma perpetuated by all this “pub league” nonsense puts people off coming – and that apathy or antipathy to “non-league” could have killed us. As long as we could get crowds of 2 to 3,000 in the BSP we could keep buying our tickets for the play-off lottery until we came up trumps, but once those gates started to fall …….
I saw the cheap early season ticket offer as an ingenious sort of “disaster insurance”. Now we are in the League, those people would probably have come anyway – so we’ve probably surrendered some income through the price-cut. But if we had failed in the play-offs and not got off to a flyer next season, how many would we be down to in the “pub league”? What would happen if we geared up for another big push and the crowds didn’t come? Would we better cutting back costs in the expectation they wouldn’t come? Tough decisions - I can understand why the club took the option of ring-fencing some income to insure against the “meltdown scenario”. The fact that it’s probably now cost us money is good. It’s like paying your house insurance – you do it but hope you’ll have wasted money because your house hasn’t burned down.
I noted the clearout at Kidderminster – the club that could still have pipped us to a play-off spot up until the last day of the season. They narrowly missed out and are now having to cut back big style. There are rumours that the same will happen at Cambridge. Would we have survived disappointment unscathed? Thankfully, we will never know.
I can see why people have got desperate over the last two seasons – even if I think their anger has often been misdirected. Paul Buckle has had the backing to give it a real go – which of course he has done. But he didn’t have the resources that made success inevitable as some seem to think. Maybe people got angry at him because they thought that if he did fail, nobody else would have the same chance that he did. If Bucks screwed up, the purse strings would be tightened and his successor would not be starting from amongst the front runners, but from the middle of the pack. It would take an exceptional season to get us up from there. You know Oxford will go up eventually. It’s quite funny watching them sweat and you’d be happy for them to have to wait another few years, but their size means it is inevitable they will return. It’s the same for Luton and probably for Wrexham, Mansfield, Cambridge and even York. But it isn’t for Torquay – staying down forever was a real and horrible possibility.
We’ve got the best Board and off-the-field team you could hope for. We have been doing just about everything right (o.k. Bucks may have made a mistake or two!). Everyone at the club has been working their socks off and the focus and strategy have been excellent. That deserves success – but football isn’t fair and you don’t always get what you deserve. You can do everything right and lose out to a dodgy offside decision, a slip by a defender or a penalty shootout. Common sense says that doing all the right things and working hard must bring its reward. It doesn’t always, but thankfully it has for us now.
That’s why I was a bag of nerves before Sunday. I knew we’d done the work. I knew we were prepared. I knew we deserved it – but I didn’t know if we’d get it.
The Legends Night was fantastic and I tried to convince myself that this was everything – that the heart and soul of the club was in fine shape and that what happened over ninety minutes didn’t matter in the bigger picture. We are a club doing all the right things and heading in the right direction – it didn’t matter what league we were in.
I lied. I tried to trick myself to protect myself from bitter disappointment. It does matter. It matters tremendously. As Winston would say, “This is not the end. It’s not the beginning of the end, but it might just be the end of the beginning”. There is hard work ahead. There will be disappointments and upsets ahead. The moaners and whingers will still have plenty to get their teeth into, but I am now confident that what we have seen over the past two years is laying the foundations of a club that will maximise its potential – whatever that is. That work has not been in vain, the risks taken by those who dared to put their money where their hearts are will not be in vain. We will succeed. I wasn’t sure of that at 4 o’clock on Sunday, but I am now.
TORQUAY UNITED ARE BACK IN THE FOOTBALL LEAGUE
As we got our very first winner when we started the Best Poster Award, so we have now come to the last one of our very first year in existence, as the TFF is very nearly one year old.
What a great week it has been again and we have been treated to not only top posts but fantastic photos of Wembley etc. I thank you my fellow members for all the work you put into your posts on the forum, its you who make the forum such a great place to want and come and spend some time in.
Remember to get votes you need to post and as always its so good to see members making their first of what we hope will be many posts on the forum.
What can I say about this weeks winner? well he really is a nice man and someone who I'm so glad joined the forum, not only for his excellent posts, but the fact that I have got to know him as a person and love being able to enjoy a chat with him on matchdays at Plainmoor.
He is also a man who knows his history of our club, you post one thing that is not a historical fact about our club and he will soon let you know for sure. I'm also very pleased that he has formed a good friendship with Barton Downs, when they get together I bet they talk for ages and ages.
Our winner made a post this week that had you the members voting like mad on it and he came very close to getting a record score. Please don't forget to keep voting if you read a post that really does deserve a vote, without your votes we won't get a winner.
This weeks winner is Jon Great post Jon and one as someone said must be close to being the post of the year.
Here is Jon's post
I don’t mind admitting that I was crying on Sunday. You can’t explain to people who don’t understand just what this means to us. Every time I hear a news headline that mentions “Torquay United back in the Football League” it brings a tear to the eye. Now I’m going to bore the rest of you to tears with a long rambling post – feel free to scroll on by.
Hindsight does rewrite history and paint things differently. Chris Roberts was so close to being the man that killed our club, now he’s the irritant in the shell that formed the pearl -not that I’m giving him credit for that! I thought that Exeter had killed our best chance of getting back to the League last year and even the mention of that match has always made me feel sick – not just that it had happened, but that is was them that did it. I can put that behind me now. I might even re-watch the last twenty minutes to see what went wrong – something I thought I would never be able to bear to do.
In my mind I’ve been playing down the importance of Sunday’s game – probably as a psychological defence against having my guts ripped out again. I’ve been trying to convince myself that “all good things come to those who wait” and that we would definitely make it back to the League – it was just a question of when. I know the club is well run and there are other clubs that had to knock on the door for a lot longer.
After our last (I can say that now – as it clearly means most recent rather than final!) League game, Chelston and I walked down the hill into town for a curry and stopped for a pint at O’Connors. We got talking to some Hereford fans - great lads who clearly understood our pain. It took them nine years to get back in the League, and if you’d have offered me a pact with the devil for us to do the same then I would have bitten your hand off. I was thinking more of Accrington Stanley who had topped and tailed our miserable season – introducing us to our new “saviour” at the home game and kicking away our escape ladder in the away game. It had taken them forty-four years. I honestly asked myself if I would see League football in Torquay again in my lifetime.
There was unbridled joy shortly after when the news of the takeover was confirmed. Utter despair turned to hope, but I think it was John Cleese who said “I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand”. The last two seasons have brought far more torture and heartache than if we’d trodden water two thirds of the way down the table under Merv and Leroy.
How would our new regime go down in history? “During the relentless decline of the club, there was a brief period of hope just after we were relegated from the League. The new Board threw money at the club and achieved some decent results, but just missed out on promotion twice. Crowds fell away and the Board was left with no choice but to return to severe cost-cutting and the downward spiral continued ….”.
The crowd for our first game with Grays was fantastic – there was real hope that the people of Torbay would get behind the club. But crowds fell away even though we were hardly ever out of the top two. We had a wobble at the start of this season and crowds deserted in droves. I would hate to think what the financial loss for this season would be if we had not had the FA Cup run and the play-offs.
How much further would or could the Board back the club? If they had stared down the barrel of an unmanageable loss this year, would they put their necks on the line again? I don’t know the answer to that. I hope they would but I wouldn’t blame them if they didn’t. I wouldn’t have given up in disgust if they had started to rein things in a bit. I asked myself if I would axe the youth scheme or slash the first team budget. I would hate to make that decision because I wouldn’t want to do either.
I would have stuck by the club like the fans of Barrow and Southport, Halifax and Scarborough have. But I certainly wouldn’t have been happy – and I wouldn’t blame anyone who gave up.
It has really annoyed me when people have talked down the BSP. It is a vibrant league. The quality is little different from League 2 – we’ve certainly seen better football in the last two seasons than in the previous two. The stigma perpetuated by all this “pub league” nonsense puts people off coming – and that apathy or antipathy to “non-league” could have killed us. As long as we could get crowds of 2 to 3,000 in the BSP we could keep buying our tickets for the play-off lottery until we came up trumps, but once those gates started to fall …….
I saw the cheap early season ticket offer as an ingenious sort of “disaster insurance”. Now we are in the League, those people would probably have come anyway – so we’ve probably surrendered some income through the price-cut. But if we had failed in the play-offs and not got off to a flyer next season, how many would we be down to in the “pub league”? What would happen if we geared up for another big push and the crowds didn’t come? Would we better cutting back costs in the expectation they wouldn’t come? Tough decisions - I can understand why the club took the option of ring-fencing some income to insure against the “meltdown scenario”. The fact that it’s probably now cost us money is good. It’s like paying your house insurance – you do it but hope you’ll have wasted money because your house hasn’t burned down.
I noted the clearout at Kidderminster – the club that could still have pipped us to a play-off spot up until the last day of the season. They narrowly missed out and are now having to cut back big style. There are rumours that the same will happen at Cambridge. Would we have survived disappointment unscathed? Thankfully, we will never know.
I can see why people have got desperate over the last two seasons – even if I think their anger has often been misdirected. Paul Buckle has had the backing to give it a real go – which of course he has done. But he didn’t have the resources that made success inevitable as some seem to think. Maybe people got angry at him because they thought that if he did fail, nobody else would have the same chance that he did. If Bucks screwed up, the purse strings would be tightened and his successor would not be starting from amongst the front runners, but from the middle of the pack. It would take an exceptional season to get us up from there. You know Oxford will go up eventually. It’s quite funny watching them sweat and you’d be happy for them to have to wait another few years, but their size means it is inevitable they will return. It’s the same for Luton and probably for Wrexham, Mansfield, Cambridge and even York. But it isn’t for Torquay – staying down forever was a real and horrible possibility.
We’ve got the best Board and off-the-field team you could hope for. We have been doing just about everything right (o.k. Bucks may have made a mistake or two!). Everyone at the club has been working their socks off and the focus and strategy have been excellent. That deserves success – but football isn’t fair and you don’t always get what you deserve. You can do everything right and lose out to a dodgy offside decision, a slip by a defender or a penalty shootout. Common sense says that doing all the right things and working hard must bring its reward. It doesn’t always, but thankfully it has for us now.
That’s why I was a bag of nerves before Sunday. I knew we’d done the work. I knew we were prepared. I knew we deserved it – but I didn’t know if we’d get it.
The Legends Night was fantastic and I tried to convince myself that this was everything – that the heart and soul of the club was in fine shape and that what happened over ninety minutes didn’t matter in the bigger picture. We are a club doing all the right things and heading in the right direction – it didn’t matter what league we were in.
I lied. I tried to trick myself to protect myself from bitter disappointment. It does matter. It matters tremendously. As Winston would say, “This is not the end. It’s not the beginning of the end, but it might just be the end of the beginning”. There is hard work ahead. There will be disappointments and upsets ahead. The moaners and whingers will still have plenty to get their teeth into, but I am now confident that what we have seen over the past two years is laying the foundations of a club that will maximise its potential – whatever that is. That work has not been in vain, the risks taken by those who dared to put their money where their hearts are will not be in vain. We will succeed. I wasn’t sure of that at 4 o’clock on Sunday, but I am now.
TORQUAY UNITED ARE BACK IN THE FOOTBALL LEAGUE
