I don’t have a lot to say on this one but when I read that Portsmouth had won their case to avoid liquidation against HM Revenue and Customs, I couldn’t help but the following headline in before some cheap tabloid newspaper beat me to it. HMRC had been looking for an order to block help to get the club out of administration.

It is the final game of the English football season and the English Football version of the NFL’s Super Bowl. It is a day when people get together all across the British Isles, have a BBQ perhaps, drink a few beers and watch the big game. Last year I described how this game was seen as the Gateway to the Summer, for once completed you knew the season was done and it really felt like summer had arrived.

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It’s an unconfirmed record but I am willing to bet it is indeed a record for a forth owner to be taking control of a professional football in just one season. Yep, Portsmouth the in-debt club with more owners coming in and out in a season than player transfers has got yet another owner and this time you couldn’t write the script better in a cheesy soap drama.

The owner this time is Balram Chainrai, a Hong Kong businessman who literally seized control of the club when it failed to repay debts to him when he had loaned the club £17m a number of months back. The loan was made against the ground and the ownership of the club and when repayments failed to materialize, Chainrai’s patience expired and he moved in to take control. Unbelievable.

I wonder if this guy actually has the money to run the club properly because the other lot didn’t and I’m willing to be this is far from the white light of hope and security Portsmouth fans were hoping for. This club is in serious trouble and the future doesn’t look bright. And do you know what the saddest thing of all is when reading articles about this and seeing names such as Balram Chainrai, Sacha Gaydamak, Sulaiman al-Fahim and Faraj is the lack of British names in there. Football teams are clearly best owned and run (baring perhaps a few rare occasions) by British owners who have an assossiation with the clubs and a true love for them

You know things are getting grim as a professional sports team when you can no longer afford to run your website and the following day you are due to pay your top flight players. That is the situation Portsmouth find themselves in as their financial predicament gets worse and worse. The team has changed ownership what seems like two or three dozen times already this year with one not-actually-rich-at-all owner following another with promises of glory being broken the first time he has to pay the players. Ali al-Faraj is the latest foreign owner to come in and do his best to destroy the once stable club. How the F.A. – in fact, the British Government for that matter – can allow such owners to come in and mess with the hearts and minds of so many loyal fans is beyond me.

Portsmouth will likely get relegated this season and the way the finances are at the minute that only spells seriously bad times ahead. Their fans may enjoy what is left of the Football itself this season – if that is possible – because it could be a long time before they see Premier League Football again.

“All the money from all the player transfers and the Sky TV money – all of the £35m from January – has gone straight to the Standard Bank,” Storrie said yesterday, referring to Portsmouth’s need to pay off a sizeable debt with the South African bank. “There is no money left.”

— Peter Storrie, Portsmouth chief executive, 1 Oct ‘09

A message to Liverpool fans: If you think things are rough with our debt and our refinancing then take a look down the south coast at this mess. I don’t know enough about the in’s and out’s of the goings on here having read little more than the article but Sulaiman al-Fahim was an alleged middle eastern Gold mine when he took charge just a few weeks back and now it seems this wasn’t the case at all. As I said I don’t know enough details but if I were a Portsmouth fan I’d be very concerned and raising some serious questions about what is going on and about how this al-Fahim character was granted ownership of the team what with the F.A.’s fit-and-proper testing procedure.

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“These teams cannot afford to get relegated and must do everything they can to stay up, even if that means shaking up the managerial role”.

That is what people argue when a manager gets sacked when his team is struggling and it is a fair and valid point, but with Tony Adams getting sacked from Portsmouth today just a few months into the start of his tenure I want to know when the people who hire managers who they could even potentially sack within a few months going to be held responsible for their terrible decisions?

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