It seems you listen to the average man on the street. Have you ever been to Meet the Directors' events? To dissect your post:
- RW and the BoD do have ambition for the club. In fact, having sat in the same room as Gill Taylor, owner of Aqumen Recruitment and Associate Director, there is no one more passionate and immensely proud of the club (and the fans) as she is. Martin Lea is unpaid in his role but still does a 200 mile around trip to do things at the club. As the CEO, RW is not the problem in reality. He is employed to manage the club and do his best with what finances he has available to him. The RFL said we were "well-run" in the last licence applications and we have never been in administration. He is very prudent and I'd rather him play the low-risk strategy at this moment in time. We cannot dice with our future. The issue is that we need more people on the BoD to support JF or to take over from JF. One club cannot rely on one man alone. If there's someone out there willing to invest cash into the club then please direct him to BoD.
- With regard to Mathers-gate, there are two sides to every story. Having listened to both the BoD and also Ian Millward's side of things, I'm inclined to believe their side of the story. Mathers wasn't forced out to an extent. He was informed that IM was running with Owen at full-back and Wakey had made an enquiry as to his availability. He still trained with the team in weights but wasn't involved in the tactical play for the very reason that we didn't want him going to one of our rivals and informing them of our plays etc.
- The difficulty about signing players is that promotion and relegation hampered us. We were the club that was seen most likely to head down or lose our licence. Players didn't want to sign unless they had high wages etc. The fact is that we had to pay higher wages to get players to sign for Cas. Hampered us in the short-term; it's not so much wages but the long contracts that is my bug-bear. We're going to see a shift somewhat over the course of the next few years with NRL players. Because of the exchange rate and higher salary cap, we're now seeing second grade players demanding more £££ to come across and top players are asking for ridiculous cash. A lot of clubs will shift towards junior players here in the UK and get the odd two or three Australians in the squad.
- You can feel lied to if you want but RW has never lied to any of us. He has always said a date or time based on the fact that he did expect things to happen only for other stakeholders to change things or things to happen outside of his control. The simple fact is that if it wasn't for the economy and the Council not removing the licence from Hickson's much sooner we would have probably been in the stadium by now. The economy reduced the value of WR so much so that it was getting to the stage where we were going to have to risk building half a stadium and the club didn't want to do this. We have an invaluable asset, which went down from a value of about £10m to about £5.5m through the economy alone. Along with this the demand for services and costs of building the stadium has soared. The initial figure was around £11m and it has now risen to around £15m. The maths don't add up. The chemical licence was only removed in late 2010 and so we couldn't do anything with our asset, WR, until then. Simple fact is that things have never been in the club's favour but they are working hard and continually working hard to get the stadium up and running.
- As for the last point, this is also untrue. People talk about Caddick but Caddick never actually made a firm offer to the club; showing interest is one thing - backing it up is another. If you're referring to the issue with Feisal, if you hear the rumours going around I can see why the BoD turned it down; it wasn't an investment - it was a loan.
