Author: Nick

And so another departure from Fulham, in fact not only from Fulham, but from the British Isles as Chairman Mohammed Al Fayed, has got sick of the Inland Revenue and has high-tailed to Switzerland after 35 years in Britain, four British kids and no British passport for himself.

Hmm, I wonder quite how important Fulham and the piece of real estate he owns by the river in SW6 will seem from the shors of Lake Geneva?

It will also make his bid to become the Mayor of London a tad tricky, I would have thought?

We recently spent a few days in Longboat Key, FL. Reading, swimming and looking after his lordship occupied most of the time. There’s a few pictures of the area linked from this one of the pool….

…and we’ll put more of him up within a day or two.

So in a masterstroke of man-management that will inspire confidence in successors, Fulham chairman Mohammed Al Fayed (that website is worth a visit, btw) announced that Jean Tigana’s contract will not be renewed at the end of the season, thus leaving the team with seven games to play with a lame duck manager.

That’s not entirely unexpected, but this line in the personal letter to Tigana which Mo so gallantly published on the Fulham website exhibited some self-righteousness that was quite something, even by Fayed’s hubristic standards:

‘Obviously, our position in the Premier League both this year and last year has been disappointing, particularly given the degree of investment and resources provided, and I am sure you would be the first to agree.’

If that’s the way you look at it, then so be it, but his record is pretty good – the acquisition of Steve Marlet excepted. Tigana could be incredibly stubborn, as he was last Saturday, declining to change anything after we went 2-0 down to Man Utd, and the way he left certain players out the side. But he’s laid the foundations for a great future for Fulham, providing the financial side of it doesn’t force us to sell all the youngsters that he’s nurtured.

His record until now is:

P: 152 W: 69 L: 41 D: 42

That includes winning the first 11 games in Division 1, winning that division with 101 points – ten points ahead of second place Blackburn – reaching the semi-final of the FA Cup in our first season in the Premier League and reaching the 4th round of the UEFA Cup in our current season. Not so bad, Mr Tigana.

The Independent is claiming that Fulham are “set to abandon plans to build a new stadium in London and will return to Craven Cottage,” using seats bolted on to the terraces, as most of the fans would prefer.

But as the article goes on, whatever happens in the next few weeks regarding Tigana – and speculation is rife that he’s actually on the way out before the season is over – the overall cost structure of Fulham is going to have to fall. We’re no different from the other companies, sorry, I mean clubs in the Premier League who are finding that the high wages of the bubble years are no longer sustainable.

One way to do that of course is to stop paying rent to QPR, another is to sell players and cut staff and a third is to cut wages of those remaining. I know March 31 is some sort of deadline, I think it’s the deadline for committing to another season at QPR, i.e. the 2004-05 season, as we’re certainly playing there next term. So there will probably be many more such stories emerging between now and the next game, at home to Blackburn on April 7.

But one thing that is annoying that the article repeats is this nonsense about the fans ambition. It quotes an unnamed sources as saying, the bolt-on seat strategy will only work “if the fans are prepared to give up a degree of ambition”.

Er, as far as I recall it was only the chairman and his myriad staff who wanted us to be the proverbial ‘Manchester Utd of the south.’ We’d be happy being Fulham for a few more years yet and being back at the Cottage would go a very long way towards achieving that.

There’s a great piece on the career highs and (many) lows of Muscial Youth in today’s Guardian – the Friday Review bit is always good for music – and includes a lot of interesting stuff about what happened to the members. But I loved this quote from Dennis Seaton, the lead singer who apparently got the job by being the only bloke to show up at the audition, reflecting their naivety about the music business:

“The Fun Boy Three tried to talk to us about the business,” remembers Seaton. “But we were asking them questions like, ‘Are you going out with Bananarama?'”

They truly were a novelty act, no matter what they thought was going on. I mean, I remember them being on Blue Peter regularly and thinking, what the hell is a band doing on Blue Peter? That’s not how it works! I knew there was something fishy about the music business even then….

Saw a poster today on 5th Avenue advertising The Libertines album, Up The Bracket. A tour therefore can’t be far behind. “Miss at your peril,” is my deep thought for the day.

With the cold weather, finding something to occupy him can be hard in the city, so eventually you just have to let him walk around the streets and the local landmarks. Click on the Union Square picture below for more recent pictures.

Watch the two Wembley towers, the last remaining part of the old Wembley Stadium come down live via a Webcam here.

While it was a venerable stadium and suitable for the 1948 Olympics, 1966 World Cup and numerous FA Cup Finals, in the last 20 years or so it has looked like a bit of a dump quite frankly. But what’s the betting the new one gets built on time and under budget?

So over the last couple of weeks, Fulham have finally taken the shackles off the person who write their PR guff, but unfortunately it’s to explain in the past tense what people were asking to be told over the last six months when it was current and we still held out hope of playing once more at the Cottage. The first concrete change came in Fayed’s statement of December 23 2002, which was the first time he publicly acknowledged that returning to the Cottage was not priority number one anymore.

Now, after much FUD has been spread by all sides, Fulham explains exactly why the costs of redeveloping the ground had risen from the initial estimate of 60m pounds to around 100m pounds.

The problem the Cottage faces is that it is in a unique position. There are still many other grounds in the middle of residential areas (though a lot fewer than ten years ago), but ground like Anfield are not surrounded by houses worth about a million pounds each on one side and a river on the other side, which provides a unique set of political and environment restrictions that we’ve known about for 15 years or more.

And the fact that the statement is written in the past tense only goes to prove that painful as it might be, it’s time to look elsewhere. The only alternative is that we get relegated and require lower wage bills and seats fixed to the existing terracing. Some choice.

In the Guardian, Jimmy said “I was gutted to hear Bill had died,” he said. “He was a great drinker but also a very good player. Only he could get tanked up with 10 pints before a match and still win.”