I live by the poem If and there's so many lines in here that you can just
sort of see in the stuff that we've done over the course of the last four or five years.
'If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two Impostors just the same.'
We got promoted, back-to-back promotions but I understand that.
But gone before about relegation, if we got relegated,
it doesn't matter as long as we know that we're moving the club on
and it's progressing because what will happen is we'll be a good League 2 Club
and we will get promoted again.
'And yet don't look too good nor talk too wise.'
See what I mean?
The start point of every job is the analysis.
It haven't got the time, the people or the money so the only way you survive on there is
to have a ruthless focus on your priorities.
My view is to try and stretch the the cash resilience as I call it from 2 months to 12 months
by doing things like creditor deferrals, what would come from the government ...
There are loans, etc, there are grants ...
If we hadn't had the furlough scheme and regrettably
we probably would have done stuff with the staff in terms of redundancies.
A lot of this is just common sense but ...
but I just do this for a living, so ...
Everybody in the leagues tend to be
hand-to-mouth, the putting hand in the pocket to pay wages almost
because the virus is and the crisis is here, the ones that will survive will be blunt
about it because it's right on us now are the ones that have the cash
resources and the balance sheet resilience, it's about having enough fat
on your back to ride a run of bad luck and so if you look at what we're doing,
we've been hit with a sudden cost of a new pitch and actually on top of that
we've had the coronavirus and can we survive? The answer is yes.
It's still within our gift but that isn't because what I did on the Monday morning after
they cancelled, it was because what we've been doing over a number of years.
You don't need to the League to say, right, playing resumes, to achieve any of this.
No.
The issue of relegation or promotion at the start of all of this, I wanted us to
finish the season.
All I've said in the last week is that as I look at things
and analyse things, I see it more and more difficult to conceive that we can
actually finish the season because of what's going on, because of the extension,
because of the absolute necessity to play in front of paying gigs to make
the economics work and because the economics at this point in time
are basically, you know, in a pretty terrible position.
So economics will overtake, if you like, sporting integrity.
... like not to be relegated but if we are relegated then all the stuff that we're doing
we still do exactly the same stuff.
Sometimes in life you've got to take sort of brave decisions and it wouldn't
have killed us as a club as it were but there was no other way to do it.
It's a fortune cookie.
It was for the Chinese New Year celebration so we have loads of fortune cookies.
So those are leftovers, so we are gradually eating them.
It's beautiful, isn't it?
Absolutely beautiful.
Well, it's a lot better than when I played on it, put it that way.
My oldest daughter is the accountant here.
Massive family business.
Emma runs community and international.
Because we are having international business as well.
How are you doing? You can't keep away from the place, can you?
Let's just keep the distance.
Came to have a look at the ground, see what it's like ...
He's worked in the maintenance team ...
You're furloughed at the moment, aren't you?
Yeah, yeah.
So, how come you are here?
I was just a bit bored at home.
... to see how the pitch was.
Yeah, hopefully we'll be back soon.
I hope so!
Otherwise, I think it will just fade away ...
The guys who work at the club become parts of the family and that's one of the things that ...
My concerns about ... if it continues on in through the summer as
it probably will do, you know, there will be redundancies that will have to be made
at some stage for clubs to keep, you know, the fabric of the business together
but it's lads like Tony who just turned up today on the basis that he's at home
and he wants to come down and see how things are and they sort of owned the
whole thing and they've got a pride in what they do which is, you know,
it's the great thing about the club.
You alright? You fit?
We have to socially distance.
Some of our defenders have been doing that all season.
Scotty Davies, goalkeeper, captain ...
I've been here five years now and when I signed the chairman hadn't long
been in charge of the Football Club, it was a football club in there in a pretty
dark place to be honest, it come off the back of a couple of relegations.
The football club was socially distant from its community, I mean over the period
I've been here, we've come together and when you drive onto the Wirral,
you drive around the Wirral ...
It's a feeling that I can't really describe but the love that the people of the Wirral have for
their football club.
Football very often gets a bad press but the reality is that, you know,
there's a lot of good things that clubs do.
Clubs like ourselves are an integral part of what I call the fabric of this country
whilst everybody's not a football fan, you know, you can see the damage that it does
when the local professional football club fails.
I went to school ten minutes away from the club,
I played for the club for 13 years.
So, I knew that the club was something that could operate in this way
and I always believed, when I was at the FA,
when I saw club, they would fight with their local supporters' trust,
they would fight with the council, etc ...
When you think about it, it's illogical
so part of the proposition was to try and leverage off that potential.
When we came into the coronavirus, part of what we did was to
just sort of change the emphasis of what we were doing in our community work
into what was required now by the community.
Tranmere has always been involved for quite a long time in food banks.
At the best of times there's quite a lot of that around here but obviously
at the moment the numbers are going through the roof because a lot of people have lost
what employment that they did have or, you know, there's a lot of financial difficulties.
I think we've delivered over 300 ...
Quite interesting that they go into the Tranmere which is where the club was formed.
135 of years ago.
... needs support at the moment.
You can't be a fair-weather community club in other words, coronavirus comes,
I've got six drivers arriving ...
Another one behind you with his Tranmere shirt on.
I'm a season ticket holder ... so I thought it would be good to bring my son as well.
We have to wait till the first of June so ...
Looking forward to help out the way I can.
We are going to a house in Tranmere just up on the hill not far from where the club was founded.
We just don't go out, we stay in constantly.
I haven't been out since January.
I'm glad to go an see my grandkids.
They're the main thing.
It's a bit frightening, isn't it?
Radio presenter: '... talks gonna be set to take place on Wednesday on whether the League One season
should be ended ...'
'Clubs basically can't agree whether to end the season.'
'You've got a relegation issue between Wimbledon and Tranmere that's so tight ...'
This week we are modeling again different scenarios, including a scenario
that we may not play in season 2021.
I've started to worry about if they don't finish the season,
how do you finish it in terms of relegations and promotions
and, you know, if you look at points per game, it doesn't work.
It's difficult for me to talk on it because we clearly have a vested interest
in not getting relegated.
If you look at our results in the last five seasons,
we've had a better second half of the season.
In every case.
We brought in players at the start of the window which we could.
Those players were better then through the February well we had a difficult fixture list
so we then came into March and the players that we bought was starting to have
an impact and we won the last three games in a row.
We were the top form side.
A game in hand, three points behind the team above us for the last relegation place
and we were due to play four of the teams just above us.
So we had an easy fix to this, relatively, we were in a massive momentum
and I've been in a dressing room so I know what difference momentum makes
and none of that is going to be taken into account on PPG.
You might appeal it, if you feel it's not going to ...
I'm not going to talk about whether I'm going to take legal action or not.
But I know that other clubs are debating ... Or not debating, they've taken advice.