WHUFC.com
Robert Hall, Callum McNaughton and Olly Lee all enjoyed positive results in
League Two action
01.10.2011
Robert Hall's terrific start to loan life continued with the winner for
Oxford United on a busy day of action for several Hammers around the
country. The 17-year-old striker headed the only goal for Oxford in their
1-0 win at Hereford United, the second time he has helped them to an away
success in a run of three victories on the road in succession for the Us.
The forward, recognised by Sam Allardyce last week as the brightest of the
club's young talents, got a full 90 minutes under his belt. Oxford are up to
sixth in the League Two standings, while Callum McNaughton has helped
inspire AFC Wimbledon up to fourth in the table. The Dons won 3-1 at home to
Gillingham with McNaughton at the back, while Frank Nouble drew a blank for
the Gills for the first time on his third appearance.
Olly Lee toasted extending his loan stay at Dagenham & Redbridge to the end
of the month by helping them to a 2-1 home win against Crewe Alexandra. It
ended a run of five straight defeats for the Daggers. Finally in League Two,
Ahmed Abdulla did not feature for Swindon Town on Friday night in their 2-0
defeat by Macclesfield Town and Jordan Brown sat out as Aldershot Town lost
3-2 at Accrington Stanley on Saturday. Up in League One, Cristian Montano
had a tough 49 minutes as Notts County went down 3-0 at high-fliers MK Dons,
who the Hammers will meet in a behind closed doors game next week, while
Jordan Spence came on at half-time of Bristol City's 5-0 loss at Blackpool
in the Championship.
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Freedman on... West Ham United
KUMB.com
Filed: Sunday, 2nd October 2011
By: Staff Writer
Dougie Freedman believes his side can be well-pleased with their last week's
work, which culminated with a draw against West Ham at Selhurst Park
yesterday...
Dougie: a fair result?
I would have taken six points, we are a club that's on the up [going] and
heading in the right direction. We had performances today today and against
Brighton and could have got six points but I look at it that as long as
we're moving forward [it's ok]. Performance-wise, over these last two games
it's been of a very high standard which in most games will get you six
points. Unfortunately it was four this week, but I'd have setlled for six!
We spoke about the youngsters in the squad; it seems they're growing up very
fast here?
They've done fantastically well. The experienced pros are around them every
day and it doesn't half help them. We are a club right now that's producing
our own and we're a team with hunger and desire to win football matches.
We've got a good blend and it's very pleasing to see.
Glenn Murray had another very good game today?
Glenn played fantastically well against Blackpool a few weeks ago when he
came off the bench so I think he's into his stride. He's looking fitter,
he's looking stronger and he's looking confident. As clever as he is you can
work off him.
Is it two points dropped or a point gained?
If we put our fan base, our finances and our expectations against West Ham
we should have been nowhere in sight. It's testament to the club and to the
players that we're hanging in there and we don't take it very lightly with
anybody coming down here. So I'm disappointed not to pick up the three
points but I know we're headed in the right direction.
You say that about competing on financial terms but you had 20,000 here
today; is it about trying to establish Palace as a big club again?
I think we're far from that, I believe the club is on a hangover from
administration and we're still finding our feet. My job is to make us [go]
in the right direction and then hopefully, one day, we'll get back to the
Premier League.
What some people find refreshing is that you come in at the end of these
matches and say you enjoyed them, despite the result?
Well I did enjoy it, that's the reason I say it; if I didn't, I wouldn't! I
did enjoy it because I thought it was a very good game with two very
different sides. One very physical, powerful team that hit a lot of long
balls in the box against a team with energy and pace who tried to cut
through them. So it was a very enjoyable game with two different sides.
I felt in the end it was a decent result, a decent performance and a good,
well-earned point.
Dougie Freedman was speaking to the BBC.
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David Gold: 'My dad was in jail, we were in abject poverty, West Ham was
pure escapism'
The Brian Viner interview: David Gold opens up on his father the villain,
his 'marriage' to David Sullivan, Big Sam's charm and humility, and his
childhood home being bulldozed if Olympic Stadium move goes ahead
Monday, 3 October 2011
The Independent
David Gold's father, known in East End criminal circles as "Goldy", was once
the getaway driver for a gang who hauled a barge off the Thames and up
Greenwich Creek, where they intended to unload £75,000 worth of copper
ingots, in the days when £75,000 could buy a whole streetful of houses.
Unfortunately for him and the gang, happily for the police, Goldy got a
little too cosy sitting in the cab of his lorry and fell asleep. He was
caught not so much red-handed as bleary-eyed.
The co-chairman of West Ham United relates this story with the timing born
of a thousand tellings. He is engagingly candid about his late father's
villainy, no matter what ammunition it offers to those who feel that the
apple never falls far from the tree, or at least who feel that there's
something not quite respectable about a self-made multi-millionaire who owes
much of his fortune to girlie magazines and sexy lingerie. Only last month
The Sun was speculating that if and when West Ham move into the Olympic
stadium, it will be renamed the Ann Summers Stadium. But if people have a
problem with the source of his wealth, they're welcome. He is proud of his
business empire.
Moreover, pretty much everyone I have talked to who has worked closely with
Gold, in and out of football, sings his praises. Decent, generous,
respectful and yes, respectable, are the adjectives I keep hearing.
Certainly, the staff at his Surrey estate, from his housekeeper to his
greenkeeper [he has his own golf course], seem to hold 75-year-old "Mr
David" in genuine affection. And many West Ham fans, while evidently less
than smitten with his partner David Sullivan, and not exactly blowing
bubbles of rapture in the direction of vice-chairman Karren Brady, have
embraced Gold as a kindred spirit, who, after all, played for West Ham Boys
in the 1950s and was even offered professional terms. They're satisfied that
his veins run claret and blue, and that he appears willing to underwrite his
sentimental attachment to the club with hard cash.
Nonetheless, I have some challenging questions with which to disturb the
serenity of Gold's handsome drawing-room, and the first of them concerns
Avram Grant, whose disastrous season-long tenure as manager ended in
relegation and whose appointment in June last year no longer looks, to put
it mildly, like the act of two astute businessmen.
"We're human beings, we make mistakes," says Gold. "In my life I've employed
over 100 managers, of whom four have been football managers, but if you're
picking a manager for your print works in Bournemouth, or your distribution
centre in Leicester, you're still looking for the best man available. What
I've learnt is that just interviewing them is never enough. Looking at their
CV is not enough. Nobody gives you a CV saying 'I'm useless'. But you can't
do more than interview him and look at his CV. So you think, 'Do I like this
man? Is there good chemistry between us?' Well, Avram is one of the nicest
men I've met in football. He interviewed fantastic, and maybe with a fairer
wind he would have been a success. But we should have acted sooner [in
letting Grant go], there's no doubt."
Under Grant's replacement, Sam Allardyce, the Hammers sit in fourth place
with 10 matches played. Saturday's draw with Crystal Palace maintained an
unbeaten record away from home, and although there have been more defeats
than wins at Upton Park, the fans I know seem to think that Big Sam is
probably the man to guide the club back into the Premier League. More
significantly, so does Gold. "I'd be devastated if this doesn't work, but
also surprised," he says. "We all knew Sam from the TV, we all knew the
remarkable job he did at Bolton. Actually, I was expecting a tough,
uncompromising, 7ft 6in northerner, but in fact he's got charm and humility,
which I never saw on TV. I know I can trust this man, because I've seen all
four corners."
Trust is important to Gold, and the bedrock of his long partnership with
Sullivan. "It's like a marriage," he says, and so I invite him to recall
their biggest name-calling, crockery-smashing domestic.
A smile. "Bizarrely, in more than 30 years, we've never had a cross word.
We're both compromisers, and we both believe in the value of our
relationship, therefore we don't want to damage it." I tell him I've heard
that he was keener than Sullivan to keep on Gianfranco Zola, before the
Sardinian was sacked last year, giving way to the disastrous tenure of
Grant. "No," he says. "All I can give you is that I would have kept Barry
Fry (as Birmingham City manager in 1996) but David was very keen to bring in
Trevor Francis. My brother was involved then, and I lost the vote two to
one."
Gold and Sullivan took over Birmingham in 1993, and sold up 16 years later.
Gold's subsequent relations with the club have not been especially
harmonious, indeed he was banned from the directors' box at St Andrew's when
West Ham played there last season. So does he look at Birmingham now, and in
particular at the spectacular fall from grace of owner Carson Yeung,
fighting money-laundering charges in Hong Kong, with regret, pleasure or
indifference?
"No, I made many friends there, and I was excited to see them win the
Carling Cup. We sold the club genuinely believing Carson Yeung and the
consortium were wealthy enough to take Birmingham City to the next level. It
was on that basis that we agreed to sell, that these were seriously wealthy
people. And the fans there always treated me with respect, pretty much, even
when we were relegated, which for a fan is the most painful thing to
endure."
Therefore, West Ham's relegation must have been doubly painful for him.
There was a time when almost all chairmen were long-term supporters of their
clubs, but now the chairman/fan is a diminishing breed. I ask Gold whether
he thinks it's dangerous when a club is in your heart as well as on your
spreadsheets?
"Of course it's a danger," he replies. "Pickering at Derby spent millions on
his football club. Jack Hayward at Wolverhampton called himself a golden tit
(there for the club to suckle on). On the other hand, Jack Walker spent
millions and saw Blackburn win the Premier League. The important thing as
fans is to understand that if you're going to gamble, you must gamble with
your own money, not the football club's money. I had a tweet the other day
from someone who said, 'It's not your club, it's the fans' club'. I tweeted
back: 'You're absolutely right, the football club belongs to the fans, only
the debts belong to me'. But you have to have that philosophy. I couldn't
live with myself if what happened at Portsmouth happened at West Ham.
"So we've gambled with our own money. You know, I went to a casino many
years ago, for a boys' night out, and I remember having £200 in my left
pocket, and £50 in my back pocket. The £200 was to have fun, the £50 was for
my cab fare and my overnight stay in a hotel. Only a fool carries on having
fun with the £50 when the £200 has gone. So the money we're gambling with is
not the money for the cab fare and the hotel. It sounds crass to say it's
fun money. I own 150 stores, not 150 oil wells, and there's a big
difference. But it's not life-and-death money."
The Gold family's wealth has been conservatively estimated at £350m, an
unimaginable fortune to most of us but, as he says, dwarfed by the funds
available to Roman Abramovich, not to mention the rulers of Abu Dhabi. So
what happens if Allardyce does not manage to get West Ham promoted, if they
stay in the Championship, and move into a half-empty Olympic Stadium? That
£200 could soon run out, leaving only the £50.
"I'm not in the business of risking my wealth, my granddaughter's
inheritance," he says. "But I will go the extra mile for West Ham. I would
not have come in in the first place if it hadn't been West Ham.
"When I saw the figures, the mess they [the Icelandic former owners] had got
themselves into... they had bad luck, with the banking crash, but they were
living well above their means, giving out incredible, crazy contracts,
pursuing a dream with no plan B, no contingency for relegation."
He denies that he invested in his boyhood club because he also saw the
prospect of a lucrative move to the Olympic stadium. "I swear to you that it
wasn't until we got into the club that we realised the potential," he says.
"At the time it looked like being a pure athletics stadium. Then it emerged
that the OPLC (Olympic Park Legacy Company) would consider a football club
if it could find a way to retain the running track."
And how does he get on with Daniel Levy, the Tottenham Hotspur chairman who
has not entirely given up on the idea of gazumping West Ham? "He believes
he's doing what's right. I don't know that I could do what he's done and
pursue a project with the full opposition of the fanbase. But you could
argue that he's a brave man."
If the move does go ahead, then Gold will see his childhood home, 442 Green
Street (he's always favoured 4-4-2, he quips), bulldozed. It would be part
of the regeneration scheme for which he yearns, having grown up when the
area was one extended slum, indeed it was the discovery that he could sneak
into Upton Park under the turnstiles that first kindled his love for West
Ham. "I'm seven or eight, my father's in prison, my mother's a skivvy, I'm
living in abject poverty, so this was a form of escapism," he recalls.
He then tells me, not with braggadocio but an appealingly wide-eyed
expression of pride, that he was one of the guests of honour at the recent
opening of the Westfield Stratford City mall, where the biggest queues were
outside the West Ham United club store and the Ann Summers shop. "It was
amazing, Brian," he says. "I've climbed a mountain that I didn't think I
would ever get even halfway up."
This is doubtless why he still empathises with the working man, and in
particular with the working man unable to afford match tickets. "It's
obscene that a working-class guy can't go to a football match with his two
children," he says. "I feel crummy about that, and it wouldn't trouble me
quite as much if the players weren't making so much money. I wouldn't want
to control wages, that's abhorrent to me. However, if we have lower ticket
prices, legislated by the governing bodies, there's only one place the clubs
can make up [for the drop in income], and that's by cutting the wage bill."
So why doesn't he put his own money where his mouth is, and lower prices,
and salaries, at West Ham? "Because I don't want to get relegated. You can't
do it in isolation. We all have to sign up to it. We're all breaking even at
best, most are losing money, but I'd feel better about it if we had full
stadiums. Football is an industry awash with money, but it's all being used
in the wrong areas."
Manifestly, Gold is right. And as I say goodbye to this likeable and
perceptive man, whom I had expected to be impossibly brash yet is anything
but, there occurs to me the perfect metaphor, at least in present company,
for a sport which is superficially prosperous, but not at all what it
appears. Football is all fur coat and no knickers, and Gold might be just
the fellow to find it the right underwear.
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