FAN’S VIEW 23/24 – NO.7

LEAGUE ONE: OXFORD UNITED 1 PORT VALE 2

For some reason I didn’t have the most optimistic of outlooks going into this one but I could never have dreamt what would unfold in the second half.

Following their opening day 7-0 annihilation at Barnsley, where we won, Vale have got their act together and picked up ten points including beating Charlton and Carlisle, feats we had also achieved. They’d kept three clean sheets so were never going to be a push over. Far from it. For all our new found optimism a total shut out of our opponents, whoever they may be, is still something which is quite elusive. We’ve let in seven in our six games so far. Ten teams have conceded fewer. We are though the joint fifth highest scorers and I don’t think we’ve really got going in that regard yet.

With summer 2023 having made a comeback and the Kassam Stadium bathed in sunshine there was something of a sleepy feeling to proceedings. The home crowd never truly came to life until the 63^rd minute sending off of Mark Harris. Then the pent up anger brought about by the horrendously inept performance of referee Sam Purkiss came to the fore. The industrial language filter I try to keep in place in the SSU premium posh seats was spat out. The number of people on their feet and anger on the faces of many was confirmation that Purkiss was not doing well at all. It was more than home bias. He’d not necessarily got this decision wrong though.

The first half was an even contest with us having more of the ball but the visitors set up with that “we’re going to be hard to beat” look about them. Throughout the game they weren’t averse to using some physical intimidation, dark arts and attempted tripping which was sometimes successful and sometimes not. That old “it’s a man’s game” maxim holds some truth but not enough to justify just two players from Burslem getting yellow cards.

Purkiss’s inconsistency was staggering. Not only that but he was so far removed from the alleged new guidelines that he can’t have read them surely. As for the occasional showing of pettiness, well.

There were at least three occasions when Vale men attempted unsuccessfully to trip our players in full flight with the ball. It was cynical. Purkiss, to his credit, allowed advantage but at the first opportunity should have shown a yellow card to the offender. He didn’t show a card when a black shirted player kicked the ball away when we were awarded a free-kick. I thought that was a given. The same with a shirt pull. Free-kick given so he saw it but no card.

So much for allowing the beautiful game to flourish and stopping the real cheats from prospering. Greg Leigh’s first yellow card appeared farcical. He slipped ffs and it hardly even looked like a free-kick. If it’s something Leigh said then that’s a different matter. I think Purkiss might have been signalling handball, but a booking, come on.

Once he’d shown that card consistency should have meant about ten more.

He did very little to get the game going again each time it stopped and his handling of the kick off at the start of the second half indicated his level of common sense at that point was about zero. Vale played the ball back to keeper Connor Ripley who turned out once on loan for us over 10 years ago. Purkiss judged that a yellow shirt had marginally stepped into the Vale half before the k.o. was taken. It wasn’t gaining an unfair advantage, it had about as much impact on proceedings as me taking a break from writing this to get another cider will have on the outcome of the Mid Bedfordshire by-election. (Don’t give me the butterfly effect on this one).

So why do such sticklers allow opponents to stand within 10 yards of free-kicks on every occasion when the spray isn’t un-holstered?

Anyway, the teams being even at the break for me was a fair reflection. The Valiants were good at what they were doing, more Cambridge (who also beat us but in a fairer way, perhaps) than a pure footballing outfit. Are there (m)any such purist teams in L1 this season though?  And even if there are would playing like that alone get them up? I think not.

All that said I reckon Vale can play a bit more at times than people may give them credit for.

We had not been at our best but with patience being the name of the game in many matches, that isn’t necessarily something to get too concerned about. We’d not moved the ball quite quickly enough. There were more misplaced passes than has recently been the case. There was no one on the end of the couple of very enticing balls we played low across goal. From my recollection most shots we had were from outside the box and these were about as testing for Ripley as asking him what letter comes in the alphabet after A.

This may be coming over more negative than I’ve intended but as I’ve already indicated I was expecting a stern task and with us kicking towards the East stand in the second half the level of optimism I’d set out with certainly hadn’t diminished.

One player stood out in all the time he was on the pitch. That was Marcus McGuane. He is an absolutely shining star at the moment. Something very very special. Way above your average League One fare. Can run with the ball, doesn’t lose it, knows what’s going on around him, has vision and can usually see the right pass, is in the right place at the right time, helps out in defence and is cool under pressure. We’ve got some very good players at the club and as a team are playing well but I don’t think we’ve got anyone else who is currently within touching distance of him at the moment in terms of quality output. If only he was a goal-scorer too. Could then be worth loads of millions.

I didn’t detect much difference in part two … until we went down to ten men.

Not having seen the incident on the day, or subsequently, my comments may lack substance. I’ll go with Liam Manning’s comments “I’ve seen the video of the Mark Harris incident and it does appear to be an elbow, so I’ve got no complaints about that. The ref’s performance, to my mind, contributed to all that.” So there is a video. There were callers to Radio Oxford who said they saw what happened: “an elbow to the chest”. “He was being held, he swung to try and shrug the bloke off”. Then there was talk of pinching to get a reaction. That’s what Harris was indicating when he went over to the linesman and motioned such an action on his own arm. Ben Purkiss (no relation I presume) gave us the insight that these may not just be little nips but really nasty stuff where a player can end up with a much bruised torso. This was a new one for me. Referees don’t have eyes in the backs of their heads but they’ve got “assistants” to call on. The clue is in the title. There’s also the fourth official.

For all that Harris should not react in the way he did. If an elbow is all the officials saw then a red card is the correct decision. Manning will ensure our no.9 learns from this. Obviously it’s not the done thing but if a player has been subjected to violent pinching which has left tell-tale signs on their bodies then why not lift their shirt, point to the injury, point to the offender and tell the tales.

Eleven minutes after we became a man light we fell behind. The free-kick award against us at the time felt questionable but by then we were very wound up and probably too blinkered to be rational. Having watched it back again I have to concede that it was probably a foul committed by Fin Stevens who I’m afraid I thought was quite poor. From what I’ve seen I don’t think he’s as solid and strong a defender as Sam Long nor did I think he looked confident with the ball at his feet and offered little in the attacking half of the pitch.

Defending set pieces is a weakness we have, which had again been evident earlier in the game and this one was exploited by Vale with a well taken delivery and finish by Alex Iacovitti.

The bunch we currently have representing our football club has character aplenty and we refused to buckle. A feeling of injustice, justified or not, drove them on. Home fans were going with it too. The Kassam isn’t the Manor but in certain circumstances, like this, an emotive atmosphere can be generated even here.

Seven added minutes seemed on the light side but we kept going. Stan Mills to the by-line, ball pulled back, not defended, all the way to Leigh who put it into the roof of the net.

One all and it felt like a win. A moral victory at the very least even if we’d not got all three points.

Adding 30 secs for our goal we had about four and a half minutes to negotiate.

What did we truly deserve out of this game? A win? A point? Certainly not a win, possibly a point but despite what I’ve written about being stitched up by the officials we have only ourselves to blame for getting nowt. We didn’t play with our heads.

Leigh, who looks like he will be a real asset for us, should be old enough to know better. He’s not one of our youngsters, he’ll be 29 at the end of the month. Knowing he was already on a card the challenge he put in which meant he was shown a second, which brought about his sending off, was inexcusable.  We can’t complain about that one.

If only Gatlin O’Donkor had not picked up an injury in the warm up we would have had him to hold the ball up by the corner flag for minutes at a time to see us home. Instead in the 97^th minute we have 19 year old Mills showing complete naivety. Going down the right he didn’t attempt to do a GO’D but whipped a cross in which just gave possession away. We did though have three players in their area when that ball came over. A win would have been the sweetest thing ever but I 100% want the draw at that stage. Half a minute later Stevens had brought down Ben Garrity and the rest is history. It was the correct decision by Purkiss.

It’s a cruel game but we were architects of our own downfall so in a way we got our just desserts. It may sound harsh but LM needs to drum into them the harsh realities of competitive L1 football and ensure that we never again do as we did here. If lessons are truly learned then perhaps not such a bad day at the office. (Or did our manager want us to take a risk and try and get the most unlikely of wins?)

We also had a few players who weren’t quite at the top of their games but I still came away feeling quite proud of my football club, that and a little perplexed as to what I’d just witnessed.

I don’t really count the Papa Johns Trophy as proper first team football. With no fixture next week due to international call ups we’ve got a fortnight before we go again for league points. Unlikely to bring as much drama as this game but when it comes to football who knows? It’s certainly not been boring.

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Before kick-off I spent about half an hour handing these out.

Just a reminder of the importance of the vote at Oxfordshire County Council on September19^th to allow the Triangle land to be sold to Oxford United Football club. If you have not contacted the Council on this one then please do so. The importance cannot be emphasised enough. The future of OXFORD UNITED FC rests on this, which of course is far from being the last hurdle.

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COLIN BARSON’S – PORT VALE FINANCIAL ANALYSIS

Port Vale are one of the seven League One clubs on my personal naughty step, as they only produce Small Company Accounts, which is obviously their business, but I feel is less than transparent in a customer facing business. It makes this report shorter and less detailed than most and once again I’ll start with the numbers that are available, using the standard format, and then go on to their ownership situation.

As you can see from the table below (Y/E 2022 remember), there is not a lot of the information that we normally look at, so I’ll move swiftly through it. Vale are a lower/middle League One club based on what we can see. They had an average crowd of 7,681 last season, which places them 14^th out of this season’s League One clubs.

There is no turnover or expenditure information available in the abridged accounts, so no analysis of this most interesting stuff is possible. However, it is possible to extract a few bits and pieces from the Balance Sheet and notes that accompany it. For instance, they made a loss of £1,086,105 for the year, placing them in a mid-table position of 11^th out of 22, and their equity situation was also mid-table with a negative equity of £3,956,263 putting them 12^th of 22. They had cash at bank of £821,668 which places them 15^th of 22. Although they don’t publish player trading information, as they don’t publish a Profit & Loss, I’ve managed to extract the numbers from the Balance Sheet, and it shows a modest loss on transfers of £7,104 for the season, which puts them near the bottom of that particular category.

Now onto their ownership, and a few other things. Vale have been owned by local couple Carol and Kevin Shanahan since May 2019. The Shanahans, who are 65 and 74 respectively, bought the club from the reviled Norman Smurthwaite (known as Smurf by the Vale fans). Smurf has a string of 15 dissolved companies to his name, and 12 of them had Vale Park as their registered address! I think this entitles him to a place on our list of football club owning wrong’uns. He arrived at the club in 2014 and put the ground into the ownership of another of his companies, Alchemy Land Limited (another indication of wrong’un behaviour, as we know from our own experience) and almost immediately began to wrack up a Directors Loan Account which eventually reached £3m. At the time of the sale of the club it stood at £2.4m. This appears to have been repaid to him at the time of the sale. A further sum of £1m+VAT was paid, by the Shanahans, to Alchemy Land Limited (Smurf  in reality) for the freehold of Vale Park, a bargain in my book.

The Shanahans have made their money out of an IT company called Synectics Solutions Limited which is situated literally next door to Vale Park. Having met them both on a couple of occasions I’d say they are thoroughly decent people, with good intentions toward the club. I don’t believe that they are fabulously wealthy, by football club ownership standards. Synectics Solutions turns over between £20m to £25m per annum and generally makes a profit of around £2m each year. I notice that the company has provided a loan to Port Vale of £3,322,761 and a further loan of £2,229,295 from a related company, also sits on the Balance Sheet, meaning that Vale are in debt to the owners to the tune of nearly £5.6m after 3 years of their ownership. I’m sure there are no bad intentions, but I do hope that the cost of propping up a loss making EFL club is not going to drain the resources of the owners, as the club’s losses are taking up pretty much all of Synectics profits. As ever with these things, time will tell.

Finally, to close, I can find no record anywhere of Port Vale super fan Robbie Williams ever having put any money into the club…………………