Maidstone Joint Owner Oliver Ash continues to challenge the National League over decisions made from the start of Covid in March 2020. These affected Hereford, along with many others clubs, in the amount of help they received during the period.
Below are his latest thoughts.
Are we still contesting the National League’s disastrous governance during the Covid period?
'Where do I start? Firstly, let there be no doubt as to what happened. The National League board proved to be incompetent throughout the crisis, from March 2020 onwards. There were errors of judgement and errors of mismanagement, there was arrogance and failure to admit to mistakes and apologise for them. Clear-headed directors would have resigned but the ones we had were simply unable to grasp the seriousness of the crisis and the extent of their statutory responsibilities as directors, which are to represent all clubs fairly and not to feather their own clubs’ nests.
The chairman, Brian Barwick, who finally resigned months after we and other clubs called for his head, kept blindly bleating ‘we are a well-respected league’ during every public utterance, as though he was conducting the orchestra on the Titanic.
Jack Pearce, who was the architect of the flawed distribution of October 2020, has refused to admit to or apologise for all the errors of judgement. Let’s not forget it was Pearce who saw fit to recommend a distribution which went against government guidelines to reimburse lost gate receipts. His distribution proposal rewarded seven out of eight National League board members’ clubs with £500,000 more than they should have received. He acted as though he knew better than government. To add insult to injury the directors of those clubs, whose pockets bulged after adopting the Pearce distribution plan, then had the gall to appoint him Barwick’s replacement as League Chairman. Even Stalin would have blushed.
It’s really no excuse to say ‘well it was Covid so what else could we do’. The then Chairman Barwick should have had the humility back in March 2020 to establish Covid crisis committees to assist the league. Some of his board colleagues, who subsequently resigned, had proposed this. He could have drafted in additional support. He could have seen what was going to happen and himself resigned, admitting he had no appetite for the challenges ahead. He and his board simply weren’t up to the task on their own. They behaved as though they were some village committee organising a knees-up, not a company board responsible for governing some 68 clubs, clubs with combined turnovers of £50 million, clubs with 2,000 paid staff and hundreds of thousands of fans. It’s very serious stuff.
Over the past months we have been working hard with other angry clubs and our legal advisers to hold the guilty parties to account for what went on in these recent dark days. This has proved complex and expensive. We have not given up though.
In
the meantime we have been made aware of a project to produce a film
documentary telling the truth about the National League governance
during this period. We are looking forward to working with the producers
and writers to create a powerful documentary, whose exposure of the
truth will have a real impact.'