Million dollar bash

It will have come as no surprise to anyone to see that Yeovil Town's latest set of accounts show a large loss. What will come as a surprise to most people are the scale of those losses, a few thousand pounds shy of £1 million over the financial year. I don't propose to reinvent the wheel by going through the few details the club sees fit to release, see part 1 and part 2 of the Ciderspace news page for as many of the details as can be gleaned from the auditors statement, with the club's version of events on it's official site.

The club's statement begs as many questions as it answers. It blames the main part of the loss on the lack of player sales during the period in question plus the absence of a cup run, as well as the effects of having to replace the injured Mark Bircham and Darren Way. Interestingly there is no mention of the costs incurred in the botched sacking of Russell Slade, either in terms of the compensation finally paid to Slade, nor the legal bill the club would have had to pay. It seems from all of the above that the board took the decision to increase the playing budget in the expectation that taking a risk would bring a reward, either in the shape of another big player sale or an extended run in one of the Cup competitions. In the event, neither expectation came to pass and the board made a bad situation worse in the ham-fisted way they got rid of the man they blamed for their misfortune - Russell Slade.

So where do we go from here? Well, according to the club's statement the club has been successful in reducing costs in this latest financial year to the extent that they are expecting to show a small profit in the next set of accounts. The loss last year has been covered, according to the auditors, by personal loans from 'the shareholders' - in other words the club is now in debt to Norman Hayward, though we don't know by how much, nor the terms of repayment, if any. We know nothing of any consequence really because, as usual, the club tells us the bare minimum they can get away with by law. Transparency? They don't know the meaning of the word.

There's no point in being overly concerned about all this anyway. The sun will keep on shining and the Earth will keep on turning and next season I will buy my season ticket and go along to a stadium with nothing much in the way of facilities and a gradually deteriorating pitch to watch an underfunded side do their best to keep in League One and try to play some decent football on the way. Who knows? We may even have a bit of a cup run. Until and unless there's a change of ownership at the club then that's the way it's going to be for the foreseeable future. It could be worse, we could be Weymouth.

Back to the football and the 3-1 win at relegated Stockport on Saturday has made League One survival now almost certain. Skivo reckons 2 more wins will do it, but he's erring on the side of caution. We're on 48 points, 7 away from the relegation zone with 5 games to go. I think we've probably got enough already, but one more win will surely be ample. It would be nice to get that win sooner rather than later, but with 2 home games next up against 2 of the most in-form sides in the division - Millwall tonight and Southampton on Saturday - then we might have to wait a week or two for some certainty. Second-placed Millwall are the visitors this evening, and it's no surprise that the bookies have made them favourites to win tonight's game. What is surprising is that they're odds-on at 4/5 for the away win. The draw is priced at 5/2 and a Yeovil win an insulting 7/2. The home win has got to be worth a fiver at those odds. Running total: +£18.88p.