Former Blues chairman David Sheepshanks said he left an hour-and-a-half meeting with new CEO Mark Ashton with his faith in the future of “our beloved club” restored in an emotional and passionate speech from the floor of tonight’s PLC EGM at Portman Road.
Ashton, manager Paul Cook, new chairman Mike O’Leary and Lee O’Neill, who remains in charge of the academy, took questions from shareholders at a more than usually well attended meeting in the Sir Bobby Robson Suite. TWTD wrote a live blog of proceedings on the Forum, which can be found here.
PLC chairman Roger Finbow chaired the meeting and was joined by fellow PLC board members Liz Edwards, Peter Over, Mark Andrews as well as the evening’s guests.
The new owners were enthusiastically welcomed by shareholders, who continue to own 12.5 per cent of the club following the takeover, but it was Sheepshanks’s words which drew the warmest applause, the man who led the club to promotion via the play-offs in 2000 drawing parallels with the situation he found the club in when he took over as chairman.
"I had an hour and a half with Mark very kindly a week and a half ago and I came away so excited and so having had my faith restored in the future of our beloved club,” he said.
"Mark said so many different things in the time that we had together and we had to cut it because he had to go and do more signings and more things that he’s trying to do so well.
"I’m not really going to say anything about the past. The first three years had lots of promise and there was huge amounts of promise, but for the last 10 years the club has really been in a pretty sorry state, and there have been so many bad decisions made, and we’re paying the price.
"The reason I’m saying this is that we’ve got to cut these guys so much slack and give them so much support.
"I remember in 1995 when I was appointed as chair having had nearly 10 years on the board and done my apprenticeship, as it were, we’d just been relegated from the Premier League.
"You may remember that we had no money and I think the gate went down to 7,000 in our first season.
"We had to restore, with your support, this club. But we were only one division down and we’d just come out of the Premier League.
"And listening to the tale of woe of the underinvestment in the stadium, the community, I remember I asked John Kerridge, who was chairman of Fisons, ‘if you were made chair what would you do?’
"He said ‘bring the loving feeling back to this club’. And I think that’s what’s going to happen. I’m convinced that Mark, Mike and all of you will bring the loving club feeling back to this club, and that the club will once again have a beating heart.
"Because football clubs are about people and real people and loves and dreams and we need a beating heart again, and I think we’ve got one. In fact I think we’ve got several. So I think it’s absolutely fantastic what you’ve heard tonight.
"But the problem is that we’re starting another division down. You’ve all heard this, you haven’t been as low as this since 1953 in the culture of this great club, so it’s a massive job to restore.
"What I thought was so clear tonight was the way Mark described his four pillars [football, commercial, operations and community] and it really, really makes sense and everybody can get their minds around that and everybody can believe in it and everybody can support it. But it’s going to be hard work.
"I’m coming on Saturday and I’m longing to see the team again and see the stadium full, like we remember it was, and it will be again, it will be a happy place.
"Firstly, thank you very much for coming because we are just thrilled. We didn’t know what we were getting, to be honest. We didn’t know you [Ashton]. You and I hadn’t met, Mike and I had met many years ago, I’d never even met Paul properly, amazingly, until this evening and we shook hands, but I knew all about you.
"I think we’ve got a leadership team here that we can really believe in. People have talked about the 12th man and so forth, I can’t wait for Saturday! Come on, whatever the score, let’s make a deafening noise and get behind this team.
"But not just Saturday, week-in, week-out, week-in, week-out and I think give them lots of time and lots of support and we’ll get our club back.”