Underfire Town chairman David Sheepshanks says he plans to add to his board of directors in the coming months. Although defending the current board's performance, Sheepshanks says the club needs new skills at the top as it enters what he calls a new era.
Sheepshanks, on the defensive after criticism of the running of the club over the last couple of years, says the directors have always put Town first: "I'm fiercely defensive of the existing board's performance because we have acted honourably and selflessly in the best interests of the club.
"We were confronted with the worst-possible set of circumstances that any board could have faced. Other companies will have suffered ultimate collapse because they have lost their biggest customer or whatever but this was so public and largely beyond our control.
"We know we could have done things differently, not signed player X or player Y, but we backed our manager and at the time they were sound decisions — no one could have foreseen all the other factors which subsequently happened.”
Sheepshanks appears to want a line drawn under the problems of recent years and plans to add to his board: "It is a new era and it is now time to prepare for that so it is appropriate that we bring new faces onto the board of directors. They will be people from different backgrounds with different skills to strengthen the board, rather than to have wholesale change, and it will happen in the next couple of months.”
As widely reported, the existing Town directors injected £350,000 into the club through the loan stock and it is likely that any new directors may similarly have invested in the club.
As reported earlier in the week, Sheepshanks is planning to take a back seat from now on to allow chief executive Derek Bowden to run the club's affairs off the pitch and Joe Royle on them. The chairman says he will work two-and-a-half days a week, which will mean a drop in salary. However, he will still be involved in all transfer deals.
The planned share issue now looks likely to occur in September/October and Sheepshanks says it is critical that supporters invest, a requirement of the CVA proposal agreed to by creditors in May: "It is absolutely crucial going forward that the supporters of the club should have the opportunity to invest and become shareholders, so Ipswich Town genuinely becomes the jewel of the community, because it is owned by the community at large.
"This club is such a rarity and is so important to so many people, be it on a personal basis or to the local economy, that it is fundamental that an awful lot of people share in the ownership.”
Sheepshanks hopes to raise a similar figure to the £2.2 million Norwich's similar issue brought in, however he says that at the moment he is erring on the side of caution.
Of the unsecured creditors, those perhaps hit worst by the club's recent financial difficulties, Sheepshanks hopes that a rapid return to the Premiership will help net them a 20p in the pound rather than the 5p they receive if the Blues remain in Division One.
After relegation in 1995 Sheepshanks laid out a five-year plan in which Town would get back to the Premiership and be challenging for Europe. Now he is looking at promotion as a shorter term aim: "Back then when we started we were not a Premiership club in any shape or form but now it is entirely realistic for me to say we can make a swift return to the Premiership.”