Saturdays defeat at Donny means the Rams have now lost 4 of their last 5 league games and seem to have hit the skids at exactly the wrong time. Whilst performances (Reading aside) have not been as bad as the points return suggests, there is certainly a nagging worry that we could ‘do a Leicester’.

With two more games next week, the picture will no doubt change constantly right to the wire. So this week let’s concern ourselves with Peter Gadsby’s surprise bid to buy the club, announced last Thursday.

First things first, Peter Gadsby is a 110% true Rams fan who regularly appears in the Sunday Times Rich list and has twice played a key role in Derby County history. Namely masterminding the move from the Baseball ground to Pride Park; then heading up the local consortium which wrestled the club away from the infamous three Amigos, before leading us back into the Premier league at the first attempt.  In simple terms, he loves the club, he’s loaded & he’s got significant positive form.   

On Thursday morning, Gadsby was in the Radio Derby studios at 7am to personally launch his bid to the public with a live interview. I listened with interest to his rationale.

The crux of his argument seems to be that our American owners are not investing in the playing squad whilst bringing in significant revenue from various sources (parachute payments, catering and season tickets were 3 he mentioned). He did however state that there was plenty of money in management fees going back to the USA. With our recent history of corrupt custodians (3 recent directors are in jail), the suggestion that funds are not all going back to the club is an emotive one.     

Reading all of this independently, you’d be forgiven for thinking the Rams were again on the cusp of some sort of financial meltdown, bought on by chronic mismanagement. Yet according to a chart I saw in the Observer around a month ago, we’re the 3^rd most financially sound club in the Championship. It’s also well reported that our debt has been cut from around £31m to around £16m in the last 2 years. Perhaps that’s where some of the money has gone?

Gadsby said that the fans ultimately decide who they want to run their club and he blatantly name checked the fan power inspired ousting of Robert Maxwell & the aforementioned 3 amigos. Whilst as a statement this is probably true, most Rams fans I know actually think ‘the Americans’ are doing quite a good job. Sure we all want Nigel to have £10m to burn, but half the Premier league have got a spending freeze we’re not exactly on our own in being prudent. There’s also a slightly more controversial angle you could take in that you may not want to give significant funds to an ex non league manager in his first season, until he has proven himself in the transfer market.

I personally found the £5m transfer kitty promise slightly patronising. Sure, Nigel could do some major damage with those kind of funds. But I just felt the intimated “back me and we give Nigel funds” was a bit like saying to your kids, “be good at your grandma’s and you can have some sweets”.

The final part of Gadsby’s pitch was to hold up his friend Peter Coates at Stoke as an example of what he was trying to achieve by re-buying the club back from foreign ownership. Whilst Coates & Tony Pulis have done an astonishing job at Stoke, lets not forget they went down to League 1 before they started going up. In addition, if Peter Gadsby doesn’t like loan signings then I suggest he doesn’t check how many Stoke made in their promotion season.

As has been well reported, the bid has been rejected and Tom Glick has pointed out a few discrepancies himself, particularly in respect of the early bird season ticket offer which was definitely around before the current administration. Glick also fought fire with fire by claiming the 2007 transfers were funded by future parachute payments. A better retort would have been to point out that Silly allegedly asked for Kenwyne Jones, Matthew Etherington & Carlton Cole and got Rob Earnshaw, Eddie Lewis and Kenny Miller (to be fair in the promotion year, the board did land all of Silly’s targets but you get the point).

On the pitch, this has been a real hard slog of a season which may still have a very nasty sting in the tail. However what we do now have at DCFC is stability on and off the pitch, something we’ve not had since the days of Lionel Pickering and Jim Smith.

Perhaps Peter Gadsby genuinely thinks someone is doing wrong by the club? Perhaps he thinks he can simply do things better & quicker? Perhaps he is motivated by the significant property development opportunities around the ground?  Who knows? One thing is for sure; this story is far from over but most Rams fans will need a lot more justification before we back yet another upheaval at our club.