The BTSC and easyfundraising.org.uk

I'm really pleased to report that the folks at easyfundraising.org have approved the Barry Town Supporters Committee (BTSC) account details, and so raising funds for the BTSC couldn't be easier!

Here's some blurb from easyfundraising.org;

"We provide a FREE service where you can shop with your favourite online stores and at no extra cost raise funds for any charity, good cause or group you choose to support. You still shop directly with each retailer as you would normally, but simply by using the links from our site first, each purchase you make will generate a cashback donation to the cause you wish to support.

For example, spend £25 with WHSmith on Books and 2.5% will be donated. You will have raised £0.63, at no extra cost to your purchase. Make any purchase from Amazon and 2.5% will be donated. Insure your car with Aviva and raise £30.00, or purchase a mobile phone from O2 and earn £17.50, and so on.

You can shop with 2000+ Brand Name retailers and to raise funds you just use the links from our site first - it's that simple!

If you ALREADY shop online, why not help good causes at no extra cost from purchases you would make anyway."

So, what's the delay?  Please go to the BTSC's specific easyfundraising address 
http://www.easyfundraising.org.uk/causes/btsc and do all your online shopping from there.

Your page will look a little like;

The service is also used by local causes such as Wales Millennium Centre, Barry Arts Centre, Barry Wanderers Cricket Club, and the Cardiff City Supporters Trust.

For further details, please go to the site if you need convincing; http://www.easyfundraising.org.uk/causes/btsc 

I'd like to thank Ashford Town (Middlesex) FC for their assistance and support.  Thanks, fellahs.

Help fund the football

We've been receiving regular enquiries of how you can financially help the #SaveBarryTownFC campaign that has been running on Twitter.  Everyone associated with the campaign sincerely thank you for this.

We do not yet have the facility to have a credit card payment function, but what we can offer, for now, is the bank account details of the Barry Town Supporters Committee (BTSC). 

This is a registered company (Companies House Co. No. 06796885), and is normally used to assist in pitch rental and handling money for the BTSC's Lottery.

However, if you'd like to make any kind of monetry donation, it would be sincerely welcome.  Ideally, we'd love to raise enough to keep Barry Town AFC playing on the hallowed Jenner Park pitch!

Account details:
Barry Town Supporters Committee
Account Number: 61537938
Sort Code: 400915
Bank details: HSBC, Barry, Vale of Glamorgan.

If you'd like to send a cheque, please make them payable to 'Barry Town Supporters Committee', and send them to this address;

CLIFTON HOUSE
FOUR ELMS ROAD
CARDIFF
UNITED KINGDOM
CF24 1LE

Thanks again!

Happy Birthday, Bob!

A review of the official sales-pitch

Okay, so we've read the statement.  But it hides a painful truth.  Chairman Stuart Lovering has intentions to turn the Barry Town clubhouse, the Jenner Rooms, into a cocktail bar and restaurant.  Do away with the burden of football which has disinterested him since relegation in 2004, and concentrate on a bar with steady takings at the till.  The 100 year old football club can be done away with.  Fuck it.  Fuck you.  Fuck us.

As a business, fair enough.  But this is a FOOTBALL CLUB.  It has 100 years behind it, and it will die in 6 weeks unless it can be prized from the grip of the current chairman.

He has previously stated, in a matchday programme of all places just a few weeks back, that this could make him several thousands pounds per week.  He has asked supporters, via the matchday programme, to 'invest' in this opportunity.

The matchday programme is there to give football news to the long suffering supporters.  To give encouragement and backing to the players - who play for NOTHING.  The matchday programme should offer emotional investment in the football club, not a cocktail bar.

The recently released advert from Barry Town initmates that, without a buyer, the club will no longer support the Welsh League side.  I don't doubt it.  However, it will continue to run youth sides and adult sides at a lower level.

The current Barry Town Youth team is completely self-funding.  It is not run by the current owner.  It pays all expenses through player subs etc.  It too plays at Jenner Park.  It pays the rent.  Do not be tricked by the impression that there is a one-club ethos at Barry Town.  There isn't.

No, what exists, at a youth level, are people doing work for NOTHING to provide football for the kids proud enough to say they play for Barry Town.

Pride, that's what it's about.

I see no guarantee in this advert that ANY football will exist at Jenner Park, the home of senior football in Barry since 1913.

The advert also threatens that without a buyer, the senior side will fold.  That's like saying 'buy my house, or I'll burn the roof'.  A prospective buyer will not come in because the owner is threatening to pull the plug.

The owner knows full well that the threat is aimed at the weary fans, used to the fact that this BULLSHIT has been happening almost every year since the current owner came in.

Shortly, I will be listing, chronologically, every single threat to the existence of the club that has ever made it into the public domain.  This will not be an invention on my behalf.  It will be a simple listing, in chronological order, every threat of football extinction at Barry Town that has appeared in the press.

Aside from the fact that the advert skirts around the fact that the owner has publically stated his desire to develop a cocktail bar at the club, one is confused as WHY the first team is being pulled out of the League when there is, apparently, according to the adverts own figures, profits to be made at the football club.

So, let me get this straight?  I can't afford the football, i'm pulling the plug.  If you're interested in buying it though, it DOES make money.

It's all smoke and mirrors.  Just somebody please come in with the money, and save us from this utter utter lunacy.

Fans of my Fathers. Whingers, 90 years ago.

Barry Dock News – August 27, 1920

Football Gossip by “Sphere”

No matter where we go, we shall always find those undesirables who are never satisfied, and whose aim in life seems to be to make everyone else dissatisfied. There were quite a number of these at Jenner Park on Saturday last, at the final trial match in connection with Barry AFC.

It was during the half-time interval that they made themselves most obnoxious, when everyone had to hear their opinions upon the abilities, or the short comings, of this player or that, opinions which no one wanted, and which everyone could have very well done without.

It would be beneficial both to team and spectators if these “boobs” would go
away and play marbles, or some other game more suited to them than football.

Greens 2 Clarets 0
Reynolds
Cowie (pen)

Kev, are you out there?

Now, this may be a little left-field, but I’m going to try it. 


8 years ago – in case you didn’t know – Barry Town went bust with, what, over £800,000 worth of debt?  The majority of which was owed to HM Customs and Revenue.   We’d been in debt for a while, of course.  I believe it was over £200,000 by the time Paula O’Halloran got the club off her hands.  But this was now an astonishing new level of debt.


It was a sticky situation.  It didn’t look great for Fash at the time, considering he came in and was meant to be our lord and saviour.  We’d had a bunch of problems for a while, so when Fash came in the outlook was pretty bright.  I think he was associated with us for about 6 months before the bubble was stretched too far.


Unfortunately, he never really got his fee under the table.  By the time he’d brought in Adebayo Akinfenwa and Abiodun Baruwa in the New Year in order to aid manager Kenny Brown take an unprecedented Treble Double of WPL titles and Welsh Cups, he was off in the jungle on some TV show.  He never did find Taribo West for us. 


He came out of that show, and the shit really hit the fan(s).  Our pre-Champions League  preparation in summer 2003 was a game against Barnstaple Town (wow, we’d take that nowadays!), and an infamously slovenly game against some touring Frenchmen which has become known as the ‘jumpers for goalposts’ game.  An absolute bloody shambles.  But there were reasons.


Nobody liked us.  There was an ugly end to the 2002-03 season after an off-field spat with Bangor City – not handled well by the club, but then, not handled well by them either.  The players didn’t really like us.  They loved Barry Town, yes, but they loved it more when their pay-check arrived.  Quite often, it didn’t.


The council really hated us.  Man, they wanted us out of Jenner Park even before the Champions League game.  Personally, I thought that was a disgrace.  Barry Town Football Club was the best thing that had happened to the town since the docks themselves were chiselled out of the Glamorgan coastline.  With maybe Butlin’s in-between.  European football in Barry, and the council wanted us out?  Poor.  All the world’s a stage, and the VoGons  wanted to close the curtains.  What was it, £3,000 for one fixture they wanted?  Fash was exasperated by their stance, but perhaps he was already preparing an exit strategy.


Not long after the heroic exit (another one!) from Europe, matters quickly came to a head.  Fash was in the national newspapers for something entirely different, and it was in everybody’s best interests that he left.  He did.  Sharpish.  This didn’t look good for Fash or Barry Town, and what later transpired at the club seemed to get thrown at Fash.  Now, I’m no Fash apologist, but I have it on good authority that sum that he put into Barry Town at the beginning, was all that he took out at the end.  And boy, what an end.


A supporter-run Steering Committee was established and everybody were chasing their tails.  Stories of bailiffs taking the furniture were rife.  Stories of the bailiffs not getting any answer at the club in order to take more furniture away were even more prevalent.  Fortunately, the fabulous framed photos of the O’Hallorans with all that booty earned in the 1993-94 season was rescued before that too disappeared.


Who was watching telly when Jamie Morallee was pictured dramatically shaking the locked Jenner Park gates for the benefit of the BBC Wales TV cameras?  All beamed live across Wales.  Oh, the humiliation.  I’m sure I heard one of the players say “all my stuff’s in there” which actually made me laugh at the time.  The bailiff’s had probably made that disappear as well.


But the biggest disappearance was that of Kevin Green.  What happened to him?  It was if the hullabaloo surrounding Fash’s exit was the perfect smoke-screen for Green’s quick exit stage left.  Nobody appeared to have given a shit.  There was no man-hunt, no comb-over detection vans going around – nothing.  The last I heard, he had some kind of holiday company selling trips to the Greek islands or somewhere.    


But out of the complete and utter misery of that period in 2003 (it actually got far FAR worse), Kevin Green appears to be the only one untarnished financially or emotionally by the whole thing.  I’d love to hear his side of the story.  I only bring this up now, because I see from my stats sheet that I’m getting hits from Greece.


It can’t be, can it?


Is that you, Kevin? Are you with Taribo West?

Gaverfordwest

I'm sorry, Gav.  We love ya!

Classic Barry Town clips now available ONLINE!

You may not know this, but classic Barry Town clips are now available to watch online, via YouTube.

One industrious supporter has lovingly and painstakingly uploaded clips from down the years after trawling through the archives for weeks on end.

All the clips are to be found at http://www.youtube.com/user/BarryTownSupporters

And keep going back, because it's constantly being updated.  Word on the street is that the Barry Town vs FK Vardar Skopje game is being readied by the mysterious Webmaster as we speak.

Barry Town ruined his life, and he can't say it didn't, because it did.

The Barry Town Centenary

Yes, Barry Town is just about 18 months away from celebrating 100 years of football.  Or, about 90 years of ruined lives and sporting aspirations, depending on how grumpy you are from one day to the next.

A lot of literature has the year the club was formed as 1912.  In fact, all of the literature that I've seen quotes a date of 1912.  Well, this is down to the fact that the company that first created the football club was incorporated in 1912. 

Barry Town's first game came some time later, as part of the 1913-14 season where The Linnets were placed in the Southern League and the Welsh League.  For me, our Centenary therefore should come in the 2013-14 season.  Let's celebrate the football - not the company.

Any numpty can own a company, the fans own the football.  2013 it is, then.  See you there?