FAN’S VIEW 23/24 – NO.15: WYCOMBE AT HOME

OXFORD UNITED 2 WYCOMBE WANDERERS 2

The performance of referee Seb Stockbridge merits a whole FV of its own. Best to try and unpick that first then analyse the performance of the boys in yellow.

When Stockbridge’s name was read out there were groans. I commented to a couple of guys sat to my left that he wasn’t very good. Something of an understatement. Or was it?

The worst ever? We’ve had Trevor Kettle and others.

It’s easy to get caught up in the moment. It’s easy to forget we’re biased football fans. One bad decision in our eyes and then he can get nothing right.

Most yellows were outraged at SS but there was one man who rang the Radio Oxford phone in afterwards claiming Stockbridge was okay and couldn’t be blamed for us not winning. Just because we couldn’t lay everything at his door doesn’t mean that he didn’t have a shocker. There was soon an incredulous counter view from Tim R suggesting the previous caller must be on drugs.

My nephew too had not put Stockbridge into the utterly dire category which is where I had dumped him. I was still seething when we were discussing it much later in the evening.

I’ve written the last two FVs without watching any replays and had intended to do the same here for time saving reasons but that would be quite wrong without looking at each penalty incident – and more – again. So what I’ve decided to do is first say it as I saw it on the day and then watch it back when I hope I’m man enough if need be to hold my hand up and say “yes, he was right after all.”

Penalty number one to make it 1-1. Marcus McGuane slipped and the ball hit his hand/arm. Nothing deliberate but under the current laws and guidance that’s a penalty. However the same thing happened in the first half when a Wycombe player did exactly what MM did and nothing was given. Inconsistent, unfair, unforgiveable.

Penalty number two to make it 1-2. I didn’t even consider this to be a penalty until the whistle was blown and SS pointed to the spot. The Wycombe man had hit the ball past James Beadle and it was going wide. A young man near us even went as far as saying JB pulled his arms away.

Penalty number three to make it 2-2. By now I had no idea to be honest. Some around me thought nailed on pen, others said no way it was a total dive by Mark Harris.

For all this, the incident that got my dander rising the highest was Stockbridge’s ludicrously embarrassing blowing of the whistle when Harris was facing just keeper Max Stryjek in the first half and the score line looking likely to become 2-0. Play the advantage? He did in that he ensured there was a huge benefit to the team that had committed the foul just outside the area. Moronic tosser. People like him should not be anywhere near a football ground on match days. But hey, without referees there would be no game. True, but officials like him are ruining the game. They make it a lottery.

So, did we deserve to win and would we have done so if we’d had a better quality ref?

I would say no but it has been pointed out to me that Stockbridge did really affect our mind set. We must have thought that fate in the form of a man in black was conspiring against us and whatever happened we were never going to win. Perhaps even he thought he’d gone too far and to give the illusion of some kind of balance, decided we should be given the chance of a point in added time.

That a not match fit Cameron Brannagan stepped up fearlessly to convert bodes well for the future. He has been sorely missed. We lost at Wigan without him and before that dropped two other home points when he was also absent. With CB fully fit and on top of his game we’re a different team.

Even though we’re the third highest scorers in L1 and just 14 games in have already had 12 different players score for us, I have worries about our goal scoring. I’m repeating here but I don’t know any fans who think Mark Harris is the answer as a prolific centre-forward and Gatlin O’Donkor certainly isn’t. Harris had a decent game here and put in a real shift. He makes some intelligent runs but doesn’t seem to have the presence to truly worry centre-halves week in week out. For much of this game it looked like that to me.

We therefore need to share the goals around which we clearly have been doing but a man in Greg Leigh’s position isn’t going to maintain the strike rate he’s been on nor am I confident that the others will keep chipping in as they have done. The better we play though the more chances created and more goals for everyone. There’s no pretending we’ve played as well in the last three games as we did when we were on that fantastic winning run even if the luck did go our way at times during that spell.

As a midfielder of whatever style I find it almost impossible to believe that in nearly 200 starts in English football Josh McEachran has only scored once. Marcus McGuane has started 63 times for us and come on as sub on 25 occasions but has yet to register. How is this possible? If these two are not delivering others will have to do a bit more than their fair share in this department.

Marcus Browne and Kyle Edwards, who are still weeks away with hamstring problems, are not known for scoring many goals.

Unsurprisingly I never got the feeling that we were going to score a bucket load of goals in this. For the most part when we had the ball it was a case of keeping it reasonably well but without genuine zip and forward incision. The first time we did this we scored, Ruben Rodrigues finishing MM’s cut back really well.

That was the only one we were to get from open play. Harris missed a few and Bodin put a header wide in the first half. In the second our shooting had no venom in it. “Back pass” I heard said once.

Once more we witness the skills of McGuane and Rodrigues, sublime at times, particularly the latter. They seem to glide about when on song and make it look so easy but there are a few moments when they seem to think they have more time than they do and make us look a touch vulnerable. McGuane’s shielding of the ball, which is usually very good, saw him dispossessed in this encounter. These things can cost you.

Back to Stockbridge and having now seen the contentious incidents back with the benefit of slow motion I’ll go again.

The ball definitely hit McGuane’s hand but we knew that already. The ball definitely hit the Wycombe defender’s hand in an almost similar situation. He favoured Wycombe.

I did note that we seemed to be slipping over more than the visitors. Did we have the correct footwear on with the correct studs for such wet conditions?

As for the second penalty I’m not sure but I can see why it was given.

Our penalty I think was the correct decision but not quite 100%.

So those two probably even themselves out.

In the non playing of the advantage incident, when Stockbridge’s whistle went Harris was just taking the ball on the very edge of the area and his next touch would have been a shot. This favoured Wycombe. The iFollow commentators called it “dreadful officiating”.

So I stand by my original opinion of Stockbridge. There’s no excuses for his behaviour. I think he’s a ******* *******, a ******* ****, etc etc. (Fill in as you feel appropriate).

I will say that being in the crowd for something as unjust as this gets the atmosphere going, confirms you are alive and with the angry energy of someone 40 years younger. My nephew was in the North stand and he thought the noise when we made it 2-2 in the 96^th minute was as loud as he had heard in many a long day.

Justice? That wasn’t justice. If we had made the score 3-2 that would have been justice.

When a mild mannered man like Liam Manning gets a red card you know something is very wrong.

I’ve changed my mind – we did deserve to win this. If we’d had an even handed referee we would have.

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I was chatting to mates in the Royal Blenheim at lunch time and then to fans at the Kassam as OxVox were canvassing for signatures to the “three point pledge”

• When travelling to the Triangle, I pledge to leave the car at home and use public transport
• When travelling to the Triangle, if it’s not possible to use public transport, I pledge to car share to reduce car use
• When travelling to the Triangle, if I have to use the car, I pledge to park only in designated car parks

It’s interesting talking to people. Not having a go at anyone but …. there were some who I would have expected to have signed but had not yet done so. There were some who were not aware of the pledge and some who were wearing our colours and clearly fans who still didn’t have much of a clue. “It’s all done now isn’t it”?

It’s far from done. There’s a lot more doing needs to be done. Numbers are important. Politicians want to keep their seats.

I also had some interesting responses when I approached fans. Me: “you are an Oxford fan aren’t you?” Response: “no I’m a Wigan fan” who then explained why he was here. The next bloke was an Oxford fan but said,: “no good to me, I’m moving to Tenerife next week.”

Spread the word. The link for the pledge is https://s.surveyplanet.com/vwpgk611

One of the people I came across walking past the OxVox table. Long lost friend ZZ Horseman.
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Wycombe Financial Analysis by Colin Barson

I normally start with an analysis of our opposition’s current financial position, using the same set of data each time to benchmark each club, which I then present in the table that you will see below. Much, but not all, of this information comes from the respective club’s accounts, as published at Companies House. If you cast your eyes at the table now you will see the letters N/A appearing in nearly every category. In this instance it means Not Available, as Wycombe publish only the briefest of accounts possible, with little to no additional information within them. These are commonly known as Small Company Accounts, something that I find particularly apt when it comes to our neighbours along the M40, as it describes their mentality perfectly. They seem to have a permanent chip on their shoulders (particularly when it comes to us), a kind of small man syndrome.

Anyway, let’s have a look at what is available regarding their current finances, before I go on to look at their ownership situation. There is no turnover nor expenditure to analyse, never mind the usual breakdown of these, which gives us some of the interesting stuff regarding wages etc. Instead we only have attendances, profit or loss, cash at bank, and equity to examine. Their attendances last season put them 20^th out of 24 and their attendances so far this season are nearly 1,000 down, although they’re still 20^th of 24. They lost nearly £2.5m in the year ended 30 June 2022, leaving them with a negative equity of nearly £1.5m, 15^th of 22, and 11^th of 22 respectively. The really scary figure though is their cash at bank, a paltry £7,951. This puts them firmly 22^nd out of 22 and to add some context, the average cash at bank of League One clubs was just over £1.4m. Now cash at bank is only a snapshot figure, and it refers to the bank balance on the last day of the financial year. But, having run companies, it is a figure that you know people will look at, and you would normally manage your finances in such a way that the figure presented wasn’t too alarming. To get to the end of the year with only £7,951 showing in the bank sends alarm bells ringing, and it tells me this is a company being run on the edge. It’s not as if they are up to date with all of their bills either, as they have total creditors of £3.7m.

This intrigued me enough to look back further, and try to see if this is an isolated case. Notwithstanding that Wycombe don’t provide much information, at least what they do provide has been consistent through the years, so I was able to see a clear pattern of how they’ve been run over the last few years. Generally they haven’t had much cash in the bank and at year end have normally had about £100,000. There were two exceptions to this. One was Y/E 2020 when they finished the year with £2.2m in the bank. This was the first Covid year, the year when they stole our promotion at an empty Wembley (not that I’m bitter), and although they had cash in the bank they had creditors of £4.9m, one of whom was HMRC to the tune of £1.16m. Their normal quarterly HMRC bill has historically been about £250,000. This means they made a conscious decision not to pay their HMRC liabilities, even though they had cash in the bank to do so. It was also the year where they were taken over by the Couhig family (more of them in a bit) and there had been two share issues during the year, to facilitate the takeover and these raised £1.15m. The other year when they had a higher final bank balance was the following year, 2021. They ended that year with £3.6m in the bank and made a profit of £3.2m, which tells me that they didn’t greatly increase their expenditure during their solitary year in the Championship, but instead banked the extra TV money (Championship clubs got about £5m more, per club, that season than League One clubs).

So, in summary, they appear to have been run rather frugally over the years, and have never had any money apart from when they had their promotion windfall.

Now onto their ownership. Until February 2020 Wycombe were fan owned, with the Wycombe Wanderers Supporters Group Limited being in control. The fans’ trust own the ground through the Frank Adams Legacy Limited, a subsidiary of it. In February 2020, after struggling to do any more than tread water, the trust decided to sell 75% of its shareholding to Rob and Missy Couhig. Rob Couhig is a 74 year old American lawyer and the £1.15m he paid for the share issue mentioned above means the club was valued at about £1.5m. The purchase was carried out through Couhig’s purchasing vehicle Feliciana EFL Limited, a company registered at Companies House in the UK, and controlled by Feliciana LLP, a company registered in Louisiana, USA and controlled by Rob Couhig. I find Feliciana a very strange name for a company, and I believe it has links to the Spanish/Latin word for happy, but I can’t help thinking of the word fellatio every time I see it!

Rob Couhig put his nephew Peter Couhig in place as his UK man. I’ll come straight out and say it, but I don’t like him. I have found him brash and disrespectful. The way he conducted himself at Wembley when they beat us left a sour taste with many at the club. I’m not a great suit and tie man, but until this season the dress code in the Boardroom at Oxford United has always been suit and tie for gentlemen. I tolerated it, and conformed, even though I found it a bit outdated, as it’s all about respecting convention. When we played Newcastle in the FA Cup replay, I got talking to Mike Ashley, and he was wearing a suit and tie. I mentioned this to him, as he was famous for always wearing an open necked shirt, and his reply was this: “Yes, I hate wearing a tie, but this is your boardroom, and your rules, so who the f*** am I to turn up wearing whatever I like!” So when we played Wycombe at the Kassam, guess what Pete Couhig turns up wearing? A bloody polo shirt and baseball cap!!! Disrespectful American prick. If it’s good enough for Mike Ashley, it should be good enough for him. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t have let him in, as all visitors are advised, in advance, of the Boardroom dress code.

OK, rant over, and back to Wycombe’s ownership. As we’ve seen the Couhigs banked the promotion money (not personally obviously) and then used it to run the club. Wycombe have lost money every year bar that one year and continue to do so. The Couhigs don’t appear to be fabulously wealthy and have made noises about wanting to get out already. Apart from the initial investment it’s unclear whether they’ve invested any of their own money into the club?

Earlier this year the supporters’ trust had their shareholding in the club diluted from 25% to 10%, leaving the Couhigs, through Feliciana EFL Limited with 90 %. It may exist, but I can’t find any record of cash changing hands in this transaction in favour of the trust, other than a share issue that would place the money in the club, which the Couhigs now own a larger share of.

Subsequent to that there has been another interesting development. In early October a charge was registered at Companies House by Feliciana EFL Limited in favour of a Mikhail Lomtadze, using all land, assets, and other assignments as security. In other words, Feliciana have borrowed money from Mr Lomtadze using the club and stadium (that they’ve just upped their stake in to 90%) as security. It doesn’t specify the amount, but these things rarely do. Mikhail Lomtadze is a 48 year-old Georgian billionaire, who has made most of his money in the wild west financial world of Kazakhstan and Russia. He is CEO and co-founder of Kaspi Bank and sits on the board of certain Russian financial companies.

The question is, why has Feliciana borrowed this money from Lomtadze, in his name, rather than from Kaspi Bank? Is it the precursor to a sell off by the Couhigs? What happens if Feliciana/Wycombe default on their repayments? Does he get hold of the stadium somehow, as it’s the biggest asset? Why is a Georgian billionaire with connections to Kazakhstan and Russia bothering to do this, and in his own name too? If he wanted to just buy the club, I’m sure he could, without the need for all of this. Perhaps it’s the appeal of the world-famous Wycombe name? If he wanted to buy a club there are lots of better candidates out there, so it’s very strange. Oh and there has been no statement of any kind from Wycombe on the matter.

Interesting times ahead I think.