Morecambe Football Club. Totally Unofficial Review of the Season. 2025-2026. Part One. From Limbo to Jimbo.
Writing a Review of the Season for any football club should be a relatively straightforward task.
You look at where the club started; then you look at where it finished.
Next, you consider factors which affected whatever happened on the way: good; bad or indifferent.
Factors such as the ownership; the Manager and the players.
Simple as that.
But that hasn’t been an option in the Soap Opera (more about this in Part Two) which has been Morecambe FC for the last few years.
And in the last twelve months alone, if you tried to invent the reality of what has befallen our beloved club, nobody would believe you.
But a brush with the Grim Reaper; protracted brinksmanship concerning other people’s livelihoods – with the club‘s future used as a constant bargaining tool by the utterly conscienceless former owner – was just the start of things.
As we shall see, blunder after blunder off the field by the new ones then followed this.
On it, things have been even worse. Four Managers – the first one summarily dismissed; the second the worst appointment the club had ever made; the third a man who never had a chance to turn a ship heading for the National League North iceberg away from it and a fourth one as yet untested.
The result: relegation for the third time in four years.
Next season, the Shrimps face the reality of playing in a regional league for the first time in over thirty years. Morecambe FC’s fine record of steady progress upwards for the previous century went pop three years ago: and it had been a headlong plummet towards disaster ever since.
You couldn’t make it up: if you suggested some of the things which have happened to Morecambe Football Club as the basis for a new Soap Opera (more about this later too), they would be turned-down as far too fanciful.
This time last year, the club was in limbo. Owner Jason Whittingham was playing very selfish games which created real stress for countless other people about whom he clearly cared not a jot.
The Panjab Warriors were trying to buy Morecambe FC only to be constantly frustrated and it looked as if a club which had existed for 105 years was going to fold altogether.
Indeed, the supporters’ association – the Shrimps Trust – was actively planning for exactly such a scenario. A new club was expected to start next season as a member of the lowest tier of English football in this part of the country: The North-West Counties League, First Division which includes clubs like Sandbach United; Foley Meir and Wolverhampton Casuals.
No disrespect intended (we were in the same boat as them at one time, however long ago and Hats Off to their supporters) – but have you heard of even one of them? I hadn’t…
So – in a desperate search for positives this time around, let’s first of all welcome the fact that this Doomsday Scenario did not come about.
We will start next season in the National League North – four steps higher than we would have been in the Football Pyramid than The North-West Counties League First Division, in which we could have been starting all over again as new members. Its Premier Division and the two Northern Premier League divisions above it will still be cushioning us from where we so easily might have found ourselves next term.
This is not something to be sniffed at: old rivals Macclesfield ended up with this Doomsday Scenario six years ago and have had to fight for regular promotions ever since only to be meeting us on equal terms next season.
We must also appreciate the fact that we still have a ground to play at: the new club could have found itself playing its home games at Trimpell; The College – or even on the beach. And our home ground – with the promotion of AFC Fylde into our former place in the National League – will be the best in the division.
Finally – the continuity of a club which could have gone out of existence altogether remains unaffected. We are not FC Halifax; AFC Wimbledon; Bury; Hereford FC; Darlington; Scarborough Athletic – even Accrington Stanley 1968 – or any of the many other clubs in England and Wales (think of Newport County, for instance) which have had to completely re-invent themselves after the total collapse of their original incarnation.
But back to twelve months ago. Without any insider input from people involved in the on-going saga, I tried to make sense of a scenario which simply seemed to get worse week by week at the time. You can find these entries on this blog – there are far too many to reference here.
What I wrote (in the immortal words of Ernie Wise) is certainly not the whole story of what actually happened, nor was it the end of the shenanigans which would continue to shake the club to its foundations once the detested Mr Whittingham and his shambolic Bond Group finally went.
Good riddance to them. Absolutely Good Riddance.
Future generations of Morecambe fans will join supporters of Worcester Warriors Premiership Rugby Union club to spit on this man’s grave.
Parasite. Leech. Liar. Scumbag. Moron. Ultimate Screw-Up.
Libel laws stop me from saying what I suspect we all think about this individual so I need to be careful what I say specifically about him. So I will limit my own general thoughts to these. It seems to me that there are certainly far better people in prison for doing a lot less harm than some so-called `businessmen’ I can think of…
Brazilian and lots of other Dodgy Dealers have aspired – and sometimes actually succeeded – in getting their scabrous hands on Morecambe FC even before Whittingham did. But he was probably worse than any of them: single-handedly, this man brought our club to its knees as the Usual Suspects – the English Football League being right at the top of the list – stood by, twiddled their thumbs – and just let it happen. The EFL’s “Right and Proper” Test? They’re ‘avin a larf!…
We as fans would have hoped that the melodrama which has surrounded our club ever since we moved from Christie Park would finally stop with the disappearance of Whittingham and his scurvy crew.
Really alarmingly, though, since the final throw of these chancers, the melodrama that has been Morecambe FC for longer than most of us can remember has continued unabated.
Continual mini-crises seem to be endless as far as Morecambe FC and the new ownership- Panjab Warriors – is concerned.
Serious doubts about them had been raised by people who know what they are talking about long before they finally took over. You can read some of these concerns here:
These concerns persist: where does the money they use to keep the club afloat actually come from? Is it all borrowed? If so, what happens when the loans are called-in?
So, even before the new Panjab dawn broke, we all had good reason to doubt that we had finally got a safe pair of hands on our club at last. Time would tell if we had jumped out of the frying pan into the fire.
The overnight disappearance of the Warriors’ new Director of Communications because of pressure from HM Treasury about his alleged ties with ‘terrorist’ groups in India was not a good start. This was not only one early domestic embarrassment for the club; it was an event of potentially international significance.
Interestingly, as the internet was awash with rumours of gun-running in faraway places, the rest of Gurpreet Singh Rehal’s former mates in the Panjab Warriors disowned him with almost indecent haste.
In a statement worthy of the “Thought Police” which George Orwell once wrote about, the Warriors went on to explain why they had appointed their fellow-Sikh – and very naughty boy Gurpreet – in the first place.
Was he best qualified?
Most fluent in English?
More experienced in media matters than anyone else?
No.
He simply lived closest to the ground.
Please pull the other one…
Even if you accept this absolutely ludicrous explanation, you have to ask yourself: was this `terrorist’ accusation a genuine shock?
When all is said and done, the Panjab Warriors put him in place and presumably knew him – didn’t they?
Or was what they said when he was rumbled by the authorities merely a more-or-less plausible denial?
The wholesale sackings of key figures within the club which ensued was followed by resignations of significant members of the Board: the joint former Co-Chairmen first, followed by the previous – and very influential – Chair of the Shrimps Trust herself.
Rod Taylor and Graham Howse have told us why they left. Tarnia Elsworth hasn’t.
Then – not just one but two further embargoes on the club were imposed by the National League.
The Warriors then appointed a man with an extremely dubious past to play a key role at Morecambe FC:
These fiascos were followed by threats of Winding-Up Orders over unpaid bills owed to contractors and the local College whose facilities the Shrimps use. They were apparently quickly settled but a lingering worry was why they had raised their ugly heads in the first place.
The list of business blunders by the Panjab Warriors is endless – and there is no guarantee that other ghosts from the past won’t come back to bite the club where it hurts in the future. Indeed, since I first started writing this article, yet another Winding-Up Petition was served on the club, according to the website on or around the fifth of May 2026. It is over a £56,000 debt on this occasion.
As always, the Warriors blame the former owner for this. So what happened to their `due diligence’ when they took over? Did they not look at the Bond Group’s liabilities? If not – why not? If so – why does this keep happening? What other nasty shocks are still waiting in the wings? Will this sort of nonsense ever stop? If you want, you can read Beyond Radio’s succinct take on thisabout particular dispute from both parties’ points of view here:
Taking all these incidents together, ‘Soap Opera’ is exactly the right expression to describe what has happened and I think that the only way to get your head around what has happened and stay sane is to parody the whole thing.
Which I have done.
More about this in Part Two…
So – for what it’s worth – this is my take on what has happened to our club this term. There are other interpretations of the final outcome and how we got there and I’m going to look at one of them in the interests of fairness in due course. The reality – as is usually the case in situations like these – probably lies somewhere between the two.
One indisputable fact is that the Panjab Warriors finally took control of our club last year. Who they are; why they did it and what their actual purpose – as far as Morecambe FC is concerned – was and remains completely opaque. The now hastily departed Director of Communications used to constantly bleat on about the importance of ‘community’ to the ownership – until he suddenly wasn’t part of it anymore.
But whose community was this? Morecambe’s? The Sikh community in general? Britain’s? India’s? The Punjab’s? Any or all of these?
As with so many other things the Panjab Warriors have said or posted or hinted at, the answer is far from clear.
Maybe they don’t know themselves. But if ever they do, it would be nice – for all of us who have supported the club for years before they appeared on the scene – to be let into this particular secret…
Moving on, what can we safely say about the season just ended? We can start by looking at the Managers.
From Limbo to Jimbo: The Managers.
Derek Adams.
The first thing the Panjab Warriors did when they finally got their hands on our club was to sack Manager Derek Adams. This has proved to be a mistake of incalculable proportions and probably the biggest error of the entire time they have been in control.
Derek had kept the club together at a time neither he; his players nor the staff were being paid. He almost single-handedly provided a continuity – and an example to everybody else in the same boat – which was vital if the club was going to survive at all.
So to reward his unpaid and unquestionably genuine loyalty to our club with The Order of the Boot was disrespectful in the extreme.
It was also, frankly, a really stupid thing to do.
I think we all know what would have happened if Derek Adams had been provided with the same sort of resources his successor was showered with after the arrival of the Warriors. Morecambe certainly wouldn’t have been relegated and there is a fair chance that we would be still competing for a place back in the EFL.
If anyone doubts this, just look at his track record since he re-joined Plymouth Argyle last November at a time they were next to the bottom of League One and had lost five of their previous six league matches. Then look at them now: on the last day of the season, only a last-minute goal by Stevenage against Wigan kept Argyle out of the Play-Offs, such was the momentum they had created since he returned to the club.
This is Derek’s take on what happened to him at Morecambe, culminating with his eventual fate last year:
“Over the time, we obviously got promotion into League One – which was a terrific achievement for the football club. I spoke to many people about that and Mark Rushton, who was my analyst, sat me down on the bus – as he liked to do to have a chat – and spoke about why did you take on the Morecambe opportunity? And I felt that I could get Morecambe into the Play-Offs. To be fair to Mark, he laughed at me. I get that because Morecambe had never been that sort of football club. My mentality was to try to change the football club from being ‘little old Morecambe’ to try and make it Morecambe Football Club and I think – over time – that I did that. I think – over time – that that changed and maybe went back the opposite way. I understand that. My role was to try and improve the football club – and I think I did. The supporter base were very, very supportive towards me throughout my time there, my staff: I had a lot of loyal people inside the football club.”
“It was my job – as the Manager – to keep the football club running. We played four games in pre-season matches. We signed nine players from the last season who were under contract but not only that, we had signed four players in that time as well but the owner; the Board wouldn’t register the players – which was strange. We had four players in the building for a two-week period who would have added to our squad. What happened then was we didn’t get paid in May; we didn’t get paid fully in June and then there was a problem because the players then had fourteen days to give notice. What I tried to do was try and keep the place together. We wanted to keep these players because I think they would have been hugely beneficial to the football club but there was other sections that didn’t want that to work because of the process of the buy-out and – all of a sudden – the buy-out took place and it went to a consortium that didn’t want to have me as the football Manager.”
“That wasn’t a nice experience because I was trying to keep the football club going; I was trying to keep the players going. I was always working for the best interests of Morecambe football club and its supporters and its players – and I did that until the day I left. I did everything in my power to try and keep the football club alive.”
“I spoke to the players on a daily basis to try and keep them updated and the news that came out was difficult at times because we couldn’t give them all the information that was required and I had to keep a group of players together that weren’t being paid. They were coming in every day to train and they trained ever so well. That was togetherness; a show of dedication to their job; a dedication to their football club and also a respect for me – that I was trying to get them through this situation and I appreciate wholeheartedly the way the football players went about that. But not only that, the supporters that came to the games; the supporters that supported me in all that time. I think that they have been hugely helpful but on that occasion, it’s difficult because I was able to try and keep that football club going: I quite easily could have turned and gone the opposite way but unfortunately for me, that is not in my nature. I’m a very loyal person and I look after people – rightly or wrongly – and I’ve done it over time: I’ve been very, very loyal. Morecambe football club – yes, I left twice but they gained substantial amounts of compensation twice for me and it was (those) – times that some supporters think I shouldn’t have moved on but you have to make decisions in your career and I thought it was the best decision at that moment in time but probably made wrong decisions along the way.”
Ashvir Singh Johhal.
This man’s name will go down in history as the worst Manager Morecambe Football Club – and possibly any other one which has ever existed – has ever endured. By a country mile.
What sort of shower of incompetents looks at Derek Adams’ CV, tears it up; pushes him out of the door and puts a complete novice like this in charge in the first place?
This decision frankly beggars belief.
Let’s look at Ash’s basic qualifications for the job:
This is a man who has never played professional football in his life.
This is a man who had never been in charge of a First Eleven anywhere on the planet previously.
This is a man whose tactical astuteness is so lacking that he only knows one way to play – and that doesn’t work.
That’s bad enough in itself.
But to employ him and do nothing as he is allowed to continually persist with a system which anyone could see was never going to be successful as his team lost game after predictable game for weeks and then months on end shows how utterly irresponsible and thus unfit for purpose Panjab Warriors were as owners of a relatively senior football club.
“Ashball” consisted of trying to play the ball out from the back; moving it quickly forwards on the rare occasions this actually happened and then – theoretically – overwhelming the opposition with the strength and intensity of our attacks.
This is wonderful in theory – Pep Guardiola would no doubt approve of it very highly. But Pep has always had multi-million pound players in his squads who possess the necessary skills to actually play this way.
We didn’t.
Almost from Week One; opposition Managers worked it out, often live on the field as they changed their formations to take advantage of our utterly rigid and wholly ineffective way of doing things.
They knew how to counter it. But so do I – you probably do too; I suspect that even the neighbour’s Labrador `Bilbo’ does: it’s not exactly Rocket Science: you press high up the field and harry the defenders trying to play-out; get the ball off them… and score. If it doesn’t work first time – just keep doing it. Because you know that your press is never going to be broken by the Morecambe goalkeeper or the defence kicking the ball long and catching you on the break: these sorts of tactics were strictly verboten by our utterly clueless Manager.
So outsmarting Morecambe and beating them was a simple process.
It became a pattern.
Truro were bottom of the division and really struggling when we arrived there right at the start of the campaign.
But what turned-out to be the worst club in the entire National League won five-nil and literally tore our ranks to pieces. If ever there was a Wake-Up call, this was it.
But it was also a sign of things to come.
Early in the season, midfielder Jake Cain admitted as such and told us the players’ heads collectively dropped every time they went behind. They knew what was inevitably going to happen next.
This, as Ash failed to face-up to the media scrutiny his predecessors were always honest enough to take-on, however difficult things were. Instead, he preferred to release absolutely cringe-worthy pre-scripted interviews to club employees where no difficult questions were ever asked, let alone addressed. It was as if Panjab Warriors – having got control of the club – were also trying to control the environment around it as well. But reality – very inconveniently for them – had a habit of intervening: in the real world, Mr Johal’s Fairyland team kept on losing.
Increasingly – despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary – he was allowed by the ownership to indulge his fantasy that his team was improving and that a lurch up the league was an inevitability.
Having no Plan B and persisting with his kamikaze policy with a squad which was clearly not physically fit was only going to end one way for the man apparently playing the role of Sikh Wunderkind for the Panjab Warriors: in relegation.
Ash told us in October that his squad would click and Morecambe would be playing ‘the best football in the division’ by November.
When he all too predictably failed to bring this frankly ludicrous prediction into being, the owners should have either sacked him or got in someone to guide him.
Someone like – say – the man who signed as Director of Football at Plymouth Argyle at the same time.
Oh – but I forgot – they had already got rid of him, hadn’t they?
However, the Panjab Warriors didn’t get anyone in to help and they didn’t get rid of him either.
Until it was far, far too late.
But – as the publication of a Retained List for the current crop of players threatens to delay this Review to a point when it’s no longer going to be relevant, let’s leave our look at Jim Bentley’s impact on the club for another time.
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