Morecambe Football Club: Totally Unofficial Preview of the Season, 2026-2027.

Part One: The National League North and The State of Our Club.

If anyone is in even the slightest doubt as to how far our mighty club has fallen in the last year alone, all they have to do is look at the dedicated BBC Sport Morecambe page. Even last year – as a National League club – there were regular updates on developments at the Mazuma Mobile Stadium, as it was then. Before that, when the club was a member of the EFL, it was a regular source of information about the goings-on involving the Shrimps.

But now that well had run completely dry. We don’t matter anymore. We have fallen beyond the horizon which the BBC scans for news. The only mention we get nowadays is when other – more significant – clubs which are still on Auntie’s radar have any dealings with us. Or – as we shall see – when yet more bad things concerning our club becomes national news. We really have hit Rock Bottom – at least as far as the last twenty years are concerned.

That being said, the reality of this season is that Morecambe will begin the upcoming campaign in a quote/unquote `regional’ league for the first time in thirty years.

Is this really true?

For those of us – like me – who can remember those ancient times, membership of the Northern Premier League in 1995 had involved trips to places such as Colwyn Bay in north Wales; Spennymoor United in the north-east of England and Boston United in the northern reaches of Lincolnshire. The longest journey the Shrimps had to make then was about 160 miles one-way to the latter outfit. The north-eastern clubs – Spennymoor; Blyth Spartans and Bishop Auckland – were less than half this distance away.

But from the Northern Premier three decades ago to the National League North now stretches the concept of `regional’ way beyond breaking-point.

This is not a `regional’ league in any shape or form.

Its boundaries stretch from King’s Lynn in Norfolk (216 miles away to the south-east from Morecambe) and encompass Spalding in Lincolnshire in vaguely the same part of the country but slightly nearer at 198 miles away.

Then there’s Merthyr Tydfil – 233 miles to the west in South Wales. (Doesn’t that make it an `international’ rather than a `regional’ league?)

Almost as far away, we will have to travel to two Shire county towns.

Oxford is 207 miles away, with – for them – nearby Bedford even further at 214 miles.

In the opposite direction is Scarborough on the North Sea coast – a mere 151 miles away.

Then there are Darlington; Hebburn Town; Spennymoor and South Shields (the latter 120 miles hence) even further up in the north-east corner of England.

So the National League North is `regional’ in name only.

The title National League `North’ is also a complete misnomer.

Clubs like Bedford Town and King’s Lynn Town have been in the National League South under a different guise in the past and that’s really where they; Oxford City and arguably Spalding should be too.

But the preponderance of rich southern clubs in the upper reaches of non-league football means that pressure on spaces is limited in the southern section of the National League. As is usually the case, money; politics and expediency means that a so-called `Northern’ league has a small but significant percentage of its membership from places that only aliens from outer space – or Cockneys, who notoriously don’t know their Arsenal from their Eltham (close to Woolwich where the Gunners originate from) – would see as fitting the bill simply because they are all `Norf of Watford’.

In taking part in this competition for the first time ever, the Shrimps will be renewing old acquaintances with clubs such as Chorley from decades ago in the Lancashire Combination; Macclesfield and Worksop – who were also founder-members of the Northern Premier League in 1968 – plus other clubs they have played in the Football Conference (Telford for example) or the Football League (Chester and Darlington, for instance.) But we are also going to encounter a number of clubs we have never come across before…

So strap yourself in; tighten your seatbelt and gird your loins as we embark on another journey into the at least Partially Unknown…

Here’s a map of the territory Adam Lakeland and his team will have to cover in the next nine months or so:

The Good News:

The Management Team.

The new management regime on the field at Morecambe – First-Team Manager Adam Lakeland and Assistant Sam Walker – created a contrast as sharp as chalk and cheese with last season’s disastrous Ashvir Singh Johal experiment almost from Day One of arriving at the club. In May, just two weeks into their new jobs, the new management faced-up to an open forum of Shrimps’ fans at the home ground and fielded the many questions supporters wanted answers to. They came across as very straightforward, level-headed individuals with a clear understanding of their role and a strategy for the club – a Three-Year Plan as they referred to it – and how they intend to implement it. They also contributed to a relaxed evening with a lot of laughter.

Could you imaging the Panjab Warriors’ first Managerial appointee even facing-up to the fans he was supposed to be representing at any stage in his catastrophic stewardship of our club? In common with the Sikhs who employed him, there seems to be a growing aversion by the Panjab Warriors to have any face-to-face dealings with members of the Morecambe community they claim to have so close to their hearts.

Both Adam and Sam had a number of incisive things to say about the realities of managing modern players and had an insight into the mindset of these individuals which transcended football. Mr Lakeland stated that finding players like his assistant – a motivational team Captain at two of his previous clubs who led on the field by simply communicating with his team-mates – is like discovering the mythical produce of Rocking Horses, to use his own analogy.

Asked why he thought this `art of leadership’ was so rare to find, he made a social distinction between Millennials; the current generation and the people who came before. He replied:

“I think – God; you’ve got me going here now – I think: technology: mobile phones; social media. I think a lot of young people are socially awkward. They find it hard to hold conversations with people; particularly people who are older than them. It was something we put a big onus on last year when we went to Halifax because you kind of had lads in little groups, on their phones, not talking. So we created an environment in the morning where they were able to come in and socialise and go from little cliques at the start to twenty-five: it’s like the Last Supper at the end. That’s incredibly pleasing because they develop communication skills; social skills – they establish relations with one another where they’re not just team-mates: they become mates and you become like a family, really. That’s important when things are tough on the pitch: they’re likely to give that little bit more for one another. I think because they don’t really talk; they’d rather send a text than make a phone call; they’d rather send a Tweet than go and see somebody down the road. I think that’s resulted in a lack of leaders.”

If you think about what he said, I suspect that this in itself underlined the main reason poor old Ash was such an unmitigated disaster as Morecambe Manager: his obvious failure to get his ideas across to his players was amplified with his total inability to communicate with the media, which he avoided like the Plague.

So it seems that we have two realists at the helm this term. It looks like the education their squad is about to experience is going to be as much about making them more effective human beings as it will be to improve their performance as professional footballers. That must be a good thing for everybody concerned.

The Changing of the Old Guard was underlined again when a new goalkeeping coach was unveiled at the club on July 14^th. Andy Smith has a wealth of coaching experience at other non-league clubs in the south of the country.  He said this after signing on the dotted line for the Shrimps:

“I am delighted to be joining Morecambe as Goalkeeper Coach. It’s a privilege to be part of such a historic football club and I’m looking forward to working with the goalkeepers, players and staff as we build towards a successful season. I’m also looking forward to meeting the supporters who will no doubt be a noisy bunch helping us get over the line. Let’s make our home a fortress.”

Changes since last season:

1. Mazuma Mobile Stadium ? – What’s That?

The company – Mazuma – which has sponsored our club as they attempted to make money out of buying and selling used mobile phones and associated tech is probably really relieved that their five-year-contract with Morecambe AFC has finally run-out. The whole idea of sponsorship is predicated on mutual advantage: a sort-of reflected glory for the sponsors as the thing they have put loads of money into goes from strength to strength.

But – for Mazuma Mobile – the deal they signed five years ago must go down in history as probably just about the worst commercial vehicle ever to project a positive image for any retail organisation as the Shrimps went forever backwards from a place worth mentioning when they initially signed-up – League One – to one which is simply isn’t.

They might have done better- if such a thing was possible way back then – to sponsor an ocean Liner: the Mazuma Mobile Titanic, for example…

As negotiations continued between our shadowy owners and other potential suckers – forgive me – sponsors – our home ground was briefly known as The Bay Stadium.

No longer.

It is now officially The Halo Aerospace Stadium.

And as we all know, the slogan that any serious aerospace company would be eager to adopt needs to be along the lines already used by pop star Jazz:

The Only Way Is Up. Literally…

If it proves not to be, we’re all in trouble so let’s all fervently hope that both their fortunes and our own follow this new trajectory…

2. Training Facilities.

The club – sorry – the `Club’s leadership group’ (stand by your beds, everyone…) have done their best to suggest that training in a separate city almost thirty miles away from their home ground is a really good and progressive development in the Shrimps’ campaign for success this season.

Really? How so?

For anyone not privy to the club’s cosy little inner circle, it seems a strange and extremely retrograde development – to say the very least – in the way the team will now prepare for games in the future.

So this is the first question which springs to mind: is ours a Morecambe club these days – or a Preston one?

The Panjab Warriors have signed an agreement with the University of Lancashire to use their training facilities several stops down the M6 to the south. The owners predictably don’t mention the problems caused last season by their failure to pay the local College (a fraction of the distance away) for training there or explain why this agreement has seemingly ended altogether. Nor – equally predictably – have they made any attempt to explain to the poor saps who happen to support what is clearly still very much their club why the agreement with effectively our own better – and much closer – University at Lancaster hasn’t been re-activated as an alternative. Instead they have made a typically opaque and very corporate announcement which – as ever – simply ignores these difficult subjects altogether:

“Steve Dewsnip, Morecambe’s Chief Operating Officer, said: “One of our key roles as the Club’s leadership group is to provide Adam, his staff and players with the finest facilities possible. This helps to attract top talent to the Club and enables them to maximise their potential. After considering several other options, it soon became clear that the University Sports Arena would take us to another level. This will help us to realise the ownership group’s vision of achieving the success that this great club deserves.”

Let’s think about this drivel for a second.

First of all, what on earth actually is the `Club’s leadership group’? Does it actually mean anything other than `me and the owners’ – except perhaps being possibly a really pitiful bid to bamboozle gullible or weak-minded people who are impressed by this sort of meaningless titular corporate nonsense – possibly by people with similarly feeble mindsets – and no discernible other qualifications?

Secondly, if the new venue really does `attract top talent to the Club and enables them to maximise their potential’ in the way that the man who really should be called the club’s – sorry – `this great club’s’ Chief Propaganda Manager would have us believe, then when can we expect Morecambe FC to take the next logical step and move there permanently and perhaps be called Preston West End from now on?

What a load of utterly patronising baloney.

This is an appalling decision. In reality, there will now be two away teams visiting The Halo Aerospace Stadium next season: the real visitors and the men from Preston wearing the red shirts.

What’s happened to all the promises by the Panjab Warriors about the visibility of our club in the local town? Interaction with the Morecambe community? As always – it’s meaningless hogwash expressed by people who either have no real interest in fulfilling their empty promises or who simply still don’t understand – or perhaps don’t care about – the basic dynamics of a community football club of the sort Morecambe has always been.

The Bad News: 1: The ownership.

Following on from this, I was personally hoping that the Panjab Warriors would have learned a few lessons from last season, when their lack of communication with the fans – despite repeatedly unfulfilled pledges by them to be more transparent and open with us – was one of the many mistakes they made in faultlessly guiding our club to a new low.

But it looks like we’re all going to be subjected to the same old drivel, smoke and mirrors and yet more total lack of candour all over again if this `training upgrade’ development alone can be used as a yardstick. A little more straight talk and a lot less flannel would be greatly welcomed. I think that the self-styled `Club’s leadership group’ need to dismiss any delusions of grandeur and remind themselves that they are just the mouthpieces of a little non-league club in a small league – and, more importantly, who put us there in the first place.

Despite their own delusive view of themselves, they are not one of Andy Burnham’s SPAD groups or the commissioning editors of a Dr Goebbels’ book about the uses of Propaganda. The rubbish they post about their actions and intentions on-line is not cleverly-enough constructed to fool anybody…

Why not put Jim Bentley in charge of comms? He gets it; he’s good at it – and he’s clearly keen to do it, too…

(By the way, what’s happened to him?…)

I had written the above a while ago in the naive hope that this was surely as bad as things could get: predictable nonsense from the mouthpiece of the club reinforced by obfuscation and a refusal to be straight with anyone at an even higher level. 

But then the wholly inept and clueless Panjab Warriors excelled themselves by steering our club to an even greater low of the sort that no football fan anywhere wants to be associated with:

The Bad News: 2. A First That Nobody Wants.

Some people may think that what I have just written about Preston West End, our (presumably) self-titled Chief Operating Officer and our owners is a little harsh. But since I wrote it, these people have ensured that our club has made history for all the wrong reasons all over again.

Morecambe FC has been formally warned by the Labour government’s new Independent Football Regulator (IFR) about the way our club is being run.

This is the first time the IFR has actually taken any football club in England to task. It is an utterly shameful new low in Morecambe’s already really appalling recent history. You can read the details of this latest national and international embarrassment here:

Morecambe FC and the Independent Football Regulator.

At the time it happened, the Warriors assured us:

“The Club and its directors are taking legal advice and will submit detailed representations within the 14-day period prescribed by the IFR. They remain confident that those representations will demonstrate why no further regulatory action is warranted.“

Since they made this extraordinary claim, well over fourteen days have elapsed and we – as mere fans – know nothing at all about the `detailed representations’ our owners have presumably offered to the Regulator to have this latest major foul-up resolved in the club’s favour.

At the time of its issuing of its censure of Morecambe AFC, the IFR stated this:

“On 20 February 2026, the IFR issued a request for information under section 65 of the Act to the Club, seeking information necessary for the IFR to establish and oversee its Owners, Directors and Senior Executives (ODSE) regime and to implement the additional duties regime under Part 5 of the Act (the “20 February RFI”). It required the Club to provide a response to the 20 February RFI by 20 March 2026.”

The club didn’t do so – and has subsequently continued not to, despite further missed deadlines. We don’t know the nature of the `information’ the Regulator was seeking under section 65 of the Football Governance Act of 2025. But some of the key things I would expect any Regulator worth its salt to want to know are:

1. What is the source of the Panjab Warriors funding of the club?
2. What guarantees can the ownership offer to guarantee continuance of this funding into the future?
3. Why does a company registered as a `Sports Management Company’ at Companies House list its dual “Nature of business (SIC)” as “Buying and selling of own real estate” and  “Activities of sport clubs”?
4. What evidence can the company produce of “Buying and selling of own real estate” and how does this chime with its intentions for the future of Morecambe Football Club? 
5. What is the actual Business Model of a company whose only discernible asset appears to be its ownership of the real estate known as Morecambe Football Club?
6. How do the men named as the owners of Morecambe AFC by the IFR explain the fact that their company name differs by only a single vowel from a genuine multinational sports management company based in India and whose assets are worth countless millions of pounds in the shape of the Punjab Warriors? Their official website describes them as “A sports investment company strategically combining innovation, operational expertise, and capital to transform iconic sports assets and cutting-edge ventures worldwide.” Is there not an inbuilt fear of confusion – with all the associated risks of mistaken investment created by the similarities in name alone – between two businesses with vastly different resources and experience?

It would be interesting – to say the very least – to see the answers to the above questions. But, of course, we won’t – because Panjab Warriors will claim commercial privilege and hide whatever answers they come up with behind their customary Wall of Silence.

This is par for the course: we – the loyal fan base – apparently exist solely to be told only what the Powers That Be think we want to hear. For example, they have already tried to trivialise the charges they face from the IFR by telling us this:

“This alleged breach is at the IFR’s lowest level of seriousness.”

They’ve missed three very important key words from this sentence so I’m going to add them now: “This alleged breach is at the IFR’s lowest level of seriousness at the moment.”

Depending on how the ownership at Morecambe responds to the IFR’s charges, the level of seriousness could well go to Amber – or even Red. Time will tell if this actually happens because the IFR aren’t going to go away. However, the same statement by the Panjab Warriors goes on to say:

“Morecambe FC thanks its supporters, sponsors and staff for their continued support and loyalty throughout this period and continues to welcome informed and transparent engagement via appropriate and professional channels with any of its supporter and community representative parties.”

This statement is also totally disingenuous for at least two reasons. It may try to once more tell fans what the so-called `Management group’ think we want to hear – which seems to be a trope of theirs – but it is at variance with established facts.

Firstly, the way the Sikh ownership has forced-out loyal staff members who still turned-up to serve the club and did their jobs even when they weren’t being paid despite the best efforts of Jason Whittingham and Covid-19 is a scandal in itself. It is the diametric opposite of rewarding “staff for their continued support and loyalty throughout this period” – and it is an insult to them to pretend otherwise.

Secondly, the utter disdain the Panjab Warriors actually have for the fan base is summed-up in one simple action: their repeated failure to reply to simple questions about their intentions and their strategy posed to them by the Shrimps Trust last season. When they were asked similar questions by the Independent Football Regulator, they reacted in exactly the same way: as we have seen, they totally ignored them. It hasn’t worked this time. So – once the IFR publicly censured them – they lied again. They said they had no case to answer in a situation where the Regulator had quoted – chapter and verse with all the relevant dates – instances where they absolutely had.

There’s a pattern here. If the Panjabs find themselves in a tricky situation, they initially ignore it. If that doesn’t work; they make excuses or try to blame someone else. Then – finally – they make-up lies to try and justify themselves.

But – as some philosopher somewhere probably once wrote: a lie is only as convincing as the person telling it. You need brains to do it effectively – and brains are clearly in very short supply in the `Club’s leadership group’ (stand by your beds again).

Sadly, the owners appear to believe that if what they choose to tell us is even the most obvious – and even pathetic – untruth; fabrication or even total fantasy – so what? Who’s going to do anything about it?

Well – we shall see…

The Bad News: the ownership: 2. What are they actually up to?

The anger about sackings at the club since the Panjab Warriors took over is easily discovered by a quick trawl through the internet. These are just a few of the postings I have seen during the last week alone, responding to this:

“Unfortunately, I can’t say what I want to say publicly at the moment, however, I have put my whole life into the club for the past 18 years and the way it has ended has been extremely sad and upsetting… The worst part about this is none of the people on that list wanted to leave. They have been pushed by the CEO and COO who do not support them… This is absolutely shocking. Some great people there that didn’t get paid and still worked their way through it. I want our community club back.”

And so it goes on. To be fair, other voices – some of whom I can’t help noticing represented the Shrimps Trust in its absolutely worst and most ineffective iteration as we crashed out of League One and they all resisted any form of protest about how this had come about – seem to be all in favour of reducing what they describe as `overstaffing’ at the club, which they maintain has gone on for years.

Perhaps they’d like to have the guts to tell that to the people involved face-to-face and see what the reaction is.

Back in those `overstaffed’ days, if you took the trouble to ring the club, you knew that somebody would pick-up. No longer: I had my Mobile on Speaker Phone on two occasions last week for an hour in total as recorded messages were repeatedly played on a loop. Nobody answered.

How much potential business in ticket sales in particular and sponsorship in general is being lost by this single failure?

How many people have given-up trying to interact with Morecambe Football Club in this way altogether? – as the old business adage has it: once you’ve lost them, they won’t be coming back.

In what way does constantly failing to answer the phones at the club represent a Great Leap Forward; or even `Modernisation’ or `Rationalisation’?

Even in these internet-dominant days, answering the phone at any institution is a basic of good business practice: even if it’s only an ansafone: at least you know what callers are offering. If you don’t, you are operating totally blind to the opportunities that these lost phone calls might offer: a stance that could wreck the club in itself.

So allow me to relate an incident which I experienced myself last week at the `rationalised’ club.

In the greater scheme of things, this is unarguably trivial. My job doesn’t rely on the Panjab Warriors or their Enforcer at the club. My pension and my mortgage don’t either.

(It doesn’t for the Brown-Tongued Old Guard I have just mentioned either – which is presumably one reason why they clearly don’t care when this happens to other people – many with kids – for whom apparent trivialities like having a reliable income obviously don’t matter. Seemingly, they are just entries on a financial spreadsheet which need to be adjusted in the relentless and cold-blooded pursuit of `streamlining’…)

Over the last five days, I have personally experienced what I suspect the ownership and its Chief Operating Officer would describe as the `streamlining’ at the club which they have been threatening ever since they led us downwards out of the National League and thus lost a very valuable stream of key income into the bargain. But everyone who has ever experienced `Modernisation’ ; `Streamlining’ or `Rationalisation’ knows that the terms have always actually been short-hand for `cost-cutting’.

The problems I had buying a ticket for the AFC Fylde game and retrieving my Season Ticket for this campaign could stand a chapter on its own: it was an utter shambles exemplified by the fact that although I paid at Reception for a ticket to watch AFC Fylde early last Tuesday afternoon, the promised E-ticket never appeared and I thus didn’t go.

But on Wednesday last, I had the unfortunate experience of an interaction with two young Sikh men at Reception as I tried to sort out some of the confusion which had already arisen. They were very smart in at least one sense: well-groomed, booted and suited – and presumably ticked at least that box about the sort of Corporate Identity the Panjabs want to project at our club. But it was only skin-deep. These two men weren’t smart in the sense that really matters. The pair of fashion shop dummies didn’t have a single braincell between them and clearly had no idea whatsoever how systems like ticket allocation work at the club. So what were they doing facing the public in the first place?

Because he clearly didn’t understand what I was talking about, I showed one of these clowns an email I had received from the club explaining very clearly that I was there to collect a complimentary ticket to watch the Barrow game due on Saturday. He took an inordinately long time to presumably read every single word of it and then said “So you are here to pick up your Season Ticket?” The term `season ticket’ wasn’t used in the email and I hadn’t used it either: a ticket for Barrow was. Bearing in mind the old adage that if you employ clowns, you end up with a circus, this guy didn’t even know where to look to find individual tickets – he had to ask someone who did.

Then, in a scene worthy of the parody of what had been happening at our club I have been writing – The Sensational Shrimpleton Saga – unable to find it, he asked: “Is your first name Fitton?”

Peter; Jim; Paul; John; Fitton: common English forenames, apparently…

You couldn’t make it up – all that was missing was his red nose, a spinning dickey-bow-tie and a car horn to honk `Parp! Parp!”

But all this incompetent clearly wanted me to do was go away and stop bothering him. I felt personally really patronised and actually quite angry by the way he chose to do this. As unanswered phones constantly rang-out in the background, this gentleman blamed all the problems which I was experiencing on a named member of staff who wasn’t there to defend herself.

This is a really weak, shabby and totally unprofessional thing to do: but it seems to be the new ethos of the club. Then – seeing that I was showing no signs of leaving empty-handed – the young Sikh promised me that the ticket the club had apparently `lost’ would be brought to my house in Carnforth personally by him if it didn’t turn up by post on a particular date. I suspected that this was a lie when he told me it: a totally meaningless statement that he assumed I wanted to hear which actually meant nothing at all.

But I suspect that this is actually another example of the official policy of our owners to deal with tricky situations: tell the person or persons pushing them into a corner something – anything – that they assume they want to hear. If that doesn’t work or turns out to be a dud, then blame someone else. Finally – when all else is lost: just lie to them. So it was no surprise when the ticket didn’t arrive – and he didn’t show-up either.

(At this point, I would like to say a big personal thankyou to Nikki Lambourne for sorting-out this mess. After eight sterling – and very loyal – years’ service, she has given in her notice. She will be missed. As will many others, starting with Derek Adams as soon as the Panjab Project – whatever it actually is – began.  Good luck to them all. Maybe under a more enlightened ownership sometime in an unforeseen future, they might come back. Let’s hope so: our club just isn’t the same without people like these…)

I know the imbroglio involving tickets I experienced last week is utterly trivial in comparison to far more serious things the Sikhs have got wrong – and are still getting wrong at our club. Increasingly, though, I fear that this is yet another example of the corrosive influence the Panjabs are having on Morecambe AFC. They operate as a law unto themselves and clearly have a real problem with the objective truth.

Is this a deliberate strategy which has been worked-out by the best brains of the self styled `Club’s leadership group’? It’s surely not part of a broader Sikh culture where this sort of subterfuge is acceptable, is it? (And before anyone plays the Race Card, I would like to point out that I was lucky enough to study a course entitled The Politics of Race which was taught by failed Liberal Candidate for Morecambe – Professor Hugh Tinker, the first-ever Chairman of the Race Relations Commission – when I was an Undergraduate at Lancaster University during the early 1980s. We learnt that all tribes; nations; civilisations – call them what you will – throughout history have had attitudes and beliefs which could be deemed racist. We have them as white British people. But Sikhs do too. We need to look no further than fellow Indians in the shape of some Hindus and many Muslims who would – and do – say far worse things about Sikhs than you might hear uttered by white people on the streets of Britain today. Equally, radical Sikhs who want Khalistan as their own state can be even more intolerant of their Indian brothers and sisters – and their former Imperial masters. So we need to be really careful about deciding who is racist and who isn’t here before casting aspersions: I’m not stating a fact; I’m asking a question: is telling lies in tricky situations an acceptable way to behave in, say, the Punjab – or in Sikh culture generally?…)

Whether it is or not, one indisputable fact is that it takes years to create a family club with certain values which most Morecambe supporters support and expect. Despite a string of recent dodgy owners, our club has always been run along decent, honest and community-centred lines. But now it seems that this hard-won reputation is being rapidly destroyed from within. The Panjab Warriors might argue that they have saved our club and that ungrateful and perhaps bigoted critics like myself should bow down and thank them for that alone.  

I have two responses to that.

First of all, we need to think about how well their `new’ way of doing things has done for the club so far. The first `upgrade’ `rationalisation’; `modernisation’ or whatever you want to call it that they introduced was to replace a seasoned campaigner in the shape of Derek Adams with one of their own who simply didn’t have a clue what he was doing. Morecambe were relegated as a direct result of this utterly stupid – and probably racist – decision: would King Derek have been sacked if he was a Sikh? I very much doubt it…

But, far from learning from this utterly catastrophic error, it would seem that the Panjab Warriors and their Enforcer – a man, we must remember, who has been banned from practicing in the financial sector in the Channel Islands due to past misdemeanours – are instead replicating it. Repeating the cardinal `Modernisor’s’ error of knowing the cost of everything and value of nothing, they are systematically replacing experienced key individuals at the club with the sort of people I encountered the other day at Reception – people who clearly have as much idea of good business practice and how to interact with the public as Ashvir Singh Johal had about managing a football team: none whatsoever. It is a recipe for disaster.

The place is already a shambles; badly led by people who seem to lack any business acumen whatsoever, poorly administered and clearly getting worse by the moment. The Panjab Warriors are wrecking our club from the inside out.

I personally hope the new football regulator disbars them. They are not fit to be in charge.

We can all worry about the implications for Morecambe AFC if they are taken out of the equation if and when it happens –  because the way things are going, the club is inevitably going to fail probably sooner rather than later in any case.

But to return to the question of being ungrateful to our mysterious Sikh owners, the second point I would like to make is this: for what purpose have they saved our – forgive me – their club?

This is a question I first posed on these pages ages ago once a man who has subsequently disappeared under a cloud of HM Treasury censure for potential links with terrorists started bleating on about `the importance of community’ to the people who were then so quick to disassociate themselves from him as a spokesman – sorry – Director of Communications for the club.

Whose community? I asked.

We still don’t know because the forever elusive Panjab Warriors have always kept their motives for buying our club in the first place perhaps the most tightly-guarded secret of all.

Is there any chance they will share this vision for the future at any time with us, the actual fans?

Experience so far dictates that there is no reason whatsoever to expect that they will any time soon – or actually, anytime ever…

How very depressing…

Let’s just hope that the government’s new Regulator has the balls to do what it says on the tin: eradicate unsuitable owners from the English game altogether.

Tomorrow on these pages, we will return to a much more standard Preview of the season, looking exclusively at who the new pitch-side management have signed.