Does anybody know David Lacey?

[fatbadger]

David Lacey, utterly brilliant football writer at the Guardian, is, I believe, a Brighton fan. I've been trying to find his email address - no luck yet. Anybody know him? Like to press him to do something in the Guardian? I appreciate that he will already know about all of this, but representations from the fans would be good...

 

[Dandyman]

I think he used to live in Lewes, if that helps.

 

[Wozza]

There are Albion fans working in the sports depts of just about every national newspaper and, of all of them, David Lacey is the least co-operative.

In fact, I don't think he's really an Albion fan at all.

I've only seen him mention us twice in his columns and in one of those he called the Goldstone a dump.

 

[fatbadger]

Harumph. Och well. The only mention I ever saw him give was to the effect of 'last Saturday Brighton weren't playing, so the day meant nothing to me'.

 

[The Large One]

Not only David Lacey, but nick Sczepanik (sp?) and Paul Hayward. They are probably already in the loop, but keep them posted.

 

[Southy]

Btw a liitle known fact about David lacey is that he's got one of the largest porn collections in the country. Been collecting since the mid fifties apparently. Absolutely true.

 

[Dandyman]

Btw a liitle known fact about David lacey is that he's got one of the largest porn collections in the country. Been collecting since the mid fifties apparently. Absolutely true.

I was at Primary school with his son & the git never told me !

 

[Skintagain 1983]

Dandoi ... you never went to school...... It was military training camp for the Lewes Rebel Army...



Run Away....

 

[honey boy zimba]

Yes David lacey is atrue Albion FAN But sadly he has now retired ,however Greg Wood the racing corespondent for The Gaurdian is a big Albion fan and lives in Brighton.

 

[SussexSpur]

David Lacey still writes regular match reports for The Guardian, don't think he's been the full-time chief football writer for a year or two though. A great writer, always has a great turn of phrase - one-liners other football hacks would build their whole report around, he tosses away a couple of times buried within his story. . .
Seems to like his 50s/60s vintage radio comedy references, though, most of which just pass miles over my head.

 

[fatbadger]

David Lacey (still the best writer in football journalism) mentioned our plight in Saturday's column:


'Follow Parliament and bar convicts, bankrupts and lunatics as directors'

Brighton are just one example of a club struggling with the legacy of directorial mismanagement

David Lacey
Saturday February 14, 2004
The Guardian

Unless the All Party Parliamentary Football Group had been living in an ecopod for the past 12 years, it could hardly have been surprised when its proposal that the Premier League should give an extra 5% of its television income to the lower leagues drew a response similar to that which greeted Oliver Twist's request for more.
Ladling out additional dollops of gruel was bad enough but uncoupling a few more wagons from the gravy train to serve the needs of the less well off struck at the very heart of the Premier League's raison d'être.

The First Division clubs broke away from the Football League in 1992 because they wanted a greater share of a bigger television cake. Giving a larger slice to clubs in the Nationwide League and the Conference would, in the Premiership's eyes, question the main justification of the original exercise.

So the MPs' relatively modest suggestion has been dismissed out of hand by Richard Scudamore, the Premier League's chief executive, who regards the proposal as irrelevant.

Thus, season by season, the Premier League will continue to ossify, with two-thirds of its members petrified by thoughts of the financial consequences of relegation, plus the threat of administration followed by points deductions which would simply prolong their fall. Parachute payments look puny when teams burn up on re-entry to the Nationwide.

Wage capping is also a non-starter and, though clubs are already responding to the clamour for greater transparency over transfers and agents' fees, it is going to take some vigorous window- cleaning to improve the present murky view.

The most intriguing notion put forward by MPs is that anyone wanting to become a director of a football club should be required to pass a "fit and proper person test". Just who would conduct such a test and on what basis boggles the mind.

Perhaps football could follow Parliament's example and bar convicts, undischarged bankrupts and certified lunatics. In fact some disaffected fans may feel this should be applied retrospectively.

Either way, it is not a bad idea. In future, for example, the test might include oligarchs who have made their fortunes acquiring a nation's utilities on the cheap in return for bailing out the government.

Or racing billionaires who rock the boat. Or tightwad tycoons from Florida who sound as if they used to be in Starsky and Hutch. Or anyone who has played the piano in Central Park dressed as Donald Duck - unless of course his name happens to be Elton John.

Then again some directors of the past might well have appeared to lack the required fitness and propriety to be involved in football, yet their clubs would have been worse off for their absence.

Take Sir Henry Norris, the wheeler-dealing chairman who persuaded the Football League to promote Arsenal to the First Division when it was extended from 20 to 22 clubs in 1919 even though they had finished sixth in the Second Division in 1914-15, when the competition was suspended until the end of the war.

In the 1920s Norris was forced out of football because of financial irregularities but he remains the founder of the modern Arsenal. Even Robert Maxwell, drowned and discredited, must be remembered with some affection by the fans of Oxford United who, under his chairmanship, reached the old First Division and won the League Cup.

Nevertheless there has long been a need to vet the character, credibility and motives of people who at the moment turn up in boardrooms with practically no qualifications other than the possession of large sums of money.

At the beginning of the 1990-91 season the intervention of a local property developer, Spencer Trethewy, saved Aldershot from a winding-up order but they failed to complete the following season's programme and in the end the fans had a whip-round for the unpaid players. To be fair, Trethewy was only 19.

Certainly a strictly applied franchise system might have spared Brighton & Hove Albion the attentions of Bill Archer, a former Crown Paints employee from Blackburn under whose chairmanship the Goldstone Ground, the club's home for 95 years, was sold to developers.

Since their exile to Gillingham, Albion have roughed it at the little Withdean Stadium fortified by expectations of moving to a downland site at Falmer, a couple of miles east of the city. But this scheme has now been rejected by a local planning inspector, leaving the club to face trying to return to and stay in the Nationwide First Division with a ground capacity of under 7,000.

Everything depends on John Prescott overruling the inspector and giving Albion the go-ahead. Clearly the deputy prime minister is about to enjoy as popular a Brighton connection as Max Miller, or else share the reputation of the 1930s trunk murderer.

Prescott's parliamentary colleagues on the Football Group had the Brightons, Brentfords, Burys and Burnleys in mind when they pleaded for a fairer redistribution of the TV money. If he counts the votes in Brighton and Hove, he may yet feel inclined to do his bit.

 

[Wozza]

 

[Safeway]

There are Albion fans working in the sports depts of just about every national newspaper and, of all of them, David Lacey is the least co-operative.

In fact, I don't think he's really an Albion fan at all.

I've only seen him mention us twice in his columns and in one of those he called the Goldstone a dump.

Your apology's in the post, I take it?

 

[SeagullSimon]

 

[Wozza]

Your apology's in the post, I take it?

Well it doesn't actually change the fact that, during our club's troubled times, he's been the least supportive Albion fan (or supposed fan) working in a major media position in the UK.

 

[Bozza]

Was it only me that, on first read of that article, had wished he had not used the phrase "downland site" ?