Did you know that Karl Oyston’s idea of public relations during these difficult times at Blackpool is to drive around the old seaside town in a Land Rover that now bears an OY51 OUT private registration plate?

It certainly tells you a lot about the man and it doesn’t take an over-active imagination to suspect he might be laughing behind those blacked-out windows. Another man might feel embarrassed that the supporters of his club have come to think of him as an ulcer in its belly. Yet it’s not like that with Oyston, who appears to be driven by other motives. I couldn’t say with absolute certainty that he is deliberately setting out to be regarded as the most unpleasant man in the business, but he is certainly making a good fist of it.

Blackpool fans force Huddersfield game to be abandoned with Oystons protest Read more

Saturday is the anniversary of the 1953 FA Cup final when Stan Mortensen scored a hat-trick to help Blackpool turn a 3-1 deficit against Bolton Wanderers into a 4-3 win. A statue for “Morty” went up outside Bloomfield Road after a public fundraising drive in 1991 and the idea was that the supporters who are campaigning for Oyston’s removal would begin their protests before Saturday’s match against Huddersfield by laying flowers and other tributes.

Instead, the plinth has become a place for rubberneckers to congregate, shake their heads and wonder what on earth has become of the club. At 8am last Tuesday a forklift truck appeared, carrying a team of workmen with angle grinders. The statue was cut from its base and put among the lawnmowers and nets in a groundsman’s shed. There is talk of it being damaged and it is no wonder their supporters, as well as the relatives of Mortensen, are wondering if this is a warped game of tit-for-tat, in its most spiteful form, and some fans have decided to meet fire with fire. The supporters who caused the abandonment of their final game of the season by invading the pitch made their feelings absolutely clear.

How did it ever come to this? It’s a long, squalid story that also involves Owen Oyston, the club’s 81-year-old owner, a property tycoon who was convicted in 1996 of raping a 16-year-old girl (when he was 58) and served three and a half years of a six-year sentence. Karl is the millionaire son, chairman and wind-up merchant who has brought the club to its knees and appears to be soaking in the infamy. As family trees go, these two are the sap.

A lot of people no doubt think the Football Association should get involved and that the authorities should not just watch from afar as a famous old club suffers so publicly. Unfortunately, it isn’t quite that straightforward. My impression is that there are many people at FA headquarters, or high up at the Football League, who are horrified by what is happening and wonder like the rest of us where it is all going to end.

But the authorities cannot intervene because they think someone is making bad business decisions and urgently needs a crash course in public relations. They can if rules are broken and if their fit-and-proper-person test had been around longer it would eliminate Owen Oyston. After that, however, the rest is for the clubs and the people in the boardroom to look after. It’s their business whether they aim for the stars or the gutter.

The only actionable event came when Karl became involved in an argument with a prominent member of the Tangerine Knights supporters’ group and, to give you a few examples, typed in texts calling him an “intellectual cripple” and telling him to “enjoy the rest of your special needs day out”.

A real charmer, our Karl. “Are you sure we’ve met?” he asked. “I would have remembered such a massive retard.” He did issue a public apology but, to nobody’s surprise, he has denied the FA’s charge of misconduct.

Blackpool, in the meantime, have finished the Championship season with 25 points, the lowest total in its modern format, and without an away win for the first time since 1909. They have been relegated 21 points off fourth-from-bottom Rotherham, and who could be the remotest bit surprised bearing in mind a week before the season started the club employed eight fully-fledged professional footballers?

A journalist friend attended one of their pre-season fixtures. The announcer declared: “The Seasiders’ team will be: number one, triallist …number three, triallist … and so on. When the substitutes were made, they were identified as, respectively: “Number 15, number 14, numbers 13 and 16, and finally, number 17.”

Since then, the indignities have stacked up at such a rate it feels like a tragicomedy that Blackpool’s motto on their club crest is “Progress”. One story, however, does sum it up and it is of the game recently in which their goalkeeper, Joe Lewis, wore a shirt that he had earlier signed and presented to a sponsor. Lewis had to ask for it back because there were no others available, pulling on a top he had already autographed with a black marker pen. Blackpool’s kit-man, Steve Wales, left in March and the club secretary, Chris Hough, has taken on the role.

Hough might want to point out to his bosses the Fawlty Towers effect of having a sign for “Centre for Excellance” misspelt at the entrance to their training ground (a place Ian Holloway once described as a “hellhole”).

There are plenty of other stories of that nature and, if nothing else, at least the revulsion of Blackpool’s fans is not merely restricted to the Fylde coast. Supporters, for all their rivalries and occasionally tribal nature, tend not to like it when they see their own being so badly mistreated. There were Derby County fans singing “Oyston Out” when Blackpool played at Pride Park. After an elderly Blackpool fan was ordered to pay £20,000 in damages for comments on his Facebook page the money was raised by supporters of clubs from all over the country. There is an old rivalry between Blackpool and Preston North End but plenty of fans from Deepdale have joined the cause.

A couple of days ago, I spoke to Nicola Heaney, the great-niece of Mortensen, who talked with restrained dignity about the past week and how distressing his widow, Jean, who died a couple of years ago, would have found it. Nicola and her 10-year-old son have season tickets at Blackpool in the Mortensen Stand but did not go on Saturday and she would like to know when the statue is being put back and if it is true, as the Tangerine Knights have been told, that the support rods have been severed.

Karl Oyston did finally return her calls on Friday to tell her it was for security reasons, but the police have made sure everyone knows it is nothing to do with them and the idea is frankly ludicrous.

Blackpool chairman Karl Oyston. Photograph: Mark Robinson/PA

“The fans absolutely adore my uncle,” Nicola says. “He is a symbol of Blackpool football. Is he trying to say that someone was intending to damage it? We haven’t had the courtesy of an explanation and if he has done it to incite the fans – and it’s hard not to think that – I hardly want to think about it. We feel extremely hurt as a family.”

She has been promised it will go back up some time in the next week and it is just a pity Mortensen’s hands are not covering his eyes considering the chaos going on around him. Blackpool is the town of candy floss, kiss-me-quick and good old-fashioned fun. Yet the club of Mortensen, Stanley Matthews and Jimmy Armfield feels like a shipwreck with floodlights, and it could get a lot worse before it gets any better. Like a lot of men of wealth, the Oystons are not used to being told what to do and there is no indication of them selling up. Karl’s number plate suggests to me he doesn’t give a hoot. It’s a middle-finger kind of arrogance and, for now, all we can hope is that someone is writing the warts-and-all book so there is a lasting document of how not to run a football club.

The comedian and football fan Jason Manford got involved, via Facebook, a few days ago. “After an earlier post calling Karl Oyston an ‘odious ferret’ I’ve been contacted by my lawyers,” Manford wrote. “So I would like to retract my comments. They were unfair and misjudged and I can only apologise for letting myself down, my family down and my fans down. I can only hope my apology is accepted by ferrets and ferret owners everywhere.”

Time for police to reopen inquiries

One of the stories about the Bradford City fire brought to my attention over the past week concerns Margaret Thatcher’s visit to Valley Parade eight days after the tragedy in May 1985 that killed 56 people. Her husband, Denis, was also there and someone had to point out to him that it was probably better if he put out his cigarette. Denis stubbed it out, joking to the assembled guests that he did not want another fire on his hands.

There is a highly unsatisfactory feel to the way the people at the top of the country treated this tragedy and the other revelation that West Yorkshire police, along with the neighbouring Humberside and South Yorkshire forces, thought the inquiry was a “seat of the pants affair” merely adds to what has already become blindingly obvious about a five-day hearing where, to quote the police documents, there was a “severe pruning” of witnesses to rush everything through.

Sir Oliver Popplewell, the judge who chaired the inquiry, is clearly aggrieved by any criticism of his work but he has said there needs to be a new investigation now he has belatedly found out that Stafford Heginbotham, Bradford’s then chairman, had a history of at least eight other major fires in the city, courtesy of Martin Fletcher’s book and 15-year fact-finding mission.

Popplewell is adamant another inquiry will clear Heginbotham of any suspicion but neither he nor anyone can say what will come out unless the relevant authorities investigate again and all the police have said publicly is that they will consider any new evidence that is presented to them. It makes you wonder whether they have read Fletcher’s book and the thousands of words of research that should leave anyone with an open mind knowing proper checks need to be made.

Popplewell’s conclusion did jar slightly with his own assertion that Heginbotham’s history was “highly suspicious”. Thirty years on, I have seen a fire report submitted by the Timber Research and Development Association, the one independent body to carry out an inspection of Valley Parade’s main stand before the tragedy, that concluded it was “extremely unlikely that a small source of ignition on its own, say a cigarette in a plastic cup, could have been the primary cause”. The association felt so strongly about it this entire passage was underlined in black.

It is not for me to tell the police how to do their job, but are they going to look the other way until someone drops a pile of these documents through their letterbox? Or is it time they accepted the “mountain of coincidence” presented in Fletcher’s book needs a proper investigation of their own?

Grounds for a film about fan power

The weekend should not pass without acknowledging it is 25 yearson Sunday since 14,838 people put a tick by the name of the Valley Party in the Greenwich elections and Charlton Athletic could set about moving home and ending a deathly ground-share with Crystal Palace. A quarter of a century on, Charlton’s return to their old ground remains one of the great stories about the collective power of football supporters, the only surprise being that nobody ever made a film of their triumph.