Keep calm and let Fawaz rebuild

Fans’ frustration

Being a Forest fan is difficult and has been for some years now. The club’s communications strategy is poor and they never tell us anything. Even then, when they advertise tickets and new kits we go and buy them in the thousands, but they don’t have enough respect to communicate with us fans.

The past week or so has gone by and the last we heard from Forest was there was due diligence being carried out by the Al-Hasawis. Once again we haven’t heard anything since. It’s sad that they couldn’t even release an article just to say it’s in its final stages or the due diligence is still in progress.

We now have players leaving and being bought all over the place, weakening our just-survived-relegation squad. This is not a good sign for a team that should again be pushing for promotion, but is it the end of the world?

Perspective

We might have a weakening squad and the takeover is taking forever, but sometimes we need to take a step back and look at it from outside the box.

Fawaz Al-Hasawi is not buying a new car or home, it isn’t a yacht or a showpiece. He is buying a football club, a club that has great history and values, works with the community and with the less advantaged and less fortunate. This is a huge responsibility, not only does he need to make sure he can manage it all, the current board of directors and Nigel Doughty’s estate have a responsibility to make sure he is who he says he is and can live up to his words.

How many takeovers have gone sour in the past few years? You only have to look at Portsmouth and across the Trent at Notts County. My stance is this: I want an owner who is right for the club, whom in time will drive us forward. But I warn you now, this is not going to be an easy road. New owners mean new ideas, new ways of thinking and doing business, so we have to be patient with them.

The situation with players leaving isn’t the end of the world. Players have every right to find other jobs if their existing one is not secure, which is the case with a few of them at the moment. We may not get promotion this season, but would it be bad to build a grass-roots team? A team from the academy that is nurtured to play proper football? Not only are we building a team for Forest now, but for the future.

The new owners are not as wealthy as those of Man City. I am not even sure that they are billionaires, but if Al-Qadsia is anything to go by, Fawaz made a team out of a bunch of bandits. He knows the game and the processes, he just needs the time to put it into place. Rome wasn’t built in a day!

Believe and be patient

All I ask is for fans not to start getting irate with him, to start pestering other people, namely his wife and daughter who is very young. I am pretty sure they have very little to do with the takeover and they should be left out of it entirely. This is a business transaction, which sometimes takes a very long time because of paperwork, finances, etc.

It takes time to build something that will last. Nigel Doughty completed the foundations and it took 10 years. Now Al-Hasawi will hopefully continue to build on what Doughty couldn’t finish.

As for the marketing team at NFFC, get your bloody act together because you’re an embarrassment. A paragraph to say things are still being discussed doesn’t take long and doesn’t give anything away either, but it means you care about the fans.