BG is a Great Owner. Better than the clowns running Liverpool, Chelsea, Man U, Arsenal and Tottenham!

Not all clubs are run badly, look at WestHam! Four weeks to the end of the season and we are second in the league with Arsenal, Liverpool and Chelski all in a relegation scrap.

Yes it's true.

The season is only 4 weeks from finished and we sit proudly in second place in the league. If you don't believe me then here go and check for yourselves, it's ok I will wait

http://www.fairpaynetwork.org/football/

Ok, are you back? I never said it was the Premier League but it is something that should make us proud as Hammers fans. The Fair Pay Network aim to improve the working pay and conditions of non footballing staff at clubs in England and a lot of credit goes to the club for providing a decent standard of living and good working conditions for its employees.

In a way it kind of sums up this board and the club's owner Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson who has show the type of patience that makes Ghandi look prone to flying of the handle. He has been slated by the fans, who lack the knowledge or understanding of what has happened to the guy or his business empire. He has been made into some Bond-esque super villain plotting the destruction of the civilised world from a secret head quarters in a hollowed out volcano in Iceland by the media.

He bought the club from Terry Brown and for about a week he was hailed a saviour, we didn't care if he had hooves, a tail and always carried his lucky pitch fork to games, he had saved us from that caravan salesman, promised to spend money and appointed a luvable elf like fella with the catchy nickname of The Egg to run the club.

However within weeks we were not hurtling up the table and no one had spotted Ronaldo at Chadwell Heath for his medical. The fans got restless, Pardew got sacked and Curbs got the job and with it the keys to the cash box. He went on a spending spree that the average Hammers fan could only dream of emulating if he won a trolley dash through LakeSide. Of course none of the signings worked out (although this was not Curbs' fault as he has pointed out since while taking credit for their revival after he had left the club) and relegation looked on the cards. Luckily Carlos Tevez saved us all on his own from this fate by playing every minute of every game in every position, at least that's what Kevin McCabe reckons and we all lived to fight
another day.

Having watched Curbs blow a wad of his cash on some very suspect signings, BG promptly stumped up more money in the summer to make sure we would not have to worry about relegation ever again and even sanctioned the big name signing of Freddie Lunchbox to make sure we felt like a big club and give the girls something to swoon over. Unfortunately, apart from a brisk trade in camera batteries for the ladies Freddie failed to live up to his billing (now that said I would have loved to see how the guy would have done in Zola's team). On top of this the rest of the big money boys keel over like the henchmen in an old Batman episode and again the fans get upset. Needless to say Curbs' backroom team's magic sponge and shoulder shrugging method of treating injuries means we are consigned to a mediocre season of awful football and cringe worthy excuses.

The fans are not happy that the Egg allowed these players be signed for silly money and laughable wages so BG packs him off back to his igloo and brings Scott "its still the 1980s to me" Duxbury, promoting him from his position of legal advisor where he had covered himself in glory in the handle of the Tevez saga. Duxbury asks Curbs if he knows how to sign players who don't cost a fortune and who don't own their own treatment table and when Curbs admits that his only experience of looking around Europe came from a school trip to Grenoble in the 70s, BG brings in Gianluca Nani from Italy, who was signed with the full endorsement and input of Curbs to help out with the scounting and signing of players.

No sooner has Nani polished off his first plate of spag bol, Curbs declares that he cannot work with the guy who he whole heartedly endorsed as the right guy to work alongside him and sods off, leaving the club managerless after the transfer window has closed. Needless to say this had the remaining fans up in arms. BG and Dux draw up a shortlist of top quality potential managers, making sure to publicly rule Big Sam out before they start, and set about interviewing for the job. They get Zola (my thoughts on this have been made clear before) and then BG and Dux go toe to toe with Roman and Kenyon to get Zola the man he wants for an assistant.

Then comes Black September and the world economy takes a nose dive, dragging Iceland with it. Fans immediately blame BG for this, although most of them know nothing of Iceland other than Kerry Katona does the adverts for the place. BG hits some serious financial trouble and the media vultures begin to circle. Talk of administraion, fire sales, knock down buy outs and impending doom dominate the papers. BG comes out and says the club is safe, it is protected and it is self financing and not in any trouble. The red tops refuse to believes this, or simply don't want the truth spoiling a good story and continue to hype the demise of the club.

With the transfer window approaching we are led to believe that all our games in January will be televised on QVC and we fans will be lucky if the seats we are sitting on are not sold out from under us. BG remains firm, Dux does his job, Zola and Nani agree on who stays and who goes and all we end up losing is an upity Welsh prat who we manage to con Citeh into paying £14M for and some of the dross that Curbs signed (Hayden Mullins apart). We even pick up a talented young player who is considered one of the best prospects in Europe, and a decent loan signing to bolster our upturn in form. The injuries keep mounting but the league position keeps climbing, the team keeps getting reshuffled but the football is still good to watch and we are watching some of the most promising youngsters in years coming through into the team

None of this would have happened without BG. He could have chosen to saddle the club with massive debt like Hicks and Gillette did at Liverpool, or Glazier did at Man U.
He could have pressed ahead with a new stadium and mortgaged the club to the hilt like Arsenal did, but instead he ordered plans to be drawn up to increase the capacity to almost 50,000 by redeveloping Upton Park so we could keep our spiritual home.

He has overseen virtually all the clubs best players sign long term deals and Zola and Clarke are about to do the same. Zola himself has come out and said we will be in the market for some big signings in the summer, and you can believe anything that he says. He has reduced the cost of season tickets to help the fans out when Man U are upping their prices again next season to force the fans to shoulder the burden of the clubs debt. And as we have all just seen, he has refused to get involved in penny pinching and using the economy to force the club's non-footballing staff to take pay cuts.

For fans who are so well known for their fierce loyalty to their club, they have shown little to the owner. Do we want to become some Arab's plaything like Citeh, where the manager is in charge of little but laying out the cones for the 5 a side, or leveraged to our eyes with debt, chasing titles like Man U, Arsenal and Liverpool?
BG has turned the club into a financially stable, self financing outfit who can compete for Europe. He deserves out thanks and our respect and whatever happens with his ownership of the club he is by far the best Chairman we have ever had.

Hail to the Chief!

By Celtic Hammer