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Gabara on SAF's reign

SAF and/or his spokesman Ivo Ilic Gabara have been doing the rounds recently - I heard Gabara speaking on TalkSport on Tuesday with SAF quoted on Arabianbusiness.com.

The common theme for both was 'they were happy with his time as owner of Pompey' and they feel he 'achieved exactly what he set out to do'.

Gabara also denied that SAF had been 'out of his depth' and also reacted to questions about players leaving and how this could have been avoided - to be honest I do not really think that way as this is looking back, not forward, which is something I want to do now!

See Gabara's thoughts, on the above and more, in this sky sports video below...

I tend to disagree with Gabara myself as I do think that SAF got in too deep and did not expect things to be as 'rough' or 'tough' as they had been - he was in 'over his head', 'out of his depth', whatever way you look at it, although I genuinely believe that he came in with the best intentions but was 'surprised' by further things he was not expecting to find!

All in all he did not do a lot to help himself during his 40-odd day reign as the owner of Pompey, but others - lets be honest - did their best to make him look worse, and, like I have said before countless times, when all is said and done it is not SAF that got us into the mess we were in, he was just unable to get us out of it as such...

Again as said though, lets start to look forward and not back - that said with the new owner we need actions to follow words, talk is cheap, actions speak much louder!

PLAY UP POMPEY!

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Writer: pompeyrug

Date:Wednesday October 7 2009

Time: 7:40AM

Your Comments

I agree. I think he had the best intentions but suddenly realised he didnt have the means to follow these through. But as much as i dont want to look backwards his involvement and stalling has lost us players and potentially our Premier League status, which is something i cant get out of my mind at the moment.

brucey_main

altho it wasnt his wild over-spending that got us to the brink of going out of business that left us in the position of having to sell players tho did it? i think another thing we have to remember is faraj's mob didnt surface until, what, a week before the transfer deadline ended - if there were more concerns early on why wasnt this lot found before. i know it sounds like i am 'defending' SAF but again i do not think it is his fault as such that we were in a position where we had to sell...
that said, all in all from those that have gone who seriously would have stayed anyway? johnson was always going regardless - kranjcar, i still think we are actually better off without him tbh, crouchy i love but he just didnt fit into this system and wouldnt have wanted to play in it. distin, for me, lost heart long, long ago...

pompeyrug

I too have sympathy with SAF - he tried but the club was in such a mess that he ran out of time. More about SAF in Toast next Sunday!!

eastneydave

we all questioned why DD took so long compared to that of other clubs - I think it was a lot less to do with Al-Fahim, and more to do wih the fact that pompeys finances were so screwed up, it really did take 10x longer than usual! I feel sorry for the guy - he said he wanted to buy PFC, carried it out, and probably saved the club, despited the fact that when DD was going on, he must have known that he didn't have the finances to look after the club as it had been so badley run in the past. Good luck to him in the future - I really think he did save the club. Not least because sasha wasn't going to sell to Al-Faraj anyway, so he was necessery for us to get to where we are now!

pompeycarpet

It's just a shame that sashas legacy as owner will be winning the FA cup, wheras Al Fahims legacy will be taking ages to do anything, and having the worst start in premier league history!

pompeycarpet

personally i think this whole thing was some sort of media ploy, after all according to SAF he sold 90% for £0 but just 6 weeks ago he spent £60 million and he has said he spent 5 million so he has lost almost £65 million what person in there right mind would do this? do you not think that this ali al faraj consortium payed al fahim to take over the club by paying for it all and giving him 10% and the reason behind that is gaydamark woudnt sell to them for the sueing story...so they set up a thing where it looked like they were up against eachother and after all was sorted out and hte transaction was completely finished they wait a while for the water to cool and then just do this so no questions were asked? either way if they have the money and want to invest who am i to complain...PLAY UP POMPEY!!!

thabuch

1 Gaydamak must take responsibility for getting the club into such a financial state. 2 Gaydamak and SAF must take responsibility for the loss of players because of their protracted takeover negotiations. 3 SAF must take responsibility for buying the club when he new that he had no cash to inject and that the world recession had cut the value of his holdings. 4 Gaydamak must take responsibility for selling to SAF when he knew a better and safer offer was coming from the AF brothers. 5 Storey - I think the jury is still out on that one. a) He's been the CEO for a long time and must have known what was happening behind the scenes a long time before SAF appeared. b) He then courted SAF and persuaded him to invest. c) He then dumped SAF in favour of his own consortium. d) He then tried to convince us that he was the good guy, the only one who could save the club. e) Most of his statements were a veiled undermining of SAF (eg he's seen papers re refinancing but suggesting that in fact they might not be genuine - but not as directly as that). On the one hand he was showing support for SAF but on the other he was working to get the AF brothers on board. f) How many times has he said that he's the saviour of the club, never admitting that he had led us down that rocky road in the first place. He's now emerging squeaky clean and revelling in his 'hero' image. But I, along with others, have ridden a roller coaster of emotions over the last few months thanks to all these political manoeuverings. For me the only one to come out of all this with his integrity intact is Paul Hart. But what do I care? As long as the new owner becomes a true Pompey fan and builds the club into a 21st century outfit I'll be ecstatic.

PFCblue

According to PS, Gaydamak asked him to find new investors when SAF was dragging his heels, his mistake was to find the one guy who was suing Gaydamak senior. Apart from that, yes he's had a hand in the trouble but as I wasn't a fly on the wall at any meetings how much of it was due to PS and how much to AG? Was he just following orders or did he have any significant input? Will he have any influence on the new owner? Answers on a postcard .... Anyhoo a new chapter has started and it looks like being a good one. SAF says he has become a fan, and, despite all the turmoil of the last few months, I will welcome him to FP as a fan.

Lemmi

a "nominal sum" ... probably a few mil ... you know ... peanuts really.

pompey--pessimist

Its true that many of the problems weren't of SAF's making, and I do believe its true that he did keep the administrator away at least once, but I also think he was out of his depth in that we needed money straight away that he wasn't going to be able to provide quickly enough. His heart's in the right place, and that's why I'm not in the least disconcerted by him still having a stake in the club. Unlike Guydamek - the prospect of him still being involved now worries me.

tracyc

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