Chin Up Pompey, Chin Up Pompey

To describe Portsmouth supporters as “long suffering” rather misses the point.

Since they won the FA Cup in 2008, it’s been a pretty hideous time for the club. They purchased a lot of players, which it turned out they might not have been able to afford and they went down in pretty ignominious circumstances in 2010.

Throughout the entire time the fans of the famous old club maintained their dignity and support for Portsmouth Football Club and earned themselves much credit as they made the FA Cup Final again the year they got relegated.

However, if those supporters thought things were going to get easier following their relegation and subsequent buy-out then the fans were sadly wrong.

They managed to purchase enough players for a good, if small squad after some wheeler-dealing from then Manager Steve Cotterill who led them to a mid-table finish and it might have been expected that, with a period of stability and some what looked like astute strengthening, a play-off push might be on the horizon.

However, recent history has taught fans to expect only the unexpected, so their manager did a flit to Nottingham Forest in October then came last weeks news – seemingly out of the blue – that the company that owns Portsmouth FC (2010) Ltd, CSI, has gone into administration.

The Administrator that helped stabilise the club before, Andrew Andronikou has been appointed to a joint role to do the same for the parent company and he apparently is hopeful that the club can be sold again telling the Daily Telegraph “there is always a solution.”

In the meantime the Pompey faithful have all the worry of not only whether they will have a club at all to support, but whether that club, assuming it does survive, will face a points deduction for going into Administration.

Andronikou believes they can avoid this fate because it’s the parent company that has gone bust. The Football League board will sit on this matter soon, but were forced to clarify their own rules regarding Parent Companies, ironically enough, after events just down the road at Southampton. In 2009 when The Saints hit the skids they made the same argument – that they should have been spared a points deduction, because it was not the football club itself that was having money troubles.

The League rejected this plea and found that the two organisations were “inextricably linked as one economic entity”. The Telegraph reports that this does not “appear” to be the case at Fratton Park.

All of which is fine, but does beg the question of how on earth this has been allowed to happen again?

Are there not rules to stop football clubs falling into the wrong hands? And if there is - and it’s the Fit and Proper Persons Test, the test that all prospective owners of football clubs have to pass, the problem is that time and time again it seems to fail the fans of these clubs who are used almost as playthings by these owners.

The FA needs to make sure that its own regulations are rigorous and fit for purpose, or else the whole thing is a pointless façade.

Surely we need to learn lessons so that this is the last time these type of stories are associated with this famous old club.