May/Jun 2000 Review

By: Rob Sedgwick
Date: 30/12/2000

May 2000

With first division safety secured, attention in May began to turn to the new stadium project, and two critical decisions which lay ahead in the next few weeks and months.

The first of the decisions was about increasing the club's share capital from a meagre £236,900 to £5m, partly in order to fund the new stadium development

Existing Shareholders were invited to buy two new shares for each one they held at par value. They would also have be given the opportunity to buy more with the board seeking authority to issue any shares left over to interested parties.

In order to be able to issue the shares the club required a two-thirds majority of existing shareholders to back the proposal. In early May the board sent out a questionnaire from chairman Doug Everitt (pictured) to all major certificate holders in order to gauge the likelihood of the rights issue being accepted. The support of at least some of the old board and/or their supporters would have been required in order to get a vote of sufficient magnitude for the proposal to go ahead.

At the end of May the board announced that they had received enough encouragement to press ahead with the proposal, and the vote would be made at the club's AGM in July.

Two days afterwards the Great Coates stadium project received an enormous boost when it was announced that North East Lincolnshire Council (NELC)'s planning director, Keith Archer, had recommended in a report that the principle of building a stadium at the site in Great Coates be accepted in a forthcoming meeting of the council to modify the area's local plan, a necessary step in order for planning permission to proceed.

June 2000

In June, traditionally the quietest month in the club football calendar, Mariners fans focus turned to the bi-annual disaster that is England's appearance in an international football tournament. If anything, this summer was probably worse than normal, a fact that many fans laid the blame on the man pictured on the right, Kevin Keegan.

In the boardroom it was announced that Grimbarian Alex King (pictured), the Newcastle United commercial director, would be joining the board. King's experience was welcomed by Vice chairman Bryan Huxford who said at the time: "He [King] has been a senior executive in football for 30 years and has been at the pinnacle for the last 15 with both Sunderland and Newcastle."

On the playing side, the news that Lee Ashcroft (pictured) was finally on his way out of Blundell Park, returning to his native North West with second division Wigan Athletic was announced. The Ashcroft money (the actual fee received is disputed, but believed to around the £300K mark) was a welcome boost for manager Alan Buckley, who had been restricted by the board to buying players financed only from the proceeds of those that the Grimsby manager managed to offload to other clubs.

As the summer and the close season approached, Grimsby fans, half-jokingly, wondered which ex-Baggies would be arriving next in Cleethorpes.

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