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It's just not as simple as this blog and others present it. In huge and essential ways Bates has been good for the club and still is. Instead of just hating him and criticising him automatically for everything, it would be so much more sensible, useful and supportable if these blogs put their prejudice aside and fully acknowledged Bates' success and value to the club - thereby leaving them able to discuss the fewer real concerns without the dominant appearance of being blinded into irrationality by their hatred.

He doesn't ignore feedback from customers. The crowd size is his feedback, and it tells him he's doing okay.

The black-or-white nature of all this really gets me down. Doom and gloom blogs like this (which isn't the worst, by a long way) go on and on about how bad Bates is in every way. He isn't. He saved the club from extinction and has it on the way back to where it belongs with a sound financial foundation, whether TSS and other Bates haters want to accept it or not. But he's not perfect, by a long way. He's rude and arrogant. He's probably set the wage limit too low. The new development seems unjustifiable in comparison with money spent on the squad. Thorp Arch seemed like a blunder. Yet, in order to argue against the blinkered, myopic, sweeping, hatred-based criticism of him (which I, too, think is moronic), it's apparently necessary to defend him across the board, which I don't want to do.

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