Former Birmingham City co-owner David Sullivan retracts "rude" comments about Carson Yeung
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Former Birmingham City chairman David Sullivan has written exclusively to the Birmingham Mail retracting the "rude, off-the-cuff remarks' he made against new owner Carson Yeung.
Below is the full letter:
"WHEN the final whistle blew against Fulham on Saturday, I was delighted.
Delighted for Lee Bowyer, delighted for Alex McLeish, delighted for the fans and delighted for Birmingham City FC.
But then I felt saddened, deeply saddened, because of all these unresolved issues between the old Blues owners and the new Carson Yeung regime.
Our bitter fall-out just won’t help the club. If it lingers, it could distract the new owners and therefore the manager and the team, as well as costing all of us lots of time and money arguing via lawyers.
For me, the Gold brothers and Karren Brady, it also threatens to sour what we hoped would be a healthy, long-term relationship with a club where we spent nearly 17 years of time, effort and passion.
So today I want to clear the air.
I want to retract the rude, off-the-cuff remarks I’ve made about the Yeung camp.
I want to express my growing admiration for what they are doing at the club.
And I want to publicly offer them the chance to sit down calmly, to tell me in detail what the issues are, and to propose how they think they could be settled.
This is a genuine offer, this time with no barbed comments.
Because I know I was wrong to get personal about Carson Yeung. When I dismissed him as a ‘hairdresser’ and gave my opinion on how they were trying to woo the fans, these were knee-jerk comments that I regret.
I certainly apologise if this caused offence.
One of the reasons I’m taking this step is because of the remarkable things the club are already achieving under the Yeung regime.
I’m very pleased the team we left are now doing so well.
I was chuffed to bits at the 1-0 result at the weekend. Hearing on the radio that they were playing with two strikers was music to my ears.
And I think Yeung and co have done a fantastic deal for adults and season ticket holders, allowing each an under-eight in for free against Sunderland, and knocking £10 off tickets for the Manchester City clash.
I’ll be honest – I don’t know how the club can afford such offers in the long-term!
But Yeung now runs Blues and these are wonderful gestures he’s made to boost attendances.
It’s nice for him to be doing it, and I take my hat off to him.
It’s also good that new board members are going to be based in Birmingham. While living in Birmingham was something the Gold brothers and I couldn’t do because of other commitments, I think it’s important for the club that Yeung’s men will be in town.
The Yeung camp taking players out is another move that impressed me.
I avoided doing things like that as I thought it was the manager’s domain. I only ever went down the training ground a couple of times, so as not to tread on the manager’s toes.
But to be honest, maybe I’ve learned a lesson. If players like to be taken out by the owners and like them to watch the occasional training session, maybe we should have done it, and maybe that’s something I’ll think about doing in any other club I get involved with.
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