'All Change' for Al Fahim

With the the new football season commencing on Saturday, it is a good time to take stock of how much has changed since this Blog first began just 8 weeks ago. At the time we started there were a number of 'facts' about Al Fahim that were unchallenged in the media and at Portsmouth football club:

Al Fahim works for the UN as a Goodwill Ambassador
Al Fahim is successful property developer
Al Fahim is a TV star
Al Fahim is a Billionaire
Al Fahim will bring prosperity, security and success to the club

As the weeks have gone by, this Blog has unpicked the accepted mythology. This has not been easy and we have been criticised for swimming against the tide of accepted opinion. However, thanks partly to this Blog, there are few who would now accept the above picture of Al Fahim in its entirity.

We believe we have added to people's understanding of the true position and have even been able to influence some media debate. The misery of the Hydra customers is now well understood; we have seen supporters of the club debating the events at Hydra in a way that might not have been possible without this site. We have also been able to have some influence on other matters, for example; readers will have noticed that for the first time today, Bhoyrul did not refer to Al Fahim as 'Doctor' and IIMSAM is being probed for misleading claims of affiliation to the UN (no new press releases have been issued for a little while).

We have often been asked about why we started the Blog.

When the takeover at Portsmouth was first announced we saw some unsuspecting supporters declaring they 'were as happier than when the club won the FA Cup'. In part, that encouraged us to set up this Blog. We had insight into Al Fahim that the British football and sports media did not appear to have. We believed it would not end well for supporters of a fine old club and that the lessons of Hydra had been too easily dismissed.

We know readers have appreciated our updates on financial developments during the takeover. We like to think that our uniquely informed insights into this complicated matter have helped supporters of the club make sense of the seemingly bewildering events. In short, regular readers of this Blog have been better informed than those who have relied on the established media.

Perhaps the key long-lasting effect of this event full Summer has been to show how important and effective the lone voice of a Blog can be. Issues such as Al Fahim's role in the takeover have been the exclusive preserve of the news 'trinity': Local Newspapers; Nationals Newspapers and Fans Forums. However we have shown that a Blog with a consistent challenging voice can act as repository for oppositional information in a way the other news sources are not suited to. Just 8 weeks ago, there seemed no role for a loan voice in this area - however we would like to believe that this has shown that this landcsape can change.

We know that we have not always got it right (i.e. the pre-emptive pullout story) but readers have, at least, always known where they stood with the Al Fahim Blog.

If nothing else we hope we have lessened the blow of the past few weeks. How we take the Blog forward remains to be seen. The show is not quite over yet and, although it is not impossible that Al Fahim may pull the deal together, we genuinely don't believe that will happen. Even if the funds are somehow scraped together, the above picture of Al Fahim has been completely changed forever and we have played our part in that.