Quote Originally Posted by The Lone Gunman View Post
In your initial post you said: "A certain member of the Trust who had been at the meeting where everyone swore to keep silence until the club could do it officially didn't keep to his word."

I don't know what meeting you're referring to, but nobody from the Trust was involved. If memory serves, some of the officials from the Supporters' Club got to know about the re-brand before anyone else.

The first I heard of it was on the bus travelling home from the West Ham game. I thought it was a wind-up. Indeed, I actually threatened to stop the bus and chuck Heathblue off if he kept talking about what seemed to be a load of nonsense. However, shortly before we arrived home I got a text from a friend who was very well-connected at the club and he told me that while not all of the post that had appeared on here was true, most of it was. My heart sank.

The following morning I got a call from stadium manager Wayne Nash asking me to attend an urgent meeting with club officials later that day. That's when things got real. Red shirts, no Bluebird on the badge, fire and passion, various promises which never came to fruition, all that bollocks. Strange times indeed.

Three key elements of the re-brand 'package' were Langston to be paid off within days (that went well), a debt-free club (that went well) and a new training ground (whatever happened to that?).

Time is a great healer and the fact that Tan barely shows his face at the club anymore is a plus-point, but plenty of the fans who stopped going to games due to the re-brand have never returned (including some of this board's best contributors), while others who were previously staunch supporters no longer feel the same about the club.

For me, the worst aspect of the re-brand and the reason why I'll never be able to forgive Tan for what he did is that a number of good friends have gone to their graves in recent years having either lost their love for Cardiff City completely or having lost much of their enthusiasm for the club. These were all people I met and became friends with because of the football, and who had previously been staunch supporters for most of their lives. That's something that can never be undone.

The whole thing was so completely and utterly pointless, but I guess we can look back at it as an experience and it certainly changed a lot of lives, in many cases for the better.

Well said Dave.

The info.was leaked by a prominent member of the Supporters Club who had been told ahead of that meeting “ in the strictest confidence”. It was certainly nothing to do with the Trust who were represented by a couple of us at that meeting.

A few points still stick with me regarding that meeting.

1. The senior management of the club who ran the meeting were very embarrassed when admitting when pressed that there was no cogent reason for the changes planned other than it was the whim of the man putting his money in- Vincent Tan.They also showed the proposed new club badge whic looked like it had been devised by a 7 year old.Most of those who ran the meeting were subsequently eased out of the club by the new owner.

2. There was at least one “plant” in the invited audience in a vain attempt to support the proposal. This was then followed up by others being encouraged by the club to dissuade fans from objecting to the plan. They did so by a series of threats of violence at meetings and elsewhere.

3. It took years to minimise/ reverse a lot of the damage done to the club and it’s fans by the ridiculous and unnecessary rebranding decision.Although the memory of it has dimmed over time, it will never completely go away as a dark moment in the club’s history.