How the worst season in the club's history unfolded

Instead of making an instant return to the Football League, the only thing worth noting is that the club is still in business and able to turn out at Tranmere.

If anyone thought being relegated to the National League 12 months ago was a low point for the club after a period of decline, then they were sadly mistaken.

This campaign was one of bad management, ill-informed decisions, weak leadership and pure carnage. And that was just off the field. On it, and things weren’t any better.

When Pam Duxbury took over as chairwoman – albeit a reluctant one - last summer, the traumas of the Gary Coxall and Dave Jones era were supposed to be put to bed.

Instead their spectre still lingers, and more.

On taking hold, Duxbury said: “If I hadn’t been able to pull money into the club from Sage Investments, there was no money to pay wages, or the bills. If there was no money coming into the club then it was administration and we couldn’t have done that without the help of Sage.’’

For Sage Investments now read ‘supporters’.

Because after John Blackledge opted to withdraw his funding in December, Pools were skint. There was nothing in the bank. Rachal Cartwright’s on-line Just Giving page which raised around £86,000 kept the club ticking along.

It meant wages were able to be paid, some bills were satisfied – although more were ignored and left to mount up.

The money – plus the gate receipts from the self-billed “Save Pools Day” when a crowd of almost 7,000 saw Pools underperform against Wrexham – gave them breathing space to continue trading.

But why did they get in that mess in the first place? Blackledge had enough after seeing £1.8m disappear. How on earth does a National League club managed to blow that much not even halfway through a season?

Make no mistake, terrible decisions and bad calls were a major part of it.

As part of the new, fresh Hartlepool United, the sponsorship deal with Utility Alliance saw the ground revert back to Victoria Park. There was a new strip, a new badge, a new manager and a new squad.

It would be no shock to see next season’s shirts no longer done by BLK. The badge? A costly rebranding exercise, done by someone with no connections to the Pools but with an association with the club’s head of recruitment Paul Watson.

He was behind the appointments of both Dave Jones and Craig Harrison and changed his title to head of football operations during the season.

Pools, at the back end of last season and the start of this, employed their own chef at the training ground. When he was no longer required, they bought in healthy, freshly prepared meals from a business in Middlesbrough.

Watson’s grand plan included the notion than the part-time teams in the National League would fall by the wayside in the second half of the season as Pools’ superior fitness and nutrition came to the fore.

Instead, the team folded. Collapsing against a financial backdrop of woe. Players were more worried where their wage packets would come from rather than their next meal.

Harrison arrived fresh and enthusiastic. The bloke he replaced, Dave Jones, was the complete opposite. However, the spark was soon drained from Harrison, another chewed up and spat out by the club.

By the time he left in February, Pools were on the brink. He was sacked after a soft defeat at Halifax, hounded by the travelling supporters who, to their credit, have never waned in their numbers.

Saturdays at the likes of Maidenhead, Sutton and Dover were well attended. All they want to see is a committed and winning team, but they weren’t getting it. Far from it.

Harrison’s aim was to build a team capable of passing its way out of the division. Recruitment in the summer, be it from Harrison or Watson, didn’t work out.

Teams in this division are big, strong and brutal. Pools, in the main, are not although they have been brutally bad on too many occasions.

Harrison was going to be sacked if Pools lost at Barrow in February. The club was confident they could get Paul Ince in to manage the team for free. The aim was to get ten points in front of the bottom four before administration and a ten-point deduction kicked in.

The Barrow game was postponed, Harrison stayed an extra couple of games before the sack. Ince never arrived.

Two of Harrison’s biggest signings, Jack Munns and Ryan Donaldson, have missed most of the season. Munns has never got started at the club, hardly playing before he was sidelined because of a mouth cancer scare.

Harrison pinned a lot of creativity faith in those two. Instead, he was reliant on the old guard in the main. Nicky Featherstone and Michael Woods have been mainstays, Woods ended up as top scorer.

But they were the central midfield pair back in 2014 when Pools were beaten by Blyth at Victoria Park in the FA Cup. That was supposed to be a low point in time. There’s been plenty more since.

Defensively, Pools have made too many basic and costly errors. Blair Adams, Scott Harrison and Louis Laing especially culpable at times. Behind them and Scott Loach has been a relatively consistent performer, and his displays have get better in recent weeks since Ross Turnbull, the former Middlesbrough keeper, started helping out caretaker boss Matthew Bates.

Both Turnbull and Ged McNamee have worked for free since being asked by Bates in February. Neither Paul Jenkins or Bernard Hirmer have been seen or heard of since they both went absent because of family issues which surfaced when Harrison was sacked.

That’s six staff – managers or coaches – who have been on Pools payroll this season who are no longer around, with Dave Jones, Kevin Cooper and Alex Armstrong, the three who helped take Pools down, all receiving payments at some point.

Add in the cost of employing a head of recruitment, and there’s a big slice of Blackledge’s money gone before running costs of the club and player wages come into play.

It’s also telling that Pools were the National League’s second biggest spenders on agents’ fees, giving almost £19,000 away after the club for so long refused to go down that road under IOR.

Blackledge finally decided, after much deliberation and changing his mind, he couldn’t keep throwing money away.

The Northern Echo met with Duxbury when the club was officially put up for sale: “I’ve been here almost 12 months now and there’s been a lot of distractions, but we are about halfway through a big programme of change which is a huge positive.’’

Quite what that positive change was, nobody knows.

She spoke of legacy issues, past difficulties which needed fixing. She also spoke of timewasters who claimed they wanted to get involved financially, but never showed any wealth.

Whatever the distractions were, the club’s books – the financial documents which would give clarity of the extent of the troubles – were not in place. There was no-one out there willing to take over. The club, rudderless and leaderless, was going down.

She was introduced to one potential saviour by local businesswoman Sam Lee, a former Hartlepool Mail sports journalist and now owner of Publicity Seekers, a town-based PR company. A chance conversation between Lee and The Northern Echo, whilst mulling over Pools’ potential options, resulted in her approaching Chris Musgrave.

The Wynyard Park chief was willing, after getting the backing from Hartlepool Borough Council, the owners of Victoria Park, to move into the club. It was announced the day before the Save Pools Day that he was set to take over.

After seeing the state of the club’s books and what he could make of the finances, the multi-millionaire walked away. There was too many black holes in there for him to plug.

Against all this, club staff were going through a laborious redundancy consultation. If they were to be paid off, there was no chance of a pay off.

There was no leader, no-one to take a hold of the mess. Duxbury was no longer a reluctant chairwoman, she was an absent one. The Victoria Park offices were a morose place to be as staff took donations from generous town folk, £30 here, £75 there, money raised from fund raising efforts.

Hartlepool Borough Council have twice given secured loans to pay player wages. Plenty of bills went unopened; power, broadband, laundry and tax.

The club’s very existence was in serious doubt. Over a century of history, pain, joy and anguish was coming to an end.

Along came Raj Singh, in association with Jeff Stelling. Their takeover may have been drawn out and Singh, as he openly admits, might not have been first choice to take control.

He’s in charge, the hard work starts now in righting the wrongs of three years of mismanagement since IOR and Ken Hodcroft handed over the debt-free club to Coxall and, in turn, to Sage and Co.