A FRUSTRATED Southend United fan has his say.

It is customary to start a letter about the love affair with your football club by outlining the length of time spent in the ‘relationship’.

It sets out your credibility as a person with an opinion about your club.

I will be no different, I started watching Southend in 1980.

A game against Bradford on a Friday night at Roots Hall was my first game. I stood on the North Bank with my older brother and his pal, and the rest (as they say) is history.

And what a history.

One of my earliest memories of the club was seeing how proud my brother was to be on the back page of the Evening Echo, standing behind a home made banner stating ‘Rubins Out’ (Rubin brothers owned the club at that time).

I was too young to really understand what went on in the short tenure of Chairman Anton Johnson, but it was clearly a very difficult time for the club.

Years later, it would be me standing on the North bank (and many other grounds up and down the country) calling for Vic Jobson to get out of our club.

Vic had an unerring ability to start a fight in an empty house.

There was almost no-one he didn’t fall out with, even managing to ban Howard Southwood from Roots Hall.

Some of the Southend players wore Jobson Out t-shirts under their kit, such was the breadth of feeling to get Jobson out of our club.

We were on our way to an unlikely promotion from the Championship when Vic fell out with David Webb, thus denying us a chance at making real history.

I struggled for years to get over that.

Until recently I thought that killing your dreams of promotion was the worst thing a chairman could do to its clubs supporters.

Chairman and owners have come and gone at our club, and there have been ups and down on and off the field.

But nothing, and I mean nothing, can compare to the depths of disasters we have seen under Ron Martin.

The list of failures and misdemeanours Ron has wracked up are on another level when compared to past custodians.

There are too many to list here, but near top of that list is our departure from the Football League.

I will never forgive Ron for that.

That one is totally on your tally sheet Ron.

It wasn’t the players fault, nor the managers who did that Ron, it was all you.

Bought and paid for by your incompetence.

But even that has been put in the shade by the continued financial problems at the club, and the way that Ron has treated its employees.

We keep hearing that he has repeatedly fail to pay staff at Southend United.

People who graft all week for the club, deserve to be treated with fairness and respect, and the very least they should get in return for their labour is the money they have earned.

But Ron seems unable or unwilling to meet this most basic level of humanity.

The noise surrounding off the field issues is starting to build, and soon it will drown out the good work at the club that’s happening on the pitch.

How long before the players aren’t paid?

How long before a game gets called off because the stewards haven’t been paid, and refuse to turn up for work?

And how long before Kevin Maher and his fantastic team have their heads turned by another club, and decide to go elsewhere?

And who would blame them if they did?

The bit that puzzles me most is why it has come to this?

I have no idea what the budget at the club looks like, but even an optimistic budget set at the start of this season could not have anticipated the levels of support the club has been getting through the turnstiles.

If we continue with current averages, over 125,000 tickets will be bought this year for home games at Roots Hall, with about 60 per cent of those being paid upfront in season ticket sales in the summer.

That’s way more than nearly all the teams in this division.

But all that season ticket money and boosted gate money seems to have come and gone.

But gone where?

To pay what?

And in the midst of this latest financial crisis we signed Kacper Lopata.

A major signing for our club, but at a time when we can’t pay our tax liabilities, and can’t pay our junior staff, it now looks like a very strange or misinformed decision.

Because right now, my biggest concern is not how many clean sheets we keep, nor if our amazing uneaten run can continue.

My biggest fear is not having a club to support in seven weeks from now.

What should happen next?

Well, I could call for Ron to leave, but we know he won’t so I won’t waste my breath on that.

He won’t go until he has either killed the club, or seen his property development dreams come to fruition.

I also don’t really want to hear what Ron has to say, because I wont believe a word of it, so what’s the point of that?

But I do trust the likes of Tom Lawrence and Stan Collymore to speak the truth, and I would like to start by hearing from them both on the full extent of the problems at the club, and only then can we start to understand what needs to be done to put this club on a pathway to stability.

Robert Spindloe

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>The final say: On the pitch I love Southend United but off it it's breaking my heart