This week has seen the tenth anniversary of Jeff Bonser putting Walsall Football Club up for sale in one gigantic strop after the bedsheet protest at Grimsby, writes Walsall blogger Mark Jones.

Like most fans, I have no idea if it still is up for sale or not.

I can’t recall any huge announcement taking us off the market, so who knows there could be some young couple nervously clutching the estate agent’s spec right now.

It was equally unclear if it was just the club or the land which is rented from the landlord that was in the classified column.

A few weeks after Jeff’s outburst we were informed that the only interest had been from that mysterious group known as the ‘property developers’.

This kind of talk has always amused me. Property developers need planning permission to develop property, councils don’t usually give planning permission to groups of people who threaten the existence of their professional football teams therefore said property developers tend to lose interest in said property.

Of course you can put something up for sale and not really want to sell it.

In those circumstances you probably wouldn’t take any genuine offers seriously either.

Younger viewers might want to know what the circumstances that lead to this big metaphorical throwing toys out of the pram situation.

Well we were away at Grimsby and the harsh reality that Big Fat Jan Sorensen wasn’t actually the best manager around was beginning to kick in.

Form and results were going down the toilet faster than a four course meal round at Posh Spice’s place.

The lucrative cup heroics of earlier in the season were becoming a distant memory and it wasn’t obvious where the extra revenue that had been generated was actually being spent.

Arriving at a local hostelry we found a group of fellow fans who were being followed around by a Central TV crew in good spirits.

In those days Central had a late night ‘soccer’ show complete with a selection of ropey local ‘celebrities’.

You know the kind of show that always tries, and fails, to have a zany approach to the game. (Just imagine if they tried to get away with that now eh?)

The feature on the band of travelling Saddlers never saw the light of day anyway.

The particular bone of contention being the words ‘Bonser Out’ painted onto a big bedsheet, which apparently caused Jeffrey so much distress that he couldn’t carry on any more.

The match itself ended in a predictable and depressing 3-0 defeat to proper manager Alan Buckley’s men.

Ian Roper in particular had a nightmare and you wonder where his career would have ended up without Sir Ray’s timely intervention a few months later.

The following Monday the ‘for sale’ story broke and, as usual, it was all the fans’ fault.

If it was a move designed to illicit sympathy and a ‘We Love Our Landlord’ campaign never materialised.

Many fans were more concerned about how we could overturn a 2-0 deficit away at Bournemouth in the LDV Trophy the next evening as we tried to achieve that longed-for Wembley debut.

Four hundred or so diehards made the difficult midweek journey to the South Coast and gave the team tremendous backing as they actually lead 2-0 and 3-1 until a desperately unfortunate Wayne Evans o.g. late on.

Talking to two home fans before the game, they genuinely couldn’t see why we’d travelled.

Loyalty, dedication and the desire to back your team when they needed it most didn’t seem to have occurred to them.

Funnily enough it didn’t seem to make a difference to those who run our club either.

A decade on and Jeff has just about managed to keep it going with only the rent money to take his mind off badly-painted slogans.

Ray Graydon and Dicky Dosh have given the club some good times, although we still await a Wembley visit, no-one has ever seen that Central footage and it took ages to clean those sheets …

Joke – they went to the laundrette really …

Joke!

Oh yes and Mike Lloyd is heading for Division Four with Port Vale – ha ha ha.

Walsall fans have your say below