Batchelor boy and the 'Dream Team'

It's been another fascinating week for Chester City, and as usual, the main interest comes from off-pitch matters.

Since Stephen Vaughan slapped a £2m price tag on the club (which by my maths makes it worth about one million Woolworths companies plus one million Honda F1 teams), one interested party has attracted more attention than any other.

Step forward John Batchelor, a man who this week has struck terror into the hearts of all City fans with his frank comments on how he'd run the club. You can read them here in the Chronicle interview (not for the faint of heart).

Doesn't exactly come across as very endearing to the fans, does he? Deep down, beneath my disbelief at the concept of trying to resurrect a Sky TV series which ended last year and erect a real-life Harchester Utd, I admire his brutal honesty, if little else.

Just to detach from him admitting he doesn't "give a monkey's about" Chester City's 120 years of heritage, the idea of Harchester Utd seems flawed to say the least.

OK, there are 27,000 registered 'fans' of the Sky TV series 'Dream Team', but that will not correlate to 27,000 fans of a real-life Harchester Utd.

A recent motor racing concept called Superleague saw teams drive around with liveries of football teams including Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspurs, AC Milan and Rangers, but the grandstands at the tracks they raced on (including the season-opener in British track Donington) were practically empty, because supporters of these clubs didn't much care for the idea of supporting a car which had their team's logo on, and a driver they'd probably never heard of.

I used to watch a cartoon on CITV called The Hurricanes, but would I have supported a real-life football team called that, if they played anywhere up to 600 miles away? No!

And what of the Harchester Utd football team? A look at their (fictional) history says they fought relegation (hm, maybe this club isn't so different after all), qualifying for the Champions League (ah, that's different), and being found guilty of match-fixing and corruption and therefore being demoted a division.

Oh, and then to finish off, an explosion at the club killed many of the players.

I think Chester City's history has enough drama already, thanks.

Stephen Vaughan met Batchelor earlier this week, then said in an interview "under no circumstances would he sell" to him, adding Vaughan had "more chance of taking over at Liverpool than he (Batchelor) has of taking over here," much to the relief of City fans.

Batchelor remains undeterred, but given his ideas and his...questionable past with previous ownership/interest in football clubs (a number of Stockport, Mansfield and York City fans have unmistakable views on what they think of Batchelor), it seems unlikely the 'Dream Team' will be playing at the Deva Stadium anytime soon.