Holloway: 'Premier League has never helped me'

Posted Monday, May 23, 2011 by YAHOO Sport

MANCHESTER, England (AP)—Ian Holloway believes the Premier League undermined Blackpool’s attempts to stay in England’s top division and criticized the organization after his club was relegated on Sunday.

“The fat lady has finished singing and I do not like the tune,” Holloway said after Blackpool’s 4-2 defeat at champion Manchester United. “The Premier League have rung me up and said, ‘We really love you, Ian Holloway.’ But they have never helped me.

“It is a great league. But the people who run it, shouldn’t. There should be people above them telling them what to do. Nobody has to hear from me for another 12 months but hopefully I will get the chance to tell them about how they do things.”

Holloway was angry because he was forced to tell players by the third Saturday in May whether options on their contracts were being taken up. In the instances of Richard Kingson, Marlon Harewood and Brett Ormerod, all of whom were on the bench at Old Trafford, the answer was no.

Others—Ian Evatt and Keith Southern—are being retained but are now condemned to vastly reduced terms due to Blackpool’s relegation to the League Championship.

“Ask yourself how you would have felt to be me on Monday morning,” Holloway said. “The Football League give you five days after your last game. The Premier League told us we had to stick to the exact wording of the contracts.

“This was before the biggest game of my life. Surely common sense should have applied and I could have told them afterwards.”

Goals from Charlie Adam and Gary Taylor-Fletcher put Blackpool 2-1 up against United after Park Ji-sung’s strike, but United hit back through Anderson, Michael Owen and an own goal from Evatt.