pay a tax bill of over 1 million pounds and sign promising players from the junior ranks. He narrowly missed promotion in the first year and took the team to the grand final where they were narrowly beaten. Over the next 2 years he got promotion to the top level for all the Oldham teams whilst getting young players like Chris Joynt, Barrie McDermott, David Bradbury, Gary Christie and Tommy Martyn to international level but due to the clubs massive debts run up by the previous management, Tunks was forced to sell his best players. Bob Lindner took over as captain-coach. The club sold the dilapidated Watersheddings in June 1994 for £1.25m to pay-off debts and moved to Oldham Athletic's Boundary Park stadium on the nearby Chadderton/Royton boundary. When a Rupert Murdoch funded Super League competition was proposed, part of the deal was that some traditional clubs would merge. Oldham were supposed to merge with Salford to form a club to be known as Manchester which would compete in the Super League. When Salford visited Oldham for a match on Good Friday, 14 April, supporters of both clubs demonstrated against the unpopular idea by invading the pitch during the interval. This merger was resisted and instead they adopted the name Oldham Bears and were founder members of the new league. Relegation came in the second year of the new summer season, 1997, when they finished below Paris Saint-Germain. Later that year, under chairman Jim Quinn, they went bankrupt with debts of £2,000,000. A new team Oldham Roughyeds was then formed in December to play at a lower level. The new club was created by Chris Hamilton and a band of three directors. The Roughyeds tag had been a long accepted nickname for the old club. It is however generally accepted that the new club (Oldham Roughyeds) is a legal continuation of the old club formed in 1876. The Millennium Mike Ford retired as player-coach of Oldham in 2001 and in January the following year took up a post as defensive co-ordinator with the Irish Rugby Football Union. Oldham put Mark Knight in temporary charge of the first team. After a successful 2001 season, they narrowly missed out on promotion to the Super League, losing to Widnes 12–24 in the Northern Ford Premiership Grand Final. During the 2002 season they played at Ashton United's Hurst Cross ground in Ashton-under-Lyne, due to