FORMER Shaker Peter Reid is in no doubt about who should shoulder plenty of the blame for the club's crisis.

The 63-year-old played his final game before retirement for Bury against Rochdale back in August 1994, his only appearance for the club.

And he has watched events at Gigg Lane from afar, their problems deepening at the same time that another one of his former clubs Bolton came close to the brink.

Reid is no stranger to being at a club with financial problems having been at Plymouth when they entered administration in 2011.

"The EFL has got to be held responsible,” he said.

"It’s a fact of life that they make the rules, so the buck stops with them.

“I couldn’t believe what was going on with Bolton and Bury in the summer.

"Obviously, people know what I feel about Bolton, and the fact I’ve lived there most of my life, but it gutted me to see a great club like Bury get to that stage. I hope they can come back again.”

With the EFL being told to apologise to the Shakers by a parliamentary committee while also holding their own QC-led enquiry, attentions are turning to how the club will return next season, momentum building behind a phoenix movement.

“It won’t be easy for them,” Reid said.

“Once you go down to the non-league it’s a huge job to get back to the league and I hope they put a manager in there who knows what he’s doing.

“If they have to start from the very bottom then the one thing they have got going for them is a huge fanbase at that level of football.

"That is a solid base to work off, so I really wish them well.”

Reid had been sold the vision of a prosperous, upwardly mobile club on his arrival at Home Park in June 2010, it took just a few days for him to realise things were not as they should be.

Finances quickly began to unravel and Reid was forced to sell several players to keep the club afloat. He could not, however, stop Argyle from officially entering into administration the following March – a spell he describes as one of the most difficult in nearly 30 years in the dugout.

“Everything looked great on the surface," he recalls.

"It’s a big club, big fanbase, and there were some very good players in there.

"I just didn’t know at the time it was about to go bad.”