BigTime wrote:
Looking from the outside, and I accept there is a lot we aren’t privy to and much that goes on is hidden, it appears to me that the off season is the time to get a club’s ducks in a row on and off the field. Hand on heart I don’t think we can say we did.
Our recruitment quality wise looks good, numbers wide poor. I accept that we needed to get numbers off our books but one hopes money saved is reinvested at some stage. Off the field we seem to have realised match day experience was woeful so we’ve made some changes - shifting seating to opposite side of pitch, bringing in a couple of high end food vans and a bouncy castle. It a positive but it’s only a start. What next? What about all the other stuff? I don’t believe the way we launched our shirt - five and a half minutes before season started, was planned. Are the replica shirts available yet? The amount of merch on sale that I saw was very bijou and not overly thrilling. What about sponsors? That can’t be called a success. Look at. The Twitter account. Both Wayne and Stock have pictures saying they had good games. Do you see mention of any personal sponsors? Do they have them? If so give the sponsors some value.
What about the website? Does anyone periodically check it? We’re quite a few weeks in now I do think it should be in better shape and ideally ready to go at the start of the season. Will we ever have pictures of the players by their names? Team sheets- forget the programmes (that I thought were very well done but last seen in 2021) getting a copy of them is completely random. Remember back in the day someone like Chris Gale and Buck and Dusty would go to a local school? Don’t we do that anymore- last I recall was the Leyland brothers inKent and that was last season. And then to top it all off we have no match day SM comms or match day reports. I think it might be time for those who run the club just to have a state of play meeting and identify what has worked, what hasn’t and what needs doing. I think we’ll be able to say we’ve grown our crowds back up to about 1000 but that’s not 5000 or anywhere close. We went round shops in Wimbledon and got them to put up posters for free tickets. Not a bad idea although you have to charge at some stage. Did that work? Did we think about doing the same in nearby and quite busy Tooting Broadway?
Crikey we’ve got our work cut out. Lots of work to do.
Can't disagree with any of that. It would be much more palatable if the owner or one of the higher ups came out and actually engaged with the fan base, gave us an insight into what they are thinking and where they see the club going. The silence toward the fans is deafening and I feel increasingly insulting. I like Eccles and he's doing the best he can, but he keeps referring to 'the plan'. What does that ultimately mean? If the owner came out and said we are in a rebuild, there will be limited investment for a period as we develop a group of players to move forward with, I could handle that and accept it. At the minute we are just in stasis, as has been said before.
Take any of the other expansion clubs, Midlands, Cornwall, Toulouse, they absolutely slay us when it comes to quality of engagement. Listen to their owners, chairperson, coaches speak or read an interview and they speak with clarity and purpose, you can feel they have something they are working towards. We are just a shell of something at the minute, not doing anything particularly effectively or with any real conviction.
