ONE CLUB

[rdusher]

I wanted to drop a line here to urge a sense of unity.

I read this religiously, although it doesn't always benefit my wellbeing or make the job in hand any easier, and whilst I love to see the forum so alive, with so many suggestions of how we can improve, where we are going wrong and what we should do better, it is a huge sense of frustration that this forum only comes to life when things aren't going as well as we would hope. I try not to comment or post on here too often, as I'm likely to become defensive over some of the things that are written, and as a fan owned club, with a responsibility to serve it's community, the opinions of everyone are important and a platform on which to share them is essential.

I would, however, like to touch on a few of the things I've seen and heard across various mediums over the past few weeks.

"This club is a shambles from top to bottom..."

This really hurts. Very few will know the amount of work that goes into keeping this club alive. There are some of you on here that have volunteered your time and services to the club over the years, and continue to do so, at a board level or otherwise, who will know how much time and effort goes in to providing what the vast majority see as 90 minutes on a Saturday. There are a hell of a lot of you who have not.

The reality is that OUR Club comprises so much more than what is displayed on a Saturday afternoon. The academy, the community, the scholarship, the first team, the development team, the fundraising team, the volunteer working group, the club shop, the part ownership programme, the secretarial team, the finance and accounting team, the commercial team... the list goes on and on. Every single element of this club is run by volunteers who give so much time, and more often than not, money out of their own pockets, to keep this club alive so the vast majority can remain invested in the 90 minutes of a Saturday afternoon. Remember, with the exception of the players in the team, the coaches throughout the various parts of the club and the groundsman, not a single one of us receives a penny for our efforts. We don't do it for accolade, or for gratitude, we do it purely out of love for our club and our community, so please please exercise caution with your comments as above and similar, because your frankly throwing a lot of disrespect at people who deserve better.

"The board need to start backing the manager"

As the chairman of this board, I can tell you that it would be impossible for us to back the manager any more than we do. There is not a day or evening that goes by when one of us isn't involved in an appointment or a meeting of some sort to tend to club business. From the outside, it may be easy to think that the extent of the backing we give to the manager is releasing funds to the budget, but where do you think those funds come from? The companies who provide commercial backing to us don't come knocking on our door, there is a VERY small group of people who go out and hunt them down. Without them, the budget that we can provide to Chris, modest though it is, wouldn't be there. This is how they "back the manger" The finance team who keep abreast of all the incomings and outgoings through daily reconciliation to ensure we keep a tight reign on expenditure to ensure that our forecast for the season is adhered to, so we don't end up in a situation where we have to withdraw any of the budget at any point during the season, to allow Chris to operate in the confidence that he can build a team that can stay together for the season, rather than axing a percentage of them after Christmas, as we see with so many other teams in and around our level. That's how they "back the manager". The morning phone call I have with Chris from my office at work, EVERY SINGLE DAY, that ensures we are all on the same wavelength from First Team to Boardroom, to make sure we all are pulling in the right direction. That's how I back the manager. Across every area of the club, there are people working tirelessly to "back the manager" every day. In fairness, I've never actually seen such a tight knit team all focussed on delivering one common goal in any industry I've ever worked or managed in.

let’s face it, the fan owned model is dead at this level

I honestly don't believe this, but appreciate that some do, and while it goes against everything I hold in my heart about this club, it is a subject that I have heard raised a few times recently. I genuinely believe that, although there are elements of the organisation that will always remain hamstrung due to the constitution of the club, there are also immense benefits. I believe this is part of a wider conversation that I have no doubt will become tabled at some point in the not too distant future, but for now, I'll echo Alex's comments that if people feel strongly enough about this to take action on tabling the conversation, there is a clear method of doing this laid out in the club constitution.

use more of the player lottery

I think this has been covered before, so I'll stop short by saying simply, this was covered at the AGM so if you are still asking this question, it points to one of three things.

1) You are a part owner who attended the AGM either in person or virtually but weren't listening.
2) You are a part owner who didn't spare the time or effort to attend the AGM either in person or virtually.
3) You care enough about OUR club to voice your frustrations on the unofficial forum but not enough to become a Part Owner and help shape the future direction of the club.

I said all this last summer! Look at my previous posts every1 had something to say then but look where we are now! Need to take action NOW

Having looked back at all of your posts, I'm yet to find a positive one. You seem to come to life when the wolf is at the door. I'm not sure if the username here is your real name Simon, but despite managing Season Tickets and Part Ownerships myself, your name remains unfamiliar to me. I'd love to have the passion you show utilised in a more positive fashion within the club. Please keep reading on for ways we can make this happen.

Wasn't there but twitter / radio diamonds said it all

Seen a lot of this recently, and it does provide quite a lot of frustration for me. I know we've had a lot of away games in recent weeks, and I know that times are tough for a lot of people, but we provided coach travel for the away game to Fakenham and very few took us up on the offer. Our away support in recent weeks has been pitiful. If this continues in to our home games, then it will only serve to make things tougher. When we constructed the budget for the coming season, as a board we were conservative in our expectations of attendances, and perhaps overly cautious in budgeting for lower than we might achieve, but this is an area of the club that we really can't underperform on if we have any chance of remaining sustainable. I know you are all frustrated, and I know you might think that the team, the manager and the board don't deserve your support right now, but with so many limitations and restrictions on our abilities currently to generate revenue, voting with your feet really will be a nail in our coffin.

Feel sorry for the board to be honest after all the effort put in over the summer

We don't need your pity, please replace it with your support. We sit here just a few weeks after another uncontested election, which honestly broke my heart. It leaves us undermanned for another season. It increases the workload on the few individuals around the table. It makes our goals harder to achieve. So many of you here seem to know what the answers are and what we should be doing to move forward in the right direction, yet so few of you come forward to channel that energy in a positive fashion. Perhaps you don't feel you can commit to standing for the board? That's fine, there's so many other ways to get involved. Many hands make light work, and if you can spare an hour or two in the week to help out, the majority of the work can be completed remotely. If you can can offer an hour or thirty minutes before or after a match day to support the matchday volunteers, you'll be taking some pressure off of the people who are already doing far too much.

If you don't volunteer, come forward!
If you aren't a Part Owner, become one!
If you don't play the lottery, sign up!

If you don't do any of the above, then have a think about what more you could be doing before you jump on here and start criticising those who are working their hardest to keep your club alive.

Over the next seven days we have the FA Youth Cup at Hayden Road tomorrow (18th) and the Development team on Saturday (23rd)
I'll be there, and I'll be happy to speak to any of you face to face about how you can take the energy out of your keyboard and into the club. I'd hope most of you know who I am, but for those who don't, I'm the skinny guy with the beard and weird shoes. I'll likely have a fag in one hand and a Guinness in the other and I'll be waiting to talk to you.

Remember, this is OUR club, and it's in OUR hands to get ourselves firing again!!

Rob

[Adrian]

I never thought I would be reading some of the stuff that I've been reading across this forum and the socials in the past week.

Back in November both the club and the fanbase were full of toxicity, there was a board shake up and then within a month everyone started pulling in the same direction. From then on, while we were not getting the results on the pitch, everyone could see the board were working hard, we were all full of praise for them, results started to pick up and we went into summer relegated but a real positivity around the club.

Now, we have a bad start to the season and the toxicity comes flooding back, last year the issue was 'board members shouldn't become managers' which was a bad decision and rightly attracted shouts of 'the board don't know what they are doing' but this year we have a board in place who have proven themselves with the hard work they did to keep the club going last year, we have a manager with bags of experience - all the tools we need in the box when in a criss - and yet they are being somewhat unfairly criticised.

Nobody should be saying 'we are lucky to have a club' or 'Chris is working for free' as it comes across as making excuses and a reason to accept failure.

Let's just be frank and say the start to the season on the pitch has been bad, Chris Nunn did not expect the squad he has assembled to be win-less a month into the season, neither did we, but that is where we are.

We could all argue, be toxic, sack Chris, get in another manager, see 8 players leave and 9 come in, another mid season rebuild! but if we don't have the money to sign proven quality we will just be in the same position.

We have a manager who can get it right, 2 training sessions a week is very little time and that's why last season we saw some improvements immediately but it did take 3 months until things really clicked.

Look at the squads we have had in the past 10 years, Dolmans, Snedkers, Sandy's and a bunch of other K*ttering promotion winners, luxury players like that are not cheap, we were able to blend 5 top players with a mix of other good players, this year we only have Michael Harriman as we simply can't afford 3 or 4 luxury players, the down point with that is Harriman isn't available every game and also while he's a football league player he's not experienced at winning titles at this level so it's not the same as having 2 or 3 players who have.

Time to be realistic and think of it as building a house, if you have money you can get 10 builders in and cut the construction time in half, if you don't have money, you have 2 builders and the job takes longer.

[Dazzler]

<BUMP>

[davealbon]

I never thought I would be reading some of the stuff that I've been reading across this forum and the socials in the past week.

Back in November both the club and the fanbase were full of toxicity, there was a board shake up and then within a month everyone started pulling in the same direction. From then on, while we were not getting the results on the pitch, everyone could see the board were working hard, we were all full of praise for them, results started to pick up and we went into summer relegated but a real positivity around the club.

Now, we have a bad start to the season and the toxicity comes flooding back, last year the issue was 'board members shouldn't become managers' which was a bad decision and rightly attracted shouts of 'the board don't know what they are doing' but this year we have a board in place who have proven themselves with the hard work they did to keep the club going last year, we have a manager with bags of experience - all the tools we need in the box when in a criss - and yet they are being somewhat unfairly criticised.

Nobody should be saying 'we are lucky to have a club' or 'Chris is working for free' as it comes across as making excuses and a reason to accept failure.

Let's just be frank and say the start to the season on the pitch has been bad, Chris Nunn did not expect the squad he has assembled to be win-less a month into the season, neither did we, but that is where we are.

We could all argue, be toxic, sack Chris, get in another manager, see 8 players leave and 9 come in, another mid season rebuild! but if we don't have the money to sign proven quality we will just be in the same position.

We have a manager who can get it right, 2 training sessions a week is very little time and that's why last season we saw some improvements immediately but it did take 3 months until things really clicked.

Look at the squads we have had in the past 10 years, Dolmans, Snedkers, Sandy's and a bunch of other K*ttering promotion winners, luxury players like that are not cheap, we were able to blend 5 top players with a mix of other good players, this year we only have Michael Harriman as we simply can't afford 3 or 4 luxury players, the down point with that is Harriman isn't available every game and also while he's a football league player he's not experienced at winning titles at this level so it's not the same as having 2 or 3 players who have.

Time to be realistic and think of it as building a house, if you have money you can get 10 builders in and cut the construction time in half, if you don't have money, you have 2 builders and the job takes longer.

I mean, I largely agree with what you're saying, but I'm also just going to leave this here...

...something at boardroom level was driving them [volunteers] away, anyone involved with the club during that period should not be involved in the club today, they are people who stood back rather than speak out and they can't be trusted because it's a fan ran club and they were supposed to ensure the club was being ran in the best interest of the fans. It somehow ended up in Richard Maxwell being made manager and that's something that took more than one person to allow to happen.