Back in August I didn’t go to one of Hendon’s most complete performances of the season when the Greens visited The Memorial Ground, Carshalton and came away with a 3-0 win. Some of you may remember my reasons for not attending, but those of you who haven’t read the piece I wrote some seven or so months ago can have a look here.
To be honest, I was a little uneasy about posting the piece on-line as I wasn’t sure how accurate it was. A Robins fan who was in dispute with the ownership of the club kindly read the piece and was very kind about it, so I posted it and got a lot of very nice feedback.
That was until recently when I received an email from a disgruntled reader. I replicate the correspondence word for word in the interests of balance and fairness.
Dear Mr. Whiskers,
I read with keen interest your blog post in August 2011 entitled ‘Why I Won’t Be Going To Carshalton’ and was horribly offended by the unflattering comparisons you made between the owner / manager of Carshalton Athletic Football Club and Our Dear Leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea Kim Jong-Il.
Whilst I appreciate that no overt comparison was made, the tone of your post made the point you were trying to make blindingly obvious.
To be quite honest I wouldn’t expect outsiders to understand just what we are trying to achieve here under the current leadership but believe me that any hardships ‘suffered’ by individuals do not simply happen for no reason. Every action has a consequence and as such, those who choose not to appreciate all the hard work I have done and improvements I have made as being for the good of all concerned should not be able to benefit from the fruits of my labour. I reserve my right in my capacity as the head of this operation to expel those who will not work with me.
I am not so pig-headed as to say that I haven’t made mistakes. I have. The most important thing though is to learn from your mistakes and there is no doubt that I have done s. I recognise the need to control, censor and filter press releases and communications with my subjects more tightly, improve crowd control at mass rallies to prevent any potential dissent from spreading amongst the 10% who I am doing my best to eradicate from society, and I realise that however much money you invest in a project, there is no guarantee that you will succeed in what you set out to do. When you don’t, the answer is simply to invest a little bit more next time around and reap the benefits.
As a result of your post I have monitored events closely and run my own comparison between the leaderships of Carshalton Athletic FC and DPR Korea and below you can find my conclusions.
- I have never and will never correspond with one of my followers by any so impersonal as email or Twitter
- I have never abused any of my dear followers with bad language.
- I have never hand-picked attendees at Party meetings for my own benefit.
- Although I have a big ego, it would never allow me to turn a football club into a mini totalitarian state. They should be inherited, never converted.
I look forward to a full and unreserved apology for the unfortunate and unflattering way in which I have been portrayed upon your journal.
Yours with nuclear fusion,
Name supplied (Pyongyang)
Unfortunately, I was unable to post my full and frank apology before my correspondent passed away, but I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge that life in North Korea and on the terraces at Carshalton over the last couple of years are very different and that my assertions were both misguided and ill-researched. I have sought to rectify this over the last couple of months with a lot of research and am not much better informed to say that it is not only those in the northern half of the Korean peninsular that would be embarrassed with any comparison made with the leadership of Carshalton Athletic, but that the majority of authoritarian regimes would find life at Colston Avenue repressive even by their standards.
Shortly after my post in August, I was heartened to see an offer from Paul Dipre to the fans than had been banned from home matches to open dialogue and bring an end to the dispute. The result was a joint statement from both parties that appeared to give the green light for everyone to start pulling in the same direction. Unfortunately, as time has progressed, that has not been the case.
I would urge anyone who is anyone to read the supporters forum here and compare them with the soundbites that appear in the Surrey Comet from the manager / owner before drawing their own conclusions as to just how disappointing the season has been from their perspective. ‘Judge me after 10 matches,’ the manager proclaimed as he presented his new signings on an all singing, all dancing power-point presentation that was projected from an airship directly onto the carpet-like turf at the Memorial Ground. After 10 matches Carshalton had 10 points. Not to worry, thought I as I looked back at my pre-season predictions that had them finishing in the play-offs, they just need to gel. They’ll be fine.
An upturn in form around Christmas and New Year coupled with a great run in the FA Trophy that saw them beat Lincoln City suggested that this could well be the case but since the turn of March, they have lost five out of five. All by the odd goal, but scoring just once themselves in the process. With Laurent Hamici (last season’s top goalscorer in the division), Paul Vines (a proven goalscorer with Tooting & MItcham and Kingstonian) and Dean McDonald (has been injured, but proven at Conference South level) available a return of 36 goals from 34 matches isn’t good enough. To put that into some kind of perspective, only Aveley, Horsham and Hastings have scored less.
In fairness to Dipre, he has identified the problem. ‘To win games, we need to score more goals.’ He’s right. Although, with that level of insight, quite honestly my four year old daughter could be Carshalton manager as she is fully aware of the need to score more goals than the opposition. However, what she probably wouldn’t have been able to do is acknowledge just how challenging things have been this season. I’ve had to explain to her that sometimes players aren’t playing because they’re poorly – something which Dipre apparently didn’t consider at the start of the season ‘I did not expect the issues that have come up in terms of injuries we had at the start of the season and are having now’ fair enough perhaps, but a good manager would anticipate and act when injuries occur – let’s face it, Craig Edwards has had it vastly worse at Billericay this year and seems to be doing alright.
‘For a first timer starting with a blank sheet, I could have done a lot worse,’ he said last week in the local press. It would have been interesting to see how much worse he would have been prepared to tolerate from another, more proven manager before pointing him towards the car park. There is little doubt that Carshalton have one of the healthier budgets in the division (if some rumours of what some players are earning are even half true then they’re on more money part-time than I am full-time) and so perhaps there is one thing we ought to be thankful to Dipre for it is dispelling the myth that you can give an open chequebook to anyone off the street and they’ll be able to build a squad of promotion challengers.
At the start of the season Dipre said ‘my target is to end the season better than we started it.’ Taking four points from their first two matches was a good start, the way things are going it’s hard to see how even he, can talk up what will be at best, a mid-table finish as being any better than the start of the season, never mind last season. One perhaps for Andy Coulson to get his teeth into.
I hope we never find ourselves as Hendon fans in the situation Carshalton fans are currently in. Trying to support the club they love in the most testing of circumstances any fan could imagine. There’ll be a good number of them at Vale Farm tomorrow, and they deserve a lot better. I hope that Dipre realises that he is not the man for the job, that his ego can allow him to stand down in the summer and appoint a true footballing man to take charge of the team with the same backing that he has allowed himself. I will not be holding my breath.
Tomorrow we will be using those god-forsaken red footballs in aid of Sport Relief. In many ways it would have been more appropriate if it was a Comic Relief year instead.
No comments:
Post a Comment