Anyone seen the new Mag and the results of the season poll? Given got best player, with Aaron second and Dyer third. Given got most improved player, with Aaron second. Shola got best young player with Aaron second. Can anyone remember the last time defensive players got so many of the plaudits?

-- Anonymous, June 19, 2001

Answers

Awfully predictable.

-- Anonymous, June 19, 2001

PS. Good article by our very own MacBeth in the Mag, too.

-- Anonymous, June 19, 2001

For those of you who cannot wait to see .....

Back in July 2000 Rogan Taylor started working on a project for the club with the aim of seeing whether the idea of setting up a fans liaison committee (FLC) was viable. A long year on and a committee has been elected and is ready to start doing its business. (It’s lucky general elections don’t take a year to organise).

I was one of the successful candidates, and I’d like to thank everyone who voted for me, and everyone who helped me. But what’s it all about, or what do I think it’s all about anyway ?

Well I think we’re all pretty sure that the club, or the board of the club are more of an embarrassment to us than any source of pride. I could list all the cock ups but there’s no real point as The Mag is only 40 pages long. When was the last time you felt the board actually did something that was for the fans, or that they actually did something by looking from the fans point of view rather then their own ?

Now the people running the club aren’t stupid. They read the papers, they know we think they are clueless and they don’t like it. They all remember how good it was for Sir John when the club was doing well, he was getting great publicity, a knighthood, and looking very good. They aren’t naturally as good at the PR as Sir John was and they need help. The people who are criticising them most are the fans so they’ve decided they need to talk to us more so that we understand them better, and they can try and avoid making further cock ups. They see the FLC as a means of getting to know the fans, to hear what they are thinking.

The club, like it or not, is a business and the directors role is supposed to be maximize the shareholders return on their investment. As the vast majority of the shares are held by the Hall and Shepherd families then really the directors are trying to maximise the return for themselves. They want to be seen in a better light, but they also still want to make lots of money for themselves. The FLC will be allowed to discuss certain topics with the club but not those that the club views as inappropriate. It will be interesting to find out what they view as inappropriate. For example the SOS mess was something that should have been bounced of fans before it was bounced on to them, but it may well be that the board would view that as a business decision and nothing to do with the fans. If they do think that then we are going to have some big fights !! I have to believe that they would listen to us, it’s all a bit of a pointless exercise if they don’t. (It will also be interesting to see whether they decide to hide the company AGM in London again, a business decision ? I don’t think so)

The topics that I know for sure that are open for debate are things that basically come down to our experience of going to a football match like stadium facilities, ticketing, seating, stewarding, club shop. Not allowed will be discussions regarding the playing side of things. So me suggesting we buy Kluivert, as cover for Shola, won’t be listened to.

The FLC has 13 members on it. Of the 13 there are 6 people representing specialist groups. These are disabled, ethnic minorities, women, those who travel to 8 or more away games, over 65s, and those who bring a child under 14 to the match. The other seven are just ‘normal’. I take Ben who is 10 to the match but I felt the person representing kids should live on Tyneside so I stood in the general section.

For me the most important thing for the 13 members to keep in their minds is that they are representing 52000 people who go to the match, and lots more who don’t. There can be no place for big egos, the job is to improve things not to be full of your own importance. That’s one of the things that the board could maybe learn from !!

One of the big disappointments for me is that the committee looks like the average St James Park crowd in that it is full of middle aged men. There is one female member and by looking at the mug shots I’ve seen it doesn’t look like there is anyone under 30. I want to believe that in 30 years time when Ben is my age that Newcastle United is still a passionate place to go and watch football. At the moment I’m not optimistic. The ground is emptying of kids, priced out of their birthright. Being born and raised on Tyneside should mean you automatically become a Newcastle supporter and pass that on to the next generation. The cost of going to football is so high that it is costly for dad to go never mind taking son along as well. The decision to make kids pay nearly £13 for a game is ridiculous. Either paper rounds pay an awful lot more than they did when I was a lad, or kids just cannot afford to go. This is one area where the board have a conflict of interests. They know they can get at least 50000 every week at the prices they charge. They have no short term desire to reduce the money they can get, so why worry about what happens 20 years down the line ? I believe the other knock on effect of lack of youth is the drop in atmosphere within the ground. Whatever it is about getting older that makes us lose the ability to leap to our feet and sing the Blaydon races at the top of our voices means we must have youth there to lead us. I expect to be told that the Family Enclosure is there for kids to be brought to. Yes, undoubtedly, and it is excellent. But how come a kid sitting in the Family Enclosure pays £125 a year, for these superb facilities and two rows in front of him a kid not allowed access to the facilities has to pay £241 ? By my (very) rough estimates if a £10 was added to the cost of an adult season ticket then you could take £90 off the cost of a child ticket and not lose money.

Something that hasn’t happened yet but will soon, or so I keep hearing, is new improved training facilities. This is so long overdue it is unbelievable. One knock on effect is liable to be the loss of the ability of fans to turn up and watch players training. Another barrier between ‘us’ and ‘them’. To compensate we need to have more, and better, access to players, managers, coaches. Someone suggested to me that their should be a club representative/fans chat on the internet every night. Why not ? If there are 30 players and maybe another dozen people for us to be interested in then they would have to be available one night a month at the most. This isn’t a priority but it would help.

I live 100 miles away from Newcastle and most of the information that I get about the club is from the internet. The club’s official internet site is an official disgrace, one Saturday this season it broadcast a commentary on a Sunderland game instead of us, how bad can you be ?! For people around the world trying to find out information about the club what they find from the internet is that the club despite being sponsored by an internet type company just don’t have a clue. This embarrassment has to be fixed.

A point raised by a number of people has been how the club has had to go and ask Rogan Taylor, a Liverpool fan, to help out. Also that they have appointed Steve Wraith as a paid up, but un-elected, member of the FLC. Both of these people have had a specific role to play in the setting up of the committee. Taylor has been around as a respected voice in football since Heysel, and has proven himself away from the club, he was the right person to be help get this all started. Steve is a well known face around town and has been asked by the club to assist the committee, he is not though a paid employee of the club, and everybody is keen to make that clear !! Steve has been in the club helping to make the lection happen. It won’t be clear though, until we get started, what role Steve will play in an on-going basis but having briefly chatted with him I think he is aware as the rest of us that the we are all going to have to work hard to make this work.

A concern I have is that one of the recommendations from the Rogan Taylor report was that the reporting back to fans was primarily through the club’s official publications. This is great but it isn’t enough. Life has moved on and the club programme and the Chronicle aren’t the be all and end all of it, and the for me the most trustworthy places to read about Newcastle are in The Mag and on the nufc.com web site. These are independent sources of information, but independent in that we can trust them implicitly to be on the fans side. I will be pushing for these places to be allowed to report on our discussions.

I stood for this committee because I know things need changed and this was the best opportunity I’d seen. I’m not 100% sure it will work because I’m not 100% sure of the motives of the club. I am sure that I will give my all to make it work. I will let you know how it goes !

-- Anonymous, June 19, 2001

Good article Macbeth.
This FLC concept may not be perfect, but it deserves to succeed. I only hope Club Management are as committed to making it a success as representatives like you.

-- Anonymous, June 19, 2001

Seconded! My fear is with Stonehouse gone, Cushing et al may not be quite as amenable to listening to supporters reps. Hopefully everyone else on the FLC will have the same commitment and drive as you, MacB, to make a success of this and show the board that it is a good thing.

-- Anonymous, June 19, 2001

It just shows what a crap season it was when defenders are named in the players of the year yet couldn't keep a clean sheet to save their lives!

-- Anonymous, June 20, 2001

I found Russell Cushing to be a relaxed kinda guy, in many ways he's seen everything there and knows where it's at. But as a dynamic brain...

-- Anonymous, June 20, 2001

You're quite right swift about Russell Cushing. He's a decent sort who generally gets a bum rap - principally because he's not a high profile kind of blerk, and has simply been there a long time. However, my instinct is that he probably does a very valuable job "at the coal-face".

As you suggest, the issue really is that it's doubtful Cushing is a strategic thinker, or someone who will look to make significant changes to the status quo - he's a "doer" rather than a "thinker".

Having said that, his new role is Chief Operating Officer - a implementation role - that doesn't necessarily require his direct involvement in the development of strategy.

I commented elsewhere that I felt there was far too much of an overlap between the management roles of Stonehouse and Shepherd, and which was bound to lead to tension - especially given their vastly different characters.
Now that ambiguity has been removed, Shepherd has the field to himself to direct the business entirely as he sees fit.
As someone noteable once said "the buck stops here".

-- Anonymous, June 20, 2001

yeah but we don't have the luxury of voting him out every 4 years if the bucks don't stop

-- Anonymous, June 20, 2001

....you've stumbled across the real problem with NUFC, Macbeth!

-- Anonymous, June 20, 2001