With all due respect Bernie I think your ego is flying away a bit don't you? You smugly suggest that the trust has done more than any other group to help our club? How so? You have self serving interest in starting the trust, that is obvious, you have failed to consult the overwhelming majority of fans and write in the name of of charlton supporters. Don't. You represent less than 10% of the club. You had a cosy relationship with Murray who incidentally mugged off more than a few shareholders and now find yourself peering over the wall wondering why this new mob won't let you play chairman once a week. If I was on the board I wouldn't let you or any other members of the PFJ anywhere near my club, you can't be trusted. It's all very well saying that I have no evidence of any founding members (listen to you) rubbishing the board, starting rumours etc but you dont need to, the ignorant, the misinformed and the panickers do all your stirring for you. You make no attempt to distance yourself from the hysteria and paranoia and accuse me of not having evidence,p. If you really want a debate on this subject stop hiding away on charlton life, massaging your ego and win us over. This is a club where we all deserve a say, and if your going to call in credentials for wanting to help the club, mine, my dads and the 14,000 who don't give a monkeys about the trust will stack up very ably against anything that you may have to offer.
therein lies my problem with the Trust. This smug assumption that you are 'thoughtful and hard working' if you support it, and somehow love the Club more than those of us who are ambivalent. At the end of the day, reinforces my view that its a vanity project , more about polishing halos and appearing busy and worthy. It grates.
Million percent... Many of these supporters won't be happy till they find themselves in a cosy cult of 4-5k on match days, bask in the comfort that club profile has hit the magical mark for not attracting "plastics" (commonly known as people who like good football), rejoice in the fact that ambition can be discarded once and for all, and ultimately erect some sort of a shrine to their friend Murray, their knight on a white charger, the man who never did bad things...
OK I agree perhaps that wasn't particularly well worded I am interested to how we could do more to consult? We have done street surveys, and one via the club about what fans want, which I think went out to 10-20 thousand fans.
What I think worries people Raz is that the ST was set up rather than an attempt to reinvigorate the Supporters Club (SC)... was this done so that a chosen few could be directly appointed to the senior positions without the fuss of an election at the SC or did the people setting up the ST have their own agenda (Morsi's and his policy changes in Egypt springs to mind) that they want to implement? With a lot of Charlton supporters (me included) there is a lot of distrust of the ST.
That is a very interesting point, and one I will attempt to answer. CASC has fallen apart for a number of reasons, also as far as I am aware the Valley Party was not an instrument of CASC. But to make things simpler let us split organised fans as follows CASC: Transport & Social then CASTrust: Political, for want of a better word. Yes there may have been convergance in the past but that tends to be the situation now, although yes there is some overlap (sorry) What happened was independent fan groups emerged based on regional areas, some lasted some are in hibernation, some died out, and some still call themselves CASC - what remains of those structures now sit on the fans forum. That is the extent of my knowledge on the matter. As you may know there have been 3 previous attempts to set up a supporters trusts. The 2nd and the one that I was aware of sadly collapsed as Ben the last Fans Director who instigated it didn't feel able to Chair it going forward and no-one else stepped forward. At this time I was about to or had recently had become a Father for the first time, and I just didn't have the time to go to the meetings. The third time happened pretty much like this: rumours were about that the club had run out of cash and was about to go pop. Out of desperation I called for a meeting to form a trust, seeing what had happened at Pompey at the time, and also the success at Swansea. As sometimes happens with this these things, if you open your mouth you often get lumbered with it, and that was that. It turns out the club didn't go bust, but match had been lit so to speak. We felt there was a need for fans to be actively engaged independently for the long term in case fans were ever needed, but also to try and actively assist the club short term if possible, we then set out to talk to fans and educate ourselves better in football finance and other stuff. We have had elections to our board, at our SGM in Spring this yer, we've done everything we could to publicise these things as far as I am aware, and will be doing so again. I do actually welcome questions and comments and will do my best to answer them
by the way I am not here to defend Richard Murray or anyone else, I will try and give the facts and my views relating to the trust to those who are interested.
also if anyone can tell me how to get a notification of a reply to a post or thread on this site I'd be most grateful, I do have to do some work ocassionally
Raz, the only other political wing I know of is the Political IRA and even Ben with his Bromley SC can't be associated with them! So are you the political wing of the old 'Back to the Valley' Party? With the Pompey ST the local Council gave financial assistance..... are RB of Greenwich going to support you financially?
We met people from the club in February when we had about 200 members and 1,000 contacts by email, Twitter etc. It was Richard Murrays invite in March which in turn directly led to the club taking us a bit more seriously... By April numbers had gone up 50% when the Club agreed to deal with us, publicising our survey and helping to distribute a few thousand copies of Trust News edition 3... result was 900 new subscribers (from the survey), membership climbing and donations pouring in... so numbers trebled between early Feb and June... Now looking to make the next step with more work with the fans and maybe the club... and every week the number of active members is going up as we approach people to help on this and that There are one or two candidates from the Valley Party involved but this is a very different challenge... instead of having a fixed deadline and a known goal we are now faced with no immediate crisis and building a network from scratch... except this time we have the internet and everyone involved is new to this so full of enthusiasm for the challenges ahead!
