WHEN asked to name the largest sports stadium in the world you may think of an American football stadium, the MCG, or even the Azteca Stadium (once the sardonic nickname of Twerton Park).
Read more at
www.bristolpost.co.uk/BRISTOL-ROVERS-BLOG-G-Gas-Foot-mouth-disease/story-21115459-detail/story.html#iSDDebMqIvzMbmAK.99In reality the Rungnado 1st of May Stadium in Pyongyang, the capital of austere North Korea, has a mind-bending capacity of 150,000, although given North Korea’s showy displays of phoney togetherness I wouldn’t be surprised if it is in fact a 5-a-side pitch made to look monumental by the use of ginormous mirrors and weapons grade cling film.
Whilst on a stadium tour there a well-travelled friend saw a huge sign that read ‘Home of the Invincible Indomitable Indestructible Insuperable North Korean Football Team’. As he got closer he then saw in small letters added underneath, ‘Twinned with Bristol Rovers F.C.’.
Ok, that’s not true, but there was certainly a whiff of autocracy in the air last week at the Mem, as the only matter to publicly come out from ‘the most important board meeting in our history’, was, without warning, an immediate closure of the Fans' Forum on the official BRFC website.
A lot on the forum was good, including some excellent analysis and statistics, bountiful witty banter, and the Fans' Forum Supporters Club (FFSC), which in barely more than a year not only put £7,500 in the club’s coffers, focussing on sponsorship of young players, but also provided much needed camaraderie amongst its almost 200 members.
As with most forums, the down side was tittle-tattle, hearsay, disagreements, and just plain incivility at times. It is unusual for a football club to host and moderate a forum about itself, especially one with over 10,000 members, and regularly getting up to 1,000 people using it during a game, so if the closure statement had solely pointed that fact out, and then given users a week to rescue any of their writings and contacts from it, BRFC could probably have metaphorically shredded the file and erased it from the history books without any fuss.
But for many years there has been a worryingly defensive and taciturn attitude at Rovers, and it seems to stem from our dear leader at the very top. I admire Nick Higgs for his construction expertise and the UWE Stadium project, but boy does he not look comfortable when questioned about anything of greater magnitude than whether the milk should go into the teacup first, or after the water and the tea bag.
Maybe it is just the media shyness of an average human being but even on the official BRFC interviews he looks uncomfortable and gives off an impression that even meagre scraps of information need to be wrenched out like rotten teeth. Communication from the club is at best, amateur, or at worst, plain dictatorial.
So barely a week after promising a top-to-toe investigation into the whole putrid setup, the board (including the so-called fans directors) knowingly decided it was a wise move to release a statement accusing the fans (yet again the fans…) of forcing them to close the forum, and then telling Gasheads to “follow” on twitter instead, where they can “receive” official information. This sounded more like Orwell‘s ‘newspeak’, or Adam Susan’s proclamations about ’V’, than a two-way dialogue.
The website headline wrote that they had decided to “suspend” the Fans Forum, whereas the by-line read that it was “closed with immediate effect”. The week before John Ward had been “sacked” (even though the reason given was purely financial), whereas a few days later three back room staff were going to “leave the club”. Are these perplexing differences in language calculated or just plain shoddy?
You really couldn’t make up what happened next. In an effort to soothe the long suffering supporters the club announced a ’Fans Forum’ for July. The small print added that it was only for Season Ticket holders and Supporters Club members. If the opinions of all fans are equal, then some seem to be more equal than others.
Everything at the moment is 1 step forward, 5 steps back. I really do not want to be focussing on this flotsam. I have a dozen half-written articles about BRFC football issues being held up in the pipeline - but the board put their foot in their mouths so often they must have veruccas in their windpipes. To side-step these crucial issues now would be fiddling whilst Horfield burnt.
Read more at
www.bristolpost.co.uk/BRISTOL-ROVERS-BLOG-G-Gas-Foot-mouth-disease/story-21115459-detail/story.html#iSDDebMqIvzMbmAK.99
