I’ve tried before without success, but it’s worth another appeal to Katrien’s philanthropic side. If she resigns or gets sacked before the opening game of the season, I will personally double today’s contribution from programme sales to the Community Trust.
If they raised £1000 from today’s sales, I will give them another £1000 , if it was £1500 then I will contribute another £1500 and so on.
Come on Katrien,you know it makes sense and you will be helping the whole Charlton community.
Just before the season when we won Division One with a record points haul,Peter Varney told me that he and Chris Powell had made the acquisition of goal scoring midfielders the priority because you can’t win anything without a good goal haul from the midfielders.
We bought Dale Stephens and Danny Hollands to add to Johnnie Jackson for that purpose. Consequently, between them, they scored 26 goals that season.
Wingers are obviously helpful and in Harriot and Holmes, hopefully, we have an equivalent to Green and Wagstaff.
However has anyone got any ideas where 26 midfield goals are coming from this year?
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Charlton is now such a small , low revenue business that it no longer needs a CEO. With ticket revenues around the £1m mark from the lowest season ticket sales in 20 years and minimal additional revenues from sponsorship and the ticket office closed.
Player sales and acquisitions ( the latter likely to continue to be minimal and low budget) can be handled by Chris Parkes with a phone call to geriatric Roland. After 20 years or so he must be able to do that on his own.
Anything else can be handled by Tony the catering manager , the deputy CEO.
What else is there ?
Its an ideal opportunity to cut costs further but getting rid of our pointless, incompetent and customer unfriendly CEO .
The news today that long term fan and excellent 24 year pitch announcer Big Dave Lockwood is resigning from his position in order to join the protests against the owner and his ‘ untrustworthy’ CEO and Deputy is just one more blow to the club.
Our Club CEO now presides over a business which is about one third the size it was when she took over.
She refuses to communicate in any way with the customers of the business .
In order to get in or out of the organisations place of business, the CEO feels the need to have bodyguard protection to protect her against the organisation’s own customers.
The club have so far refused to reveal the scale of the season ticket collapse and have reacted stupidly to huge crowd decline by announcing additional charges to discourage walk up customers . Rumour has it that sales are around the 3,700 mark , a record breaking double decade low.
We are 3 weeks away from the start of the season and – just like the previous seasons under Duchatelet we are woefully short of the requisite number of competent players to succeed – even in the Third Division.
By any sensible measure of business performance and in any business or organisation with commercial objectives and Key Performance Indicators ( KPI’s ) eg reducing losses , increasing profits, increasing sales , improving quality , reducing headcount churn, improving customer service , enhancing customer engagement , recruiting and retaining good talent, maximising commercial opportunities , increasing stakeholder engagement , improving company profile.
Meire has proved to be an abject failure on every single CEO KPI.
I cannot imagine any other organisation in the UK where this level of failure would not have resulted in resignation or dismissal.
Well, we’d all vote for that wouldn’t we ?
This season marks 10 years since we were relegated from the Premiership and what a miserable decade it has been for Charlton supporters . With the exception of the 2 years when Peter Varney and Chris Powell brilliantly assembled a winning team , albeit in the 3rd division using Kevin Cash’s money , it has been a decade of unremitting failure and decline in every respect , dwindling crowds , revenues , sponsors and latterly a complete disintegration of the relationship between the diehard fanbase and the ownership.
To many of us , we go to Charlton because we wouldn’t know how else to fill our Saturday’s , I know from a personal perspective , I couldn’t stand shopping and all I would do instead is watch Sky Sports coverage praying for us to score .
Nevertheless, it is very difficult to be enthused about going to the Valley these days. Russell Slade seems like a decent bloke and we have bought a couple of reasonable players for this very low level, although we will lose considerably more talent than arrives over the next month. While Palace bid £31 million for Christian Benteke , we are chuffed to bits to secure Ricky Holmes from Northampton for £120k . Its a desperate end to a desperate decade.
When you consider the talent that Powell assembled last time in Hamer, Morrison, Taylor , Cort, Wiggins, Stephens, Hollands, Green, Wright Phillips and Kermogant , – in comparison with the current bunch , I would suggest that achieving an exit from the 3rd divsion this time is very unlikely indeed.
Anyway, I will be there and I would urge you to join me even though understandably many of you will be thoroughly fed up with the club by now. Although I loathe the current ownership and support CARD wholeheartedly , I am fed up with car park protesting and I just want to see my team win a few games for a change and enjoy a nice couple of pints and go home with a smile on my face to enjoy Saturday night.
We are due some luck at some point – surely no supporter should have to suffer more than one decade of misery . Perhaps all our dreams will come true , the team will over perform and get promoted , Roland will sell up and move onto his next crackpot project taking his incompetent idiotic protege , katrien , with him.
Hope springs eternal.
Albury Addick 