‘Relentlessly Mediocre’; ‘Conspicuously Awful’;

‘Spur’ on an excellent brief write up of proceedings at the AGM based on words from Eddie Ramsden wrote the following

• He was forthright about failures on the pitch over the past few seasons (‘relentlessly mediocre’; ‘conspicuously awful’; ‘an anti-Midas touch’} and said his theory was that there had been insufficient liaison over the years between the various management teams (seven in six seasons) and directors who, not wishing to interfere, had been too hands-off. This was changing, and Stuart and Barry would now be regularly in touch with Darren and Ross. Stuart explained how this was working.

So the worst kept secret at the club is out. It has now been suggested by someone highly respected on the Board, that the pitiful five years of trite football we have had to endure has been to what many of us have known but few suggested, mismanagement of the manager at Board level. It explains why some very good appointments have failed to deliver. I would suggest not a theory but a fact. Of course for a such a long time the question, with the obvious answer, has been a taboo subject with certain members of the Board and their ilk taking great umbrage at such criticism. So when somebody with a very healthy open view on the matter suggests it is the case, we haven’t got to the root of the problem we’ve hopefully smashed it. It has sadly taken the threat of a further relegation for an acceptance at the top of the club that actually the performance of the manager or lack of is entirely their responsibility. To say ‘not wishing to interfere’ in real terms from the start by the current set up is a woefully inept and disastrous attitude.

Reading the earlier write up on Freeman was heartening as he at last seems to be someone who now the Board have woken up to the responsibility of managing the manager probably does not need it so much as you can see the fire in him, he seems very impressive and his approach spot on. Nevertheless, he must be keenly monitored by the Board. It would seem this responsibility will fall to Stuart Fuller and Barry Collins but if current trends continue the whole Board must begin to act decisively. As we blogged before, the appointment of John and Roger the new Board members, has suggested a mark in shift of Board focus to the first team and maybe in the nick of time. However with the acknowledgment of previous mistakes we may just save the community project from the ignominy of failure

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It must be a lesson on getting the balance right that must never be forgotten. There have been great strides off the pitch to build the community model at the expense of a team and a crowd to enjoy the fruits of all the work. Let us hope, as it would seem, high horses have been dismounted and lessons have finally been learnt and sleeves will be rolled up accordingly

CLASSIC KTE: Spot the ham at The Pan

Great food, poor service

There have been some interesting comments regarding The Chuck Wagon and catering facilities at The Dripping Pan yesterday evening. While I was suitably frustrated that I couldn’t get a bowl of chips in less than half an hour, it appears many others are having similar experiences.

“I know plenty of people have food at the game, therefore I cannot really comment but surely there is a faster way of making the burgers even if they are supposedly really nice. There is quality over quantity but when you are at a game you need speed over most things.” Garethlewes, Fan’s Forum

Garethlewes hits upon a salient point; Brighton and Lewes are awash with nice places to eat, fancy restaurants and gastro-pubs. As nice as the burgers may be, there is a very good chance you would get served quicker if you walked out the ground to The King’s Head up the road and ate in there than from a caravan at the game! Most football fans (including the Hillians last night who seemed a bit hacked off at spending a third of the game away from the action) want convenience over quality.

“PLEASE can someone on the BOD sort out the catering. It may be great food but service is so slow, 30 minute wait for a burger is just not good enough.” heathfieldrook, Fan’s Forum

Despite the long queues last night, there was no mention of the extended waiting times from the staff. It was quite poor customer service in my opinion. Making patrons aware that they will need to wait for their food may have solved the issue by creating less of a backlog and being honest with the punters always helps.

“I whole heartedly agree with this article. Similar thing happened to me on my last visit to Lewes a few months ago. I saw the slow moving queue at half time this evening, so didn’t bother!!!” clive greatwich, KTE blog

One problem is that we have a fixed fee income from the catering, which means that Circa have very little reason to go above and beyond expectations. If they’ve already paid for their pitch and sold the requisite number of burgers to make a tidy profit, why try harder or make things better?

“Agreed, I used to get my dinner from the Chuck Wagon at evening games but I’ve given up now unless I’m there at 19:15, which is unusual. Shame as the food is really good!” stevet, Fan’s Forum

How much money are we losing out on? My £2 may be a drop in the ocean but what about all the others put off by the queues? The system needs looking at next season to maximise income, customer satisfaction and the number of Rooks fans leaving with emptier wallets and fuller stomachs.

Chris Mason

Catering at The Chuck Wagon

As we stumbled to another defeat, yes, a little more fight in us than we have seen sometimes, but a defeat nonetheless, I decided to get some chips. Some saturated fat after a particularly hard PiYo (pilates and yoga, darling) session was in order to soak up the Magner’s pear cider.

I took my ticket from The Chuck Wagon in good faith and awaited my deep-fat-fried fate at 19:55. The bacon had already run out. Somehow. Number 48 I was.

Fifteen minutes later, at 20:10 if you are looking for military timings, with the Rooks 1-0 down, they had only reached number 42. I grew impatient. Spending a sixth of the game waiting for a single portion of chips, and still ten minutes or so away is simply unacceptable. This is fast food.

People say that we moan about the little things. Yes, we do. We moan about the little and big. The little things can symbolise the malaise in the wider picture. So I asked for a refund – which was graciously given.

Charlie Dobres, one of the top bods at the club, was a few rows in front and was doubtless still half an hour away from whatever he ordered. This is no way to run a catering establishment at a bloody football ground. I want to spend the time on the terraces, singing, and with mates.

£2 to stand at the corner of the ground is indeed, Mr Noel Edmonds, NO DEAL!

Chris Mason

The Sun It Shineth

The other Chris and I disagree on the much-discussed final placing this season. I empathise wholly with his views but disagree.

The rot was stopped early this season and there is plenty of time for Freeman to sort this mess out. I believe we have a decent enough squad of players and once augmented with a back bone that is surely (well hopefully) to follow, we will be fine.

Years of supporting Palace as a season ticket holder has seen me, when I cared, follow the lower ends of various divisions and at this point in the season nobody can be written off, unless Kevin Keehan is at the helm of course.

I remember Millwall being top of a division at Christmas one season before melting down and getting relegated. If Freeman is what he is cracked up to be and his knowledge of players as good as we have been told, I believe we will be mid-table.

As me old mucker Cliff has alluded to on the forum before… and he knows his stuff, there are a lot of teams worse than us and the last time Chris and I bet on a football league position, Palace ended up in the top 10 and I was correct.

Chris Harris

CLASSIC KTE: Elvis Presley’s Greatest Hits

OK, these may not have been his globe-smashing mega-hits but they certainly sound like things we have heard many times before!

The Rain It Cometh

Is it the clouds of pessimism or realism? As I look outside at the pouring rain, I cannot bring myself to get optimistic about our predicament this season. It is practically unheard of to be nine points adrift from safety with just one third of the season gone. It seems borderline impossible, a statistical anomaly.

I know my partner in crime (the other Chris) has said we have the makings of a mid-table side and I know that we have been ineptly managed to a rather large degree. However, despite a potentially decent new manager, with us rooted to the bottom of the league, we are not exactly a good career move for the sort of player that may get us out of this mess. And with another ten fixtures to allow this manager to get the team set up and playing the way he wants, things are not looking healthy.

To be frank, our next best chance of victory appears to be the home fixture against our fellow relegation probables VCD Athletic. The away fixture ended 0-0 despite both defences being the leakiest in the Rymans – a somewhat telling conclusion that both attacking forces are useless as well.

While the isobars on the weather map indicate the cold is coming, when it comes to The Rooks, I simply can’t stand by the fire, warming my hands, and confidently predicting our survival. Indeed the opposite. We are a lost cause and a write-off this season. It is very difficult to get promoted in non-league football. But due to the pyramid structure, it is mightily easy to be relegated. Building from the Ryman Division One South will take all the efforts this club can possibly muster.

This will not stop me from slavishly devoting my Saturday afternoons to The Dripping Pan and all its glory. It just means that, for now, with the wind and rain pummeling the windows as I day-dream about Lewes CFC in the mid-noughties, the dream is dying a little.

Chris Mason

A Shift Towards Team Building

So the new members of the Board have let loose their perspectives. I liked them. John Peel strikes me as someone itching to get the five year mess on the pitch resolved and that seems his raison d’etre. To me this is the most important thing at the moment.

His wish list of perfunctory demands are what we need desperately and his analysis of the Board being distracted on off-field issues rather than the golden egg is heartening. Whether or not his excellent roll your sleeves up trouble-shooting approach works or has the support of others on the Board remains to be seen. But it looks a very positive way forward

I liked Roger views too. Shame about the Charlton bit! I’d question his view that we are already self sustaining as if we get relegated on our budget it has failed as a season to be self sustained. However of course if we stay up, and I envisage we will, I agree. I’d say a lot of his views are more of a wish list I cannot see being granted unless the harsh ideas of John Peel are introduced. But he is positive and believes league football is possible, which many don’t, but I do too.

However reading through the jungle of management speak his ideas are more long term and his grasp is spot on, he seems to have identified many of the areas of concern, especially the first team and management.

Both candidate address our current on field problems which I feel under the current Board have been left to drift, as they have concentrated on making us live within our means which they have done brilliantly. I feel their inclusion on the Board will be a fantastic addition as the emphasis will drift towards the problem of the dire first team flaws, recruitment and management and hopefully we can gain result momentum and the riches that come with it.

So good luck to them both. They look like really good news.

Chris Harris

The Microlife and The Rooks

Let me introduce you to a concept: microlives. David Spiegelhalter and Alejandro Leiva, researchers from the University of People with Funny Names, introduced the idea into the national consciousness. A microlife represents half an hour of life expectancy for the average 35 year old human. Forget all those bogus internet sites that tell you the day you will die based on your star sign, inside leg measurement and the amount you can count up to in German. This is real scientific shit, you know.

David and Alejandro’s research indicates that smoking 15 cigarettes results in the loss of ten microlives for men and nine for women. That’s five hours of your precious time. Five hours you could spend doing something more productive, like mumbling to your palliative care nurse that some bastard’s stealing your loose change.

Eating just one portion of red meat, which apparently comes in at a paltry 85 grams, will cost you one microlife. Considering 85g of red meat would fairly be considered a between-meal snack, it’s fair to say a proper steak would set you back about two hours. One the other hand, having your five a day will grant you four microlives, meaning that a 300g sirloin cut with a bagful of vegetables will cancel each other out. As long as you don’t have dessert.

Sex as a male, for some unexplained reason, will cost you four microlives, which at least means I will live until I’m 114. It doesn’t cost women any microlives though – it seems a bit like those horrific female spiders from far-flung countries which devour the male after copulation. When you think you’re in luck ‘cos it’s a special occasion and your other half has sent you a saucy text, your missus is in fact slowly killing you.

I bring all of this up for a reason, as well as making a few cheap gags. How many microlives do we lose watching Lewes? Are we committing collective suicide at a glacial pace? Having watched eight years of crap, and for the most part needing to be utterly inebriated to remotely enjoy the rubbish on offer, it’s fair to see I should probably have passed away at some point last week.

Lewes have on average 23 home games per year. This should be higher but we never win cup games, do we? Let’s say I can’t make five games because I was doing something more important like replanting my Eucharis flowers or washing the gaps between my toes. So that’s eighteen matches left.

At each game, on average, I will plunder my way through six pints of silly juice, with occasional forays into the more sophisticated terrain of prosecco on special occasions. Less than 10g of alcohol actually gives you one microlife which explains all those Daily Express articles about the benefits of red wine. However each subsequent 10g loses you one. Given that the average pint will have 16g of alcohol, this means nearly 100g of alcohol per game. Hence eight microlives are thrown in life’s pedal bin.

Add in the fatty foods and burgers that one is prone to purchase from The Chuck Wagon, and that’s another two microlives vanished. So in the space of just one match, that’s ten microlives. Over the course of the season, that’s 180. This equates to nearly four days of your life lost because of The Mighty Rooks each season, and that’s without the eighteen Saturdays and freezing midweek matches that you’ve already thrown asunder as we flounder further down the table.

During my time as a devotee of The Pan, that means I have had a month lopped off my life. Now, I hear you say, you could just not drink, have a half-time batch of carrot and coriander soup and take a smart jog around the stadium during half time. This would actually extend your life. But then I would have another month of watching us scurry around in the lower reaches of the Rymans (or whatever stationery company gains naming rights for the lower leagues in the future). Pint please barman!

Chris Mason

CLASSIC KTE: AWAY TO BARROW

Might as well finish what we started! This is the epic story of the away trip to Barrow, an astonishing fifteen-hour marathon in a minibus for the Rooks fans. At least we were being managed by the saintly Ibbo and we could support with pride.

Chris Mason

“BACK IN 1994, I sold a kidney just to ensure the Chairman could put fifty pence in the light meter” says a man with a receding hairline, Levellers t-shirt and standing next to The Chuck Wagon awaiting a portion of chips, practically rocking back and forth with anticipation like a child with ADHD. He says this with pride and stature, swelling his (already enormous) chest and wallowing in self-congratulatory smugness.

“Ah yes, but I went to Barrow” I reply, and instantly win Top Football Lewes FC Trumps, leaving our kidney-lite fan to admit defeat (and keep a watchful eye on his potassium intake).

Because travelling the breadth of Britain to watch a team rooted to the bottom of the Conference, with barely two first-team players fit and available, knowing that even getting a point will rank amongst the larger shocks this side of the electric chair, is to gain a lifelong badge of honour.

Steve Ibbitson had taken over after Kevin Keehan resigned ignominiously a few weeks beforehand after fourteen consecutive defeats. Previously a youth coach with the club, the likeable pint-sized northern hero had reignited the passion that had been missing all season. At last we had someone to get behind.

Minibuses are painful at the best of times. You’re jolted out of your seat so often you leave head-shaped dents on the roof. You daren’t stick your hand down the side of a seat to retrieve a seat belt in case you come across a decades-old boiled sweet or a bullied schoolchild. You can’t even listen to the soothing tones of some snotty punks like Pulled Apart By Horses because of the constant drone of the engine.

To travel on a minibus for seven hours in one go, with only a paltry McDonalds pit stop to relieve one’s sore buttocks (there’s no Sudocrem in a motorway services WHSmith, and I asked!) you genuinely wonder whether the inner sanctum of the Underworld is just a clapped out LDV whizzing around, with Russell Brand’s Ed Milliband interview as the in-transit entertainment. My Helly Welly!

Gareth, bless him, was supposed to come, but he had one too many Kopparberg ciders the night before and with a 6am start from The Dripping Pan, he was never likely to make it. “Get out of bed you useless female reproductive body part” I yelled down the phone to his voicemail but to no avail. We set off with fourteen patrons, Roger, esteemed ex-groundsman, with his hand on the joystick… no, I wasn’t sitting next to him!

Part of the reason I was desperate to visit Barrow was the fans, who were a bonkers bunch. They visited The Pan earlier in the 2008/9 season and were responsible for the first “Keehan Out!” of that miserable campaign. Such was the mutual bonding and good humour of our northern friends, we clapped each other at the end, rather than the shower on the pitch.

I knew a couple of them having gone to watch Barrow play Eastbourne. Young Jon T was supposed to kip round my house before the Boro’ game, allowing a mighty drinking session on the Saturday. Unfortunately he did not get off the last train at the station. It transpired he got smuggled in to a friends’ Travelodge and slept in a cupboard, spilling a can of Guinness down his fleece. Northerners scare me.

We arrived shortly after 1pm at Holker Street and should have spent the first half an hour doing yoga to relieve our stiff joints (steady on, I know the thrum of an engine can get a man going but still…) Instead we piled into the bar and began our own relaxation therapy which involved necking as much weak lager as possible.

Unfortunately, early doors, we were harshly down to ten men and the player sent off was the only experienced player in Steve Ibbitson’s hastily reassembled squad. Did the referee not know we had risked life and limb pelting up the motorway? Luckily, we were only 1-0 down at half time and I halted the drinking, if only to avoid the ignominy of peeing into a Lucozade bottle in the back seat every five minutes on the journey home.

Jon T took a break from leading the Bluebirds’ choir to join us for a chat in the comfy bar about life in Barrow, which seemed to comprise painful shifts in Morrison’s, two festivals in the summer to relieve the misery and rain. Lots and lots of rain. As he said this, the patchy spitting had turned into a downpour and he let out a sigh as he looked out of the window and said “Well at least we got a few hours of sun last Thursday”.

By some miracle, Lewes only conceded one more goal. Football’s a strange game – we lose 2-0, barely register a shot on target and yet us Rooks fans were as pleased as punch. Our young team, most of whom were only just out of diapers, acquitted themselves marvellously and the Barrow fans even gave them a standing ovation as they entered the bar for a post-match meal.

Jon T came bounding over and congratulated us. For travelling so far, for supporting the lads, for singing a few songs and for supping their beer. Ibbo graciously offered every travelling fan a pint, the kind of gesture which made him such an icon of our club.

In an interview a few years ago, Ibbo declared the Barrow game as his favourite moment managing the Rooks, citing the dedicated supporters and the extremely gracious Barrow fans as reasons for making the day quite emotional and a perfect picture of what non-league football can mean.

We refused Ibbo’s offer of a drink, citing the seven hour return leg as a reason for hitting the road once more.

KTE Issue 14