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

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

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

New Manager Syndrome

One fairly reliable trait in football is the introduction of a new manager generally means a fresh introduction to some fresh points. It normally always happens. Fairly obvious really, the previous manager has gone because he was incompetent at the role … a la Keehan. He has hit a poor run of form and the owners get the jitters…Mourinho? Results are not good enough or he has lost the changing room. Generally the team framework has lost faith in the manager, confidence, respect and drive have gone, resentments, blame and in-fighting have spread. Time to go.

So it is normally just the appearance of a new face at the helm and hope that gels the team back together. Unusually when Steve Brown at Lewes took over, the previous manager was deemed to have underachieved but nobody thought we’d go down. But under the new manager we nearly did, the new manager bounce certainly was not working in our favour.

It’ll be slightly different for Freeman as Brown didn’t really create much of a team for him to mend, so the quality of the materials are grim. Not I believe that most of the players are not highly capable, they have just operated under entirely the wrong circumstances conducive to teamwork. If Freeman does get a ‘bounce’ from the players then we’ll be very quickly heading up the league. But I wince to think the state the dreadful and baffling appointment of Brown has left the dressing room in. So while I expect Freeman will keep us up I am expecting a gradual improvement as he melds a team with the existing and new players. We need bandages not a plaster. However maybe he is that good that as a bonus he has an immediate positive impact on the team.

Chris Harris

Embarrassing Albums… What’s Your Worst?!

What’s your most embarrassing album or single? It has surely happened to us all. A chronic misjudgement of a moment and it’s there. You are happy with your buy at the time but then as years drag on it sits like a sore thumb in your precious collection.

Twas the summer of 1987, music was just dire then and Def Leppard released the enormous hit of an album Pyromania… I wince at the thought. Their drummer had just lost his arm in an accident and whilst he recovered they had a drum kit made he could operate with one hand.

They found time on their hands. Too much time. All obviously loved up, the album oozed over-produced AOR with tragically awful lyrics on the dreaded subject of love. Yuk. The album pumped out hit after hit of what my hero Jello Biafra called “sugar coated swill”. Sickly romantic lyrics like “Love bites, love bleeds, it’s bringing me to my knees” I guess resonated with me because I was 21 and falling in love. And that’s it. It is of its time, generally in your naive past in a vulnerable mental state, when a song captures a moment and no matter how shite, you buy it.

It still sits in my collection.

It always makes me laugh as my friend Adam also fell for the Def Leppard trap. We were both a couple of punk indie hipsters, disciples of The Clash and The Ramones but for some reason we both ended up with it. I am slightly more of a twat than him in that my girlfriend at the time ruined it, probably maliciously. She was a bright girl and I shamefully made her replace it..

I bumped into Adam at a wedding a few years ago and reminded him of our foolishness, my prompting of this sad memory was clearly one he wished to forget.

Chris Harris

Price of Football

Interesting article on the price of football on the BBC website. Or is it? Guess what, we are all being ripped off. As rip off football cut in I drifted from being a season ticket holder at Crystal Palace to watch Lewes. You weigh up the options, chuck in travel costs and that every game was effectively a long trip, an away game even, and Palace were not always that good. You get hit by the fickle stick driving back one day after another defeat and decide it was better walking the 50 yards to the Pan, paying £6 at the time to get in and get pissed with my mates on subsidised lager.

So you take the cheap organic rustic approach of cheap football, environmentally friendly, saving all that petrol and of course putting money into the local economy and do non league. Let’s keep it that way I decided.

The price of the food at the Pan is way too high, the standard comment on the high quality does not mitigate this. Just about every away supporter chokes on the over priced food. Yes you get what you pay for but you take a choice on a Saturday night of cheap pub food or more expensive gastro or restaurant food.

In the Pan there is no choice but expensive and the time-honoured tradition of filling a hole in one’s stomach is far too expensive. Hot dogs at Chertsey were a pound, not great but not awful. They soaked up the beer. Being hours before a proper meal, it’s how it should be.

Of course there is no problem with serving nice pricey food. Choice is good and it reflects well on the club. But there should be a cheaper alternative. Can Circa not knock out tasty pots of curry and pasta dishes, high profit, quick and tasty as well as the posh football nosh?

Get the food out quicker… tasty, less expensive but still high gross profit means more customers, more profit and a better fulfillment of the remit of a community club where all are encouraged to attend.

Chris Harris

Thoughts on the new manager Darren Freeman

We almost chuckled, when discussing with a friend, the next managerial appointment by the Board. Being creatures of habit we both declared Darren Freeman would be the next manager. There is an air of inevitability about our managerial appointments. Ease and obviousness of appointment with a good track record seems to be the remit as we have an attractive club to manage. He will have his work cut out. Not that the players and any additions will not be perfectly capable of keeping us up but somehow something at our club is not right when whoever seems to be good takes the post and flunks it.

Having read up on him he looks a good choice, but I have not had the chance to wade through and interview the many other applicants and have no idea how heavy duty the interviewing process we have had and whether we have missed out again.

I know enough about football though to recognise that the players for the last few years have been of a perfectly acceptable standard and basically need a massive kick up the backside. I don’t think the problem has been much deeper than that and it would appear Freeman can operate a hair dryer so I am cautiously optimistic about the appointment, one that is a far cry from the bemusing stupidity of appointing Brown, which people who know me will tell you is not hindsight.

If it is true a that he has walked out of Peacehaven where he has already steadied a ship this season because he has always wanted to manage us, all bodes well.

The fly in the ointment is why good managers turn to crap at Lewes and that is something not right at the top. Either the Board are not man managing the manager properly or they simply do not get the best people in who knows. Can Freeman be the first to shake that monkey off our back?

I’m cautiously optimistic, I think he’ll keep us up but does not have a record of taking a club up the league on a limited budget. He is however still cutting his teeth and unlike some of the previous incumbents may actually have the driving ambition to succeed.

So good luck to him and I trust he has been told mid-table this season, heading towards play offs the next. That is the calibre of manager we should have and what we should expect of him.

Chris Harris

Kingspan… What may have been?

A current thread on the forum prompted a thought. It is relevant to the thread because it was in the dark days when we were close to going bust just after Kevin Keehan had done his worst. It was at a meeting of the Supporters Trust that then club sponsor Magic Man informed us Kingspan had been in contact with Martin Elliot about a possible takeover the club.

Although in desperate straits he didn’t cave in and wouldn’t sell to them because he thought they were not the right fit for the club. With hindsight of course he was wrong. Instead they plumped for Whitehawk and have taken a club with no fans and no infrastructure to the brink of Conference football. Imagine the effect they would have had with a club with fans and an infrastructure. We’d certainly be in the Conference now and not heading towards Ryman Division One South and thereafter County football.

Of course, should we end up one day in the Conference, as is the ambition of the Board, and we do it via being self -sustained it will be the greatest of achievements, far outstripping the merits of getting there being bankrolled.

Should we continue our downward spiral we can surely all wish Martin had taken a different view about Kingspan and possible glories.

Chris Harris