Wilf and Gareth

Gareth Southgate is someone who can  talk the hind legs off a donkey and made England manager on the back of that talent, being seen by the FA as a safe pair of hands his eloquence off speech and undoubted intelligence getting him the job. The idea these days of an England manager needing the sort of CV that maybe dictate an ability to win an international tournament is just accepted as an irrelevance. The fact he couldn’t even get a job in the Championship speaks volumes.

But the FA  must be slightly annoyed this week. For the smooth, straight talking safe pair of hands, appears to be going off message and flunking his lines.

Southgate has decreed Crystal Palace winger Wilfried Zaha did not have the passion to want to play for England. Zaha has been making headlines for outstanding performances playing for the Ivory Coast, seemingly having the temerity to play for the nation of his birth is frowned upon. Now I support Palace and Zaha has been criminally overlooked for England for years. I must add here his decision to play for the Ivory Coast was made before Southgate had any involvement with the job so quite why he had to boost his ego with such a trite statement is baffling.

It is just ignorant and arrogant to assume a player with two options has chosen the wrong one because he wasn’t that bothered. Every Palace fan knows Zaha dreamt of playing for England but had too many set back’s in his quest and became disillusioned. He has warranted a squad place for three years and let us not kid ourselves if he played for a big club he would be in the squad on a regular basis.  Zaha, a much loved player at the Palace, has shown the passion and loyalty to stay at the Palace, despite it possibly stunting his international intentions….that is passion the England set up failed to tap into. Southgate should be bemoaning the guilty party England not Wilf.

Zaha had an unhappy time at Manchester United, world class manager Sir Alex rated him, loser Moyes didn’t. As a young man in his twenties being dicked around by such a big club it is obvious he felt the same was happening with the England set up with his lack of opportunities. So along come the Ivory Coast, make him feel like a King and he opts for the simple choice of the simplicity of playing for his homeland. His performances certainly would suggest no lack of passion

Let us not forget the success of Jack Charlton loving up players to play for Ireland over England

So maybe Southgate should be warning the FA not to let  talent like Zaha slip through the net and to love up some of our bright unrecognised stars and perceived talents rather than slate a young man tired of being dicked around by a low grade under achieving England international set up.

Wilf being allowed to slip through the net is, contrary to the ideas of the low grade Southgate, not down to a lack of passion, but to gross mismanagement by the FA and the England international set.

People like myself couldn’t believe Southgate was appointed manager and this is a classic example of a lack of etiquette and understanding of the simplicities of top football that Southgate has shown through talking such twaddle he is ill equipped for.

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

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

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

CLASSIC KTE: Barrow AFC visiting The Pan

While we are on a bit of a nostalgia trip (to a time when yes, the manager was crap but we had such fun) I thought I’d post one of my all-time favourite pieces from the best set of fans to have ever visited The Pan.

Step forward Barrow AFC, who delighted The Philcox with the first chant of “Keehan Out” back in the inglorious days of 2008 and who ensured the banter was of such top notch quality. Even in the gentlemanly exteriors of non-league football, rarely do you get two sets of supporters clapping each other home. Such wonderful bonhomie from our northern friends.

Some of their supporters had traveled by plane. To a Lewes match! It would have been less surprising if they took a flying carpet. But they won 3-0 and had the time of their lives and none of us on the terraces could begrudge them their joy.

We stayed in touch with a few of their fans and Elaine, one of the travelling support on that fine day, wrote a piece for us about supporting the Bluebirds across the land.

Chris Mason

AS WE TRAVEL ON THESE marathon journeys around our sceptre isle we have certainly had some interesting experiences to put it mildly.

Our match against Kidderminster was one of the funniest. As we were bowling along merrily on our way, ten miles from Kiddie – the coach broke down! We all piled off and stood by the roadside with banners and flags flying and thumbs outstretched in the vain hope that the passing cars would do the Good Samaritan bit and ferry us to the ground.

Not a hope in hell. Well, would you? Even our team coach passed us by! One car did stop and give us the number of a taxi company and our coach company organised a replacement coach for us but it wasn’t going to arrive until 14:30. We didn’t want to chance that.

Some then set off to walk the ten miles, some decided to wait for taxis but then divine intervention from above! The local bus service stopped and picked us up – much to the consternation of the local passengers. We then regaled them with the Barrow A.F.C. song repertoire as we headed for Kiddie and guess who we found waiting at a stop further down the road? Yes, the hardy hikers who had set off to walk.

At one stop there was an elderly lady, very smartly dressed in her fur coat with a very worried expression on her face when she saw the passengers crowded on her bus. A seat was quickly found for her and I think it must have been the most enjoyable bus journey she has had in a long time as she was laughing and clapping along to the songs. Given a chance, I think she would have come with us.

The funniest part was when the bus drove down their high street and everyone was coming out of the shops to watch their bus driving along with all these people on board singing, clapping, waving scarves and flags. It must have looked like a scene from ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’.

The coach was quickly repaired and the diagnosis was (and I kid you not) – A SCREW LOOSE!

Some of the lads had fluorescent waistcoats on with handwritten titles as we had trouble at the Northwich game the Tuesday before due to our own stewards. The legends included “N.V.F.C. Armed Response Unit”, “Mangy Dog Patrol” and “Crowd of One Control”. Ten minutes before the end of the match they went to the front of the crowd and stood with their backs to the pitch and led the singing like orchestra conductors. An excellent day and we won 1-0 too!

Lewes are special to us and we still talk of the day we visited The Dripping Pan as the best one ever.

Good luck for the rest of the season.

KTE Issue 3

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

CLASSIC KTE: Keehan victory plate

Rummaging through the archives I came across this… from our first victory in the Conference against The Mighty Yellows of Oxford United. It didn’t matter that they displayed “all the attacking prowess of The Wombles on LSD” as our friend Ollie The Poet put it. We won 2-1 after coming from behind and history was made.

The moment was immortalised in this exclusive Franklin Mint production. Most certainly a collector’s item!

Chris Mason