Club silence is a cause for concern
In his latest “One Vale View” column, Rob Fielding says the recent silence from the club is worrying.
Rob says “one of the key issues with the previous regime was the lack of open and honest communication” and if the club don’t re-engage with the supporters then they can hardly be surprised when the fans start to fear the worst.
I hope that the current Port Vale regime will remember their promise of engaging with fans and attend Wednesday’s Supporters Club meeting (7:30pm, Tommy Cheadle’s, all welcome).
There’s a number of questions that fans want answers to and while the board’s silence may be entirely innocent, the continued lack of investment updates is causing the rumour mill to go into overdrive.
For this fan, one of the key issues with the previous regime was the lack of open and honest communication, notably about investors. There were so many empty promises of investment just “a few weeks away”, it was no surprise when Bill Bratt’s utterances were greeted with a healthy dose of scepticism.
It was therefore a pleasant surprise for then-chairman Mike Lloyd to meet fans at an open meeting and for CEO Perry Deakin to host a live Q&A session on the official site. Those small “gestures” went some way towards myself and other fans being at least cautiously optimistic over the club’s future.
But now, it’s all gone quiet.
Therefore, it’s very much in the club’s own interest for members of the board to attend Tommy Cheadle’s on Wednesday and provide answers to supporters’ questions such as:
•Is work on the Robbie Williams suite continuing?
•When will it be open?
•What are the club’s plans for team strengthening in the January transfer window?
•Why pick such an inconvenient date and time for the AGM?
•And most importantly… can the club confirm the investment agreement with Blue Sky is still in place?
In football, it’s difficult to please everyone all the time, and no football board ever has 100% support. But if the Port Vale board can provide answers to these questions, it will at least go some long way to proving their doubters right. But if they continue to dodge interaction with fans, keep up their recent silence and not answer these questions, they can hardly be surprised when fans begin to fear the worse.
About the author: Rob Fielding has been a Port Vale fan for thirty years. He founded the award-winning onevalefan.co.uk website in 1996. These are his personal views and he welcomes your comments on them.