Welcome to the magazine.
Although it says January on the front, that’s a little cheeky, as the chances are
you’re reading this in February. Christmas and New Year always produce a significant
gap between the season’s second and third issues – which is why this magazine
contains a lot of very small writing – and problems with fixing a means of, and date
for, distribution have contributed the rest of the delay. As our membership has grown to
its present, once unimaginable size, so the task of licking over 350 sets of stamps and
putting over 350 magazines into over 350 envelopes has become ever more onerous. Given
this, distribution has increasingly come to depend on gathering a number of
various-shades-of-unwilling volunteers in the Sekforde Arms, where they can try and take
the taste of gum away with the occasional sip of Young’s bitter. At time of going to
print I’m not absolutely sure when distribution will take place, so consider this an
apology if it’s later than I’d have hoped. (By the way, if anyone is ever
willing to assist with magazine distribution, do get in touch.)
It’s become customary in editorials to present an
overview of the team’s progress and prospects, but as several of our contributors
have offered excellent pieces on this theme, written at various points during our boom,
slump and tentative return to stability, complemented by the usual comprehensive snapshot
match report collection, there isn't really much left to say. I’ll only note that, at
the start of the season, while never expecting we’d so quickly scale the heights, I
felt that there would be a time when a bad run came, and the test would be how we handled
it. I’m not sure that either the manager or supporters passed that test with flying
colours.
One thing I’m won't apologise for is any confusion
caused over our website address in the last issue, simply because it wasn't my fault.
I’ve long believed that I’m a master of mistiming, but this one was something
else. Having registered the london.clarets.co.uk address with the free internet service
Burnley were offering some time back, I finally began moving pages onto the web space
provided. I put the new address in the magazine, sent it off to the printers, and then I
read my e-mails. That very afternoon, it emerged that, in taking back the clarets.co.uk
address for their own use, the club had permanently disconnected their subscribers and
removed any websites with clarets.co.uk addresses. Genius. It remains my opinion that, for
this extraordinary piece of incompetence, someone should have been clearing out their desk
drawer.
Instead, what we got was an apology that wasn’t
really an apology. The waters were muddied further a few days later when a statement
appeared on the official site which appeared to suggest that supporters shouldn’t
look at unofficial sites; they also seemed to say that the official site would copy all
the best bits from other sites to save you having to go elsewhere! Admittedly, it was a
bit hard to grasp precisely what they meant, as the piece was so very badly written. A
clarification-cum-retraction followed a few days later, in which it was stated that
unofficial sites were okay by them.
Sadly, this falls into a pattern that we’ve now
become used to. The official site seems to specialise in badly written, misspelled
articles of little substance, with the odd ill thought out dictatorial statement thrown in
for good measure. I’m frequently embarrassed by this site, which is the most public
face of Burnley FC. I’m concerned about how items that aren’t up to scratch come
to be published on the internet, where they are seen to represent the official voice of
the club, without any apparent quality control or editorial intervention. I’m also
perturbed by the strident, ‘top down’ tone the club sometimes adopts. Their
recent attempt to lay down the law on the allegedly equivalent offences of racism and
swearing is a case in point. Where was the consultation? Where was the supporting
evidence? Where, indeed, was the justification? But why bother if you’re just telling
people what to do?
Those who run the official site need to remember that
they are newcomers in a community where long-established unofficial sites have done a good
job flying the flag for Burnley over the years, and stop acting like upstarts.
It is a shame, at a time when Burnley FC is more
professionally run than it has ever been, that its official publicity does not reflect
this. Anyone who works for the club should feel honoured and privileged to do so. If they
do not give their best for the club, or if their best is not good enough, they should be
dispensed with.
Oh well, in case you were wondering, the old site
addresses of http://surf.to/londonclarets and
http://www.geocities.com/londonclarets/index.htm can still be used. There are plans to
move the site permanently to a new server with a new address in the future, probably the
summer.
Finally, and unrelated to anything else, was I the only
one to grow tired of the mystifying ubiquity of Jim Bowen during recent media coverage of
Morecambe's cup run? As far as I’m aware, Bowen has now claimed to be a supporter of
Accrington Stanley, Blackpool, Blackburn and now Morecambe. It all goes to show that, as
the old catchphrase has it, you can’t beat a bit of bullshit.
