NCM meets Keri and Steve :: Part Three

It’s one of our stated aims; I think that is something that is there and it’s been our position from the start. Obviously it’s not our biggest priority at the moment as that is just to support the club to, firstly, make sure we stay in this division; secondly, to make sure that the finances stay on-track and that is something that is incredibly important to us. That is something that is something that transmits its way up to the boardroom through Steve (Thompson) as we cannot allow any gambles to be taken with the future of this club.

We’ve been too close to the wire; and we all got scared stiff because of that and, obviously, that is something that is seared onto our brains in terms of how we take the club forward. Saying that, we have to balance that against being ambitious and what Steve said earlier about wanting to climb the leagues – We don’t deserve to be in this division so perhaps that is why supporters rightly get so upset when something don’t go our way.

So, yes, ultimately, I think it is something we’d like to see; the Trust having a major ownership in the club. But we mustn’t also forget that everybody running this club at the moment is a supporter – nobody makes any money out of the club, nobody makes any money out of the Trust and I think that is a very good position for us to be in at the moment.

Get your views heard!

There’ll always be differences in opinion and ultimately the Trust board needs to be there to try and balance all the views that people have come up with towards the right outcomes. We don’t always get the right; we’re like anybody else, we’re human beings. But we do try very hard because we want this club to be run in the interests of its supporters. But we’re available all the time but the easiest way is through the Trust website. Even do it through Notts County MAD, there’s always someone viewing and responding.

There’s plenty of ways of doing it. Join the Trust, have your say and we’ll follow it up.

The way the Trust works is that we have a sub-committee that deals with our PR and deals with the kinds of messages we want to get across with our all-communications strategy. We try very hard to communicate as much as possible with members. If you’re a member with an e-mail then you’ll get your weekly update.

Decisions like that aren’t always taken in isolation. I spoke to other people about it and we decided that it was something they needed to do at that time so no one individual makes decisions of that kind and I don’t believe that’s the way things should go in a democratic organisation.

ST: I came in, and one of the first things I was involved in was the departure of (Billy) Dearden and the Gary Mills situation. And at that time, Peter Joyce was sort of the main leader of the board and we came into some conversations beforehand. I had nothing to do with bringing Gary Mills to this Football Club in the sense that him arriving here or contacts with him or anything, he was presented to me and interviewed. And I’ve got to say; he was fantastic in interview – absoulutely brilliant.

Mills: 'Absolutely brilliant' in interview

But he wasn’t going to go without a settlement, he said he had a sum due on his contract, though he wasn’t greedy. And this was my first baptism of fire into football and it’s quite a funny story – bearing in mind, I’d just come into the club and other directors have been for a while and Peter Joyce had been here before, so I’m just trying to watch what was taking place. But Billy (Dearden) said that he wanted a joint statement, which I thought was a very honourable thing to do.

So we left it, the club wasn’t going to make an announcement and we were going to work on a joint statement overnight. So, driving home, I turned the radio on to FiveLive, bearing in mind this is only half-an-hour afterwards and there’s Billy on the radio! ‘Notts County have got rid of me.’

And there you go, baptism of fire. Football is obviously about getting your shot-off first, clearly. And, as a matter of fact, I now keep a diary, a daily diary of everything that’s happened within this Football Club which I’m going to have to keep under lock-and-key given what it contains.

Dearden: He DID resign!

The actual initial playing budget was just about spent – not everything down to the penny, but most of it was.

Of course, things did happen, Mills did go out, so there has been some ‘trading’ if that’s what you want to call it . The difficulty is in this situation is that you bring a manager in, you say this is the budget and the manager comes back and says I think I can get this player, I want to spend my budget now then what do you do? As the last few days have demonstrated, if you seem to step in you’re cursed, and if you don’t you’re cursed. It’s very difficult, very difficult.

ST: I wrote all of those contracts and I inserted a clause into those contracts and also a clause that said if we asked you to stand down then you’d do anything else that you’d want us to do. So, you often read of manager’s receiving payments of their entire contracts when they leave – I was very specific about the contracts I wrote, people didn’t get that deal at all – no pay-off took place.

We must have been the only Football Club in the history of football who have said goodbye to a manager, assistant manager, goalkeeping coach and other coaches and simply not had to pay people off but there you go. It was a tremendously difficult period – and I feel sorry for Gary (Mills) because I genuinely believe he gave it his best shot, and it didn’t work, and I think anyone being asked to stand down would have taken it badly.

ST: A non-executive director in the legal sense would be someone who would normally just attend board meetings but have no involvement in the day-to-day running of the club. An executive director in the full legal sense would be someone who would be a fully paid director, and we don’t have any of those at this club. We don’t have that situation here, yet we are all constantly involved in the running of the club – so it’s a rather weird set-up, as is having a Trust involved because you have the board who want to keep quiet on certain issues, then you have someone reporting back to the fans.

Wilko: Gives 'football backbone'

ST: In the original business plan, we were looking for attendances to be around six to six-and-a-half thousand, bearing and mind it was written when we were in the higher division. We’ve now re-evaluated the plans down to five-and-a-half, and we’ve also got plans for four-and-a-half. We will survive – but it would be a hell of a lot easier if people came and watched the games, we’re averaging at around 5,200 at the minute. It would be very, very difficult if they went down, on an average, if it goes down to four-and-a-half.

I’m not saying we’d go out of business or anything like that, but it’d make it very difficult to compete at the level we want, with the ambition we’ve got if they were to go down to four-and-a-half thousand.

We need people – I’m begging – to come and watch the games. I’ve seen football like this before, but you’ve just got to stick in there. I don’t blame people for not coming, but there are consequences if you don’t. That means it’ll just take us longer to fulfil our ambition.