Friday 20 January 2012

All in the room?

What fascinates us most about the Sun revelations (the spurious ones about people legally buying shares in CPO) is the timing. It reveals a great deal about the mindset of the SAYNOCPO stalwarts who have been encouraging this sort of club bashing. You might think that it is obvious; that today is the AGM and that the stories, designed as they are to ridicule and add fuel to their conspiracy theories, are timed to influence fans attending the AGM, to make them mistrust the club and buy into the idea that a grand larceny is being committed by Roman Abramovich.

Well, that may be true and it is possible there will be many people at the AGM in person. Likely in fact. But the majority of shareholders won't be and they made their voting decisions some while ago, before these ridiculously childish and frustration-fuelled attacks appeared. What it reveals to us is the delusion SAYNOCPO are suffering from, the one that makes them think the only people that matter, as with the EGM, are SAYNOCPO and their proxies - the people actually in the room. It is why their secret, unannounced and ill fated attempt to take over the board was planned to take place using only those votes in the room. And then, using proxies they had asked for, even though those shareholders may not have approved of such a move.

That they will have encouraged people to attend is undoubted. But it is obvious that they have so cast themselves in the role of guardians of something or other, that they probably don't even consider the wider constituency of CPO, let alone the tens of thousands of season ticket holders and beyond. Getting their name in the papers, regardless of whether that is on the back of scantily clad, virulently anti Chelsea stories has totally consumed them. We doubt they have even considered the votes of those not in attendance and probably believe everybody there will agree with them. Their frequently cringe-making, teenage PR junior press releases, full of haughty cliches and indignation and which almost always reveal an alarming lack of knowledge of almost everything they comment upon (Stamford Bridge planning permission is a good example) are great at provoking a one dimensional opportunity to attack the club - tabloid journos must think their Christmases have all come at once - but they also give us a good insight into their objectives, even though SAYNOCPO seem unaware that they are doing so.

Of course, they know they are in a minority but the really alarming thing is that they don't believe, for a single moment, that the majority cares and most damningly, that the majority matters. They believe that anybody voting Yes or against anything they belileve in is not a real fan. And the only real fans who bought 100 shares after October 3rd are their friends and supporters. Further, their desire to have voting rights curtailed to small packges reveals another assumption on their part; that people able to afford more shares than ten (whilst they busily parcel out and try to reassign ownerships in packets of ten or less to their friends and family) are either in the pay of the club or not real fans. One SAYNOCPO activist even said on Twitter yesterday that people will be "leant on by the club". She said that, whilst furiously denying SAYNOCPO had anything to do with the Sun story, whilst denying a board takeover had been attempted, even though she had been one of the proposed nominees and whilst another SAYNO activist joked with an Independent journalist about having "missed" the Sun story. What was that we said about losing touch with reality?

What has to happen today is that a board is confirmed and then increased. Then that board can get on with bringing the agenda back to what matters - which is how we move ahead. To do that there has to be dialogue and cooperation with the club. Those who wish to remain in the past must be left there with their tactics of generating hatred, fear and mistrust.
Fans who care about the long term good of Chelsea must have reasonable, sensible, moderate proposals put by people of logic and sense with a very healthy dollop of realism, to vote upon.

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