Cod Almighty | Article
by Ian Poulter
20 September 2004
Apparently GTFC have started up a scheme where you can alert them to racist behaviour at matches by texting them. I say "apparently" because I hadn't heard anything about such a scheme until a friend told me in the pub on Saturday night. According to my friend, the club announced this scheme in the programme for the Rochdale game.
I get the impression, and I could be wrong, that this seems to be the only way the club has announced the scheme. I was at the Rochdale game and arrived at my seat some 15 minutes before the game kicked off. I didn't hear anything by the public announcer. I certainly didn't see anything happening on the pitch before the game started to make supporters aware of such a scheme either.
Like many Town fans, I cannot afford the extra expense of a programme on top of paying to get into a game. Unless the commercial department labours under the delusion that every Town fan at some point reads every page of every programme, either their own or a friend's, I do not understand why such a well-meaning scheme should be exclusively launched through the programme.
I have checked the club's official website and I cannot seem to find anything about this scheme on there. In addition, I would have thought the local newspaper would have been informed and would carry information on this scheme. I haven't seen anything in the club's close ally, the Grimsby Telegraph, and neither have any of my friends. As for the official site, it seems to choose to prefer repeating gossip rather than providing us with the facts, so I should not be surprised.
Is it a case of the club trying to sneak this scheme through or has the launch of it not been properly thought through? If the club is trying to squeak the announcement of the scheme then why, in the first place, are they bothering? Are they embarrassed? Are they doing this just to appease certain elements of the Town support so they are seen to be doing something? If the club has not properly considered how it was going to announce this scheme then the fans have every right to point their finger accusingly at the club's PR department. And the club should be putting this right in the near future by informing the relevant organisations such as the local paper, supporters' groups, and the club's own internet department.
Or is it that the club has informed these organisations and these people are ignoring it? Is it that nobody is really bothered, that they feel racism will always be a factor at Blundell Park and isn't worth tackling? Could it be that the Grimsby Telegraph does not want to risk upsetting a proportion of its readers? Or has the prospect of a one-off cash-cow of a payday like tomorrow night's game against Charlton, a team with a number of regular black players, overshadowed the launch of the scheme?
I would find the latter point hard to believe, since the club took the time to pen the words for the programme. If you put the time into doing that, how much more effort would it have taken to make sure a message was read out over the ground's public announcement system? Would it have been too much to ask a board member, the chairman, or even a player to address the crowd? No.
And this is possibly the problem with the club. No-one is willing to attach their face to this campaign, instead hiding behind the faceless anonymity of an article in the programme, which they hope everyone will get the message of. This isn't good enough. People won't find out about the scheme. They need to be told, and they need to see who is telling them. Someone needs to stand in the middle of the Blundell Park pitch with a microphone and spell it out.
Which is why I ask the club: are you going to do something about it and redress the balance? Until this happens, this scheme, whatever its possibly good intentions, is a hollow gesture.