IT’S good to talk if you believe the adverts for the British Telecom from the late 1980s, while people who wear pin-striped suits and red socks in marketing insist that communication is king.
While both of those phrases are now well and truly filed away in the cliche drawer, Burnley FC could perhaps take those lines on board, especially as the new Championship season draws ever closer.
It seems hard to believe that the Clarets kick off their new campaign against Bolton Wanderers in just 38 days – and it seems even harder to believe that the theory around Turf Moor appears to be one that dictates silence is golden.
Martin Paterson has become the latest player to head out of the door after he rejected Burnley’s offer and headed over the hills into deepest Yorkshire to take the Tyke shilling from Huddersfield Town.
Charlie Austin is looking increasingly likely to follow the striker on the road out of East Lancashire, while Chris McCann has been released and is looking for a new club.
And the fans are growing concerned.
They are getting itchy feet over the lack of activity on the incoming front – and they are also restless about the wall of silence from the powers that be at the Turf.
Okay, the club is a private business and you wouldn’t expect Asda bosses to come out an explain why a pound of pork and hall roll has doubled in price.
It’s their business and people have the right to choose whether to buy or not.
But as football people keep insisting, football is apparently different.
So seeing that the game is different to most businesses, surely the club should be talking to the fans and keeping them broadly informed?
The club expects the fans to lash out the not inconsiderable price for season tickets and they are quite happy to change their kit most seasons knowing full well that people in Burnley will dig ever so deep into their pockets to buy the new shirt.
I sometimes think some people at Turf Moor really underestimate the fans.
In fact I am pretty sure that they don’t actually understand what the football club means to people in the town.
The fans of Burnley really care about the club.
It matters to them.
More so than at many clubs, a win makes the weekend and a defeat totally wrecks it.
A good number of fans I have spoken to are really worried about what the season will hold.
The statement regarding Charlie Austin’s future last week was fair enough, although it was the absolute minimum you would expect from any club.
But surely that should have come from one of the two chairmen or even the chief executive rather than a few unattributed lines.
People in Burnley want to know who the men in charge are.
They like to relate to the chairman and the like.
They don’t like them to be anonymous beings who are so far in the background that most fans wouldn’t recognise them if they walked down Harry Potts Way wearing a name badge.
And perhaps the people in charge need to mix with the people who make the club what it is.
Maybe then they would get it.
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