No stooges were used in the writing of this blog

Have you ever woken up the morning after a fight with a loved one the night before and wish you could take back every single word that you said? All those words that came out in the heat of the moment that you now regret and you sit and wish that it had never happened. Let’s be honest most of us have been there at one stage or another in our lives. It’s that point in time when any sense and logic for whatever reason departs our brains and something else takes over us and takes control. Our emotions get on top of us and before we know it we’ve lost control of the situation and words are spilling out and they keep coming and coming. In that very situation we’ve for want of a better word or choice of phrase become ‘blinkered.’ With the next morning comes the realisation that you wish you hadn’t have said even half as much as what came out of your mouth and emotions got in the way of your thought process. We are all human and whether we like it emotions especially when running high will play a very big part of your thought process. You cannot help but fall under the influence of emotions and the impact of that can be that lateral thinking quickly goes out of the window. So why mention this? What’s the point? Well there’s a very big point and one I hope that people will sit and mull over for a while and try see some sense and reason to it and try work out a sense of logic to certain things.

In the past seven days I have written five blogs in total and they’ve all been connected with Portsmouth FC in one shape or another. One of those blogs was my take on the preview of the game against Yeovil Town during the week. One was a rather randomly worded one entitled ‘Almost… I think that one hit the post and bounced.’ Whilst its content was randomly worded it did carry some instruction as to my intent to reply to two blogs written, one by Pompey’s best well known blogger Mr Mike Hall and one from the Chief Sport’s Writer at The News Mr Neil Allen. This blog followed on from the blog that I wrote entitled ‘Challenging the trust or bust rhetoric,’ which both Mike and Neil through the use of social media brought its contents to a far wider audience than it would have normally had achieved. Mike wrote a reply which he posted on Pompey-fans.com and Neil then wrote a piece that appeared in the Sports Mail and online. In all three blogs the notion of fans treatment towards one another was discussed. I replied in turn to what Mike had written in a piece entitled ‘What would Charles M Schulz have made of it all?’ and ended of the piece by saying that I still had to reply to Neil’s blog. I then wrote a further piece called ‘You can’t shake hands with a clenched fist,’ a direct quote from the Portsmouth Supporters Trust Chairman elect that he used in reference to Balram Chanrai in a statement given during the week. That blog still didn’t give my response to Neil’s article that he had written and was posted online on Monday morning. What it did mention however were a couple of rumours that had been circulating for some time. One of which it appears has caused a great deal of discussion today.

In the blog I wrote that I had heard the alleged suggestion that Neil had been offered the role of Press Officer by the Portsmouth Supporters Trust if they were to take over the running of the football club. As within the first blog that kick started all of this about the rhetoric of Trust or Bust, I deliberately left out a few pieces of information in that blog. In the first one I deliberately left out that actually I no more wanted to see Portpin return to the club anymore than Mike did. I did however state this quite clearly in the reply I sent to his reply. I also stated very clearly within that blog that I would like to see a Trust representation on the board of any future potential owners and if Portsmouth’s Trust was able to mirror the role that’s proved so successful at Swansea City then it was be a great outcome for not only the Trust but the club as a whole. So having left out that quite large omission from the first blog I was curious to see the reaction of leaving out something similar from the last blog published and these are some facts that should be considered alongside what I’d written about the alleged rumour that had been suggested about Neil;

In the past I have worked for newspapers owned by Johnston Press Plc the same company that owns The News. In the eight and a half years in newspapers it’s fair to suggest that I learned an awful lot about the way that newspapers operate and the constraints that sometimes they have to find themselves working to. In the past decade or so the fortunes of Johnston Press have suffered considerably and this has taken its toll on the workforce either through downsizing of operations whereby people have lost their jobs or on the moral of staff that were lucky enough to keep their jobs. When you’ve been through that situation and seen the effect it can have on friends and colleagues it stays with you and it’s quite easy to feel empathy for someone that works in the same field even if you’ve never actually worked with them or even met them. The News relationship with Portsmouth FC and the problems they’ve had over the years have been documented to a degree but never enough to gain a real insight into what a fine balance and tight rope you have to walk as a sports journalist to ensure that forms of communication are kept open between both parties. Neil has in the past come under a lot of criticism from fans about the stories that he has written and I have gone on record in public with my opinion that fans should cut him some slack and recognise the fact that there would be many things he would like to print but the decision of whether he can will fall to an editor and also has to be balanced about the need to keep communication channels open. For a daily newspaper like The News, stories about Portsmouth FC will be one of the things that keeps people buying the newspaper every day. When you work for a weekly title you don’t have that same pressure because the biggest reason for people to buy a newspaper isn’t actually for the news that’s been written it’s for the property section on weekly titles.

So I’ve defended Neil, I respect the constraints he is under as a journalist and I feel a bond with him having both at one stage or another worked for the same company. All of this I deliberately omitted from the piece I wrote. I also omitted the fact that I had heard this rumour some five or six weeks ago and hadn’t felt the need to bring it up other than the time I did and now I shall explain the context of why I did. When presented with the alleged role over I had several choices as to what to do with the rumour when presented to me;

a) I could choose to ignore it and do nothing with it.

b) I could have chosen to make him aware of the fact that the rumour was going around.

c) I could have asked him direct whether the rumours were true.

d) I could randomly bring it up several weeks later in the context of trying to make a point.

So obviously in the outset I chose to do nothing with it. I didn’t feel the need to tell him that there was such a rumour going around and neither did I feel the need to ask him whether the rumour was true on the basis that just because I’d heard it didn’t mean that I had taken it to be the truth. I will go on record however and say that if the club was taken over by the Supporters Trust and were to offer him the position of Press Officer then I think he would do an excellent job and would be a logical choice for the role. Now people who haven’t followed my Twitter account for very long wouldn’t have known that I have in times gone past gone on the defensive on behalf of Neil when he gets criticism from fans. I personally believe that he does a good job and under harder circumstances than the average fan would realise actually, without being allowed to become party to the full details of why I make that statement. I deliberately didn’t go to Neil and ask him whether the rumours were true because I didn’t believe they were true. What I did was use them in a general context alongside other rumours to see what reaction if any they would get and if I did get a reaction whether it would be what I call a blinkered one; the type of reaction that I opened this blog with. If I hadn’t have written the allegation in the past blog and had brought up the subject here after what I had just written about Neil I cannot imagine for one minute that armed with everything I had just said including the fact that I would see Neil as a good choice had the rumour actually been true, that no one would have seen it through blinkered eyes. Neil’s reaction for the record was this ‘I am afraid you have discredited your own blog with the lies contained about me. Trust job? Ridiculous and a lie. It’s not even as if I am too hard to get hold of to ask me if it’s true before repeating such tittle tattle. Very poor.’

If Neil had been presented with the rumour here and in this blog with everything I have just said do you think his reaction would have been the same? I didn’t claim that I believed the rumour to be true and I didn’t feel the need to ask him direct because I didn’t believe it was true. I’d already ignored it for some weeks and I use it now in a context and to make a point and a very strong one which echoes what Neil wrote in his article that the fans are being torn apart and that the one thing that fans need to do is to stay together as a unit. The fans are the clubs best and most consistent asset that it has and although it doesn’t always feel like it, now more than ever we are the clubs most valuable asset. What we have at the moment from far too many is a highly blinkered approach where certain fans have become so blinkered to one side of an argument or another that it’s caused a split in the ranks. People have become so desperate to believe certain things and for certain outcomes to happen that in certain cases logic and reason go out of the window. There is a will and a want for things to be true. There will have been a will and a want on certain peoples part for the rumour I had heard being alleged about Neil to have been true because that would have given more argument to the weight of the claim that the newspaper is firmly in the Supporters Trusts camp. Then on the other side we have people claiming that Express FM is in Portpin’s camp. Its early panto season and people have chosen their heroes and villains of the piece and you can hear the cries of ‘he’s behind you!’ from the audience joining in the participation.

The original point of my first blog was the feeling by many fans that if you didn’t back the notion of the Supporters Trust bid then you were seen in some quarters as backing the Portpin bid. Not only that, but an awful lot of people were afraid to even mention certain things in case they were rounded on and taken to task over their comments. That’s not a healthy environment for which fans should operate and it’s far too easy to forget that at the end of the day we all love the club and we all want what’s best for the club even if we don’t all agree on what we actually think that might be. The funny thing is when fans split it’s sometimes hard to realise how close everyone is yet looking at the situation it can appear that people are miles apart.

One of the best conversations I had about the situation came with someone who it’s fair to say isn’t my biggest fan by any stretch of the imagination. Yet he made a point that has really stuck with me since he said it. It was the simple notion that unless you lived in the City of Portsmouth, you couldn’t really see with your own eyes the impact that it has on people’s lives day to day. That must have been two or three months ago now and that sentiment really struck home to me. The notion that when things are really under your nose in terms of what goes on, that it’s hard not to get so emotionally involved in things and after a while it’s become so close that it really becomes this energy by where people take the slightest thing mentioned really personally and direct to heart. Logic just goes out the window and actually unless you do live miles away, it actually becomes quite hard to take a step back from the situation, take your fans hat off as it were and to really analyse everything that goes on and everything that’s being said.

Now I’ve admitted to deliberately missing key parts out of previous blogs to see what sort of reaction it gets on certain subjects. I have also used the fact that I have studied psychology, human behaviours and communication studies to try and manipulate certain things that I have written. They may only be subtle ways of presenting information, but the manner in which they are done can have a great impact on what’s been written. I have quoted the number of pledges that the trust made and deliberately chosen to display this information in a certain way to make a point for one side of the argument. I could have chosen to display the same information in a different way to make a complete opposite argument. Confused? Well let me explain;

In previous blogs I had used the total number of pledges given to the Trust which surrounds the 2,000 mark at present and measured it against certain other reasonable yard sticks which could be seen as a fair indication at the opening of the argument and probably quite unfair at the end. So for example I compared the number of pledges to the number of season ticket holders we have this season which is around the 8,000 mark and the way I gave the answer was to say that 25% wasn’t a very large number. Furthermore from this I used last season’s attendance as a marker and then last season’s top attendance at home to Southampton which was just under 20,000 to really drive home the point of how far away that number of 2,000 was from being a really good effort. The brain automatically looks at figures in different ways and as adults we all have a good comprehension of numbers and percentages. So if I asked you what percentage 50% was as a fraction you could easily tell me that it was ½, 25% to be a ¼ and 75% to be ¾ without having to do much thinking or working out. Now with the admission that I deliberately chose to use a percentage for my point, I will now reverse the point and make it again to make the statement for the opposite side of the argument. The total number of pledges believed to be around the 2,000 mark can see to be a real achievement for the trust as it represents a ¼ of the number of this seasons ticket holders at Fratton Park this season. The information is exactly the same just presented in two different ways and to two different effects for the purpose of who you are trying to aim the message at. To explain the psychology behind it would take me a while but the basic theory is the brain sees 25% and ¼ as two very different figures despite the fact it represents the same thing. It works on the principle that the 4 is closer to the 1 therefore makes the percentage appear quite large in a context where the brain would see that the 75% missing was quite a way off the 25% yet the end result is exactly the same.

I have very deliberately chosen the way I have represented numbers as a percentage instead of a fraction. I have deliberately chosen to withhold certain pieces of information from what I have written to be able to steer the majority that are reading it down a certain direction. This happens every single day of our lives in everything we do and unless we become more open to the fact that it is happening then we will always walk around blinkered to so much that happens to us and we will never be aware that it’s happening to all of us.

How many people have come away from a supermarket believing they’ve purchased some real bargains, especially when the till roll tells us how much we’ve saved but never really taken time to consider that week on week unless money is really tight come the last week of the month that no matter how many bargains we think we’ve picked up, the end bill is actually roughly the same every week. How many people in the UK believe that when purchasing a buy one get one offer at the supermarket means that they’ve come away with the best value that was on offer potentially? I’d love to know the percentage. Every part of a supermarkets layout and the brands on offer each month are designed to help you part with as much money as possible. From the gondola promotion ends that cost companies thousands to place their goods on during promotion periods, to the nice neat row of sweets and chocolates close to the counters to tempt you into impulse buys whilst you wait in the queue. How many times do you walk past a gondola promotion end and pick up an offer deal and then never bother to even walk down that aisle where the goods normally live? Most people probably aren’t even aware that they’ve done it in fairness. It’s also a good indication of just how much mark up is in a product when they’re offered on a buy one get one free basis. What you are lead to believe to be a good deal doesn’t actually mean that it’s such a great deal after all.

How many fans can say hand on heart that at present they are looking for a balanced argument on the subject of Portsmouth and in particular the ownership issue? If you were sat in the Trust camp or Portpin camp for example would you make an active attempt to see what both sides of an argument were or moreover would you chose to attempt to find an opposing view and then try to change that view to your own? After so many months of off the field problems continuing, how many people are so institutionalised into doing such a thing that they don’t even realise that they are doing it? How many times do you read what you’re told to read without realising it just because of who’s made the request? Before Mike and Neil referenced my first blog in the series it had been read a total of 82 times. Since then it’s been read 1,396 times because of their involvement.

How much of what’s being written do you actually understand and if you don’t understand it how prepared are you to openly admit that fact in public? Last night Mike must have spent nearly three hours trying to explain the logics of one of his blogs to me before I fully grasped what he was trying to put across in it and even then we are only now half way through it. Today it took me just over an hour to then simplify it in turn for someone else for them to then understand what I took the information to mean. Here for me is where the real danger lies in splitting the fans apart. It’s the ability to take a set of data like I did and be able to manipulate it quite easily into the context of how it’s presented to make the point you wish to make. It’s only when you openly admit it that people will potentially (and this is what I’d like to see happen) start to take a step back from the situation and begin to look at the logics of what is being written and not be afraid to ask what it means either. Whether we want to admit it or not articles that are written will even with the best of intentions to try remain neutral, carry a certain element that will sway the reader one way or another.

At present Mike is on a daily basis writing a series of questions to the PR Company involved with the Portpin bid. Now Mike knows that the likelihood of him getting a better answer than no comment from the firm is slim to none let’s face it. That doesn’t stop him doing it and let’s face it he is the best well known blogger of them all and he has the most power. No one else of all the Pompey bloggers could have brought the same level of traffic to the first piece that I wrote without a shadow of a doubt in my mind. What I like about Mike is his refreshing honesty. He makes no bones about what he tries to do and that he wants to see the Trust get over the finishing line. Only Mike could tell you the total number of hours that he has put into helping the Trust achieve their final goal of beating Portpin to the post. Each actual Trust board member in turn could probably only surmise as to the total number of hours that they have each put in but collectively it will have been thousands let’s be fair and that’s a gigantic effort on their parts and if people cannot recognise that and applaud it even if they don’t believe that the Trust bid is the right bid to take over the club then they should at the very least be able to congratulate the effort that was made. I doubt even the Trust would have believed that when they started this whole process that they would come as close as they have done to possibly taking over. It’s an amazing effort and I am big enough to say well done you should all be proud of your efforts.

Back to Mike though and the credit he disserves on the part of the Trust as he seemingly shifts effortlessly through the gears and ups his game every time. There is no point in trying to argue with Mike on the subject of Portpin because he seemingly lives as close a life to them as Balram Chanrai does on a day to day basis. The closer to the finishing line the race becomes the more complex the argument is starting to become. I genuinely have about five pages of notes from the early hours of this morning trying to get my logics around fixed charges, floating charges, apr and various other parts. After three odd hours in the small hours of this morning I think I had genuinely just about grasped half of what had been written in one of his blogs. Mike wrongly credited me with having a better understanding than I do on such matters. Had he not helped me then I’d still be in the dark and I suspect many fans that attempt to read them are left in the dark on the matter. But having come so far into the argument on the Trusts side it doesn’t actually matter that they don’t understand fully what’s being said, if the general sentiment is pro-Trust then that’s good enough for them. You genuinely do have to have a basic concept of law and accountancy to be able to understand their contents. There will be an element of what’s written that is designed to be confusing to many. The general point is that you aren’t really supposed to be able to understand the complexities fully because if you could then you could try to work out the logics of how everything is actually working and on what basis choices are being made. I would reckon that it’s taken me around about four and a half hours to work out the logics of half of one of his recent blogs. What I can recognise are the logics of writing to Portpin's PR company even when he knows the best answer he can reasonably expect to get is no comment and it’s for that exact same reason that I chose not to approach Neil Allen direct because for one I didn’t believe the allegation and for two I knew had I have done then I couldn’t have used the outcome that did happen to demonstrate the context of why I wanted to use it. The reason Mike aims comments to the PR firm is because even if he gets an answer of no comment in can be seen as a moral boost, a triumph of sorts to celebrate. I didn’t ask Neil direct for the opposite reason. Knowing he would say it wasn’t true wouldn’t have demonstrated that there will have been certain people out there that wanted the rumour to be true. That even mentioning that a rumour existed could give weight to views that some have that he is in some way impartial. People will when emotions are running high be too quick to not consider the fact that there might be other information needed on which to make a decision. People will believe what they want to believe at the end of the day. Can we overcome and challenge people to look at the wider picture that is the question?

The reason goods are sold at 99p, the reason supermarkets are designed the way they are, the reason I omit certain facts and opinions from blogs, the reason Mike targets PR companies knowing that his best answer will be a no comment are all the same. They are all targeted at an audience in a specific way and for a specific purpose. You are that audience and in this context I want you to all start to step back and start to look at the bigger picture. It is easy to manipulate people especially when they’re blinkered. What this club needs from the fans at this moment is for us all to stay together. More now than at any time in recent past the club needs the fans whoever is in charge and come match day for fans to get behind the team for 90 minutes. Fans minds aren’t likely to be dissuaded after so many months of off the field troubles so whilst I’ve had to make a point using extreme circumstances to get people to listen, my hope is that fans will actually do so and realise that unity is just as important as who eventually takes over at the club. Remember the most important factors; that we all love the same club and most importantly the thing that is hardest to realise is that we all genuinely do want what is best for the club. Neil if you’re reading this I apologise for using you in the context that I did to make a point and as I stated earlier I do believe you do a good job for The News and if you were to be considered for the role then I couldn’t think of a better candidate to do so whoever owned the club. The fans have been divided but can they be brought back together now for the benefit of the club? We will wait and see.