GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

committees and boards, charitable organisations and community trusts. We

have also seen some graduate from the programme and continue to serve the

game in coaching and management roles, but over the last month we have lost

Darren Moore, a talented young manager who was in charge of a club called

West Bromwich Albion who were fourth in the league at the time, in the play

offs and he was sacked. There was not any real coherent explanation given.

This was a guy that was achieving all the aims, hitting all the targets and there

was a question that was asked: Why? I do not know, any of you, whether you

are interested in football or not, but there is a guy called Adrian Durham on

Talk Sport and he picked up on this. I will try and share the link to his radio

programme where he illustrated the inequity in dismissing that talented young

manager.

Another good friend of mine, Chris Hughton, has just been dismissed as

manager of Brighton, a club that he dragged into the premiership, put almost

four years of his hard work into maintaining their position in the most profitable

league in the world, took them to the semi-final of the FA Cup, kept them in the

division again and was sacked. All the work that we are doing to try and see

greater visibility in those areas of management, administration, in committee

representation, boardroom representation, it seems that it is a snakes and

ladders issue. Just when you think that everything is okay, as I said before, it

is not.

We have seen possibly with the new permissiveness which some might say

has been caused by the divisive nature and language of Brexit a resurgence of

racism on the terraces in football. I tell you what we have also seen. We have

seen the same impotence in addressing this from the stakeholders, all of them,

which we have witnessed for years. Racism is like a virus. It spreads

insidiously and rapidly when unchecked. I will just go a bit off piste here,

because I recently suffered a bout of shingles and I went to the doctor and the

doctor said, “Yes, it is shingles, it emerges from the chickenpox virus and it

manifests itself in adults as shingles”. The chicken pox virus lies dormant at

the base of your spine and then it just waits for the right preconditions to

resurface, it waits for the right environment and then, as I say, it just manifests

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