If there’s such a thing as tragi-comic timing, then Marcus Evans has it. Just a few short months after deigning to acknowledge that he had physical form by appearing in a video interview, Evans has given his first on-the-record interview to a journalist from outside the club, Archant’s Stuart Watson. Shortly afterwards, Ipswich Town go into an East Anglian derby bottom of the second-tier table, against opponents who are top, and whose owner cheerfully appeared on an independent fans’ podcast recently. It would be hard to devise, imagine, or fictionalise a more stark set of contrasts between the two clubs, and it’s the sheer weight of evidence in Norwich’s favour which gives the lie to many of the claims made by Evans.
“One thing I’m pretty good at is managing my time so that I get an awful lot achieved in a short period of time”, Evans told Watson. Fair enough: as my Turnstile Blues colleague Rob Freeman pointed out, the lot that he's achieved so far has been pretty awful. “I’m pretty hands-on and on top of detail without having to spend 35 hours a week managing a football club”. Right, so running Ipswich Town is a part-time job, we get that. Thank goodness you’ve previously been able to trust the day-to-day to your faithful lieutenants, Clegg and Milne.
The same Ian Milne, let’s not forget, who found time back in June 2017 to be sniffy about the management structure that Norwich were putting into place. “They’ve gone for a sporting director and a head coach, but I think there can only be one captain of the ship – the manager”, said Milne. This is echoed in Evan’s recent Archant interview: “I’ve always felt it was the manager’s responsibility to manage a football club, pretty much, from A to Z.” How’s that been going for you recently, guys? And how does it seem to be going for Norwich?
Because this is the thing. Turnstile Blues has always argued that Evans has no strategy. Evans would argue that he has – the much-vaunted “5-point plan” which supporters (disgruntled about a rise in season ticket prices) were instructed to “get behind” by Milne in that same summer as he was dismissing the merit of what was going on up the A140. Analysis of the “5-point plan” was conspicuously absent from Watson’s interview with Evans, but even if you accept the existence of such a plan, what cannot be denied is the fact that it isn’t f***ing working. We’re bottom of the league and Norwich are top. And nowhere in Evans’s interview does he even come close to acknowledging that, still less accepting any responsibility for it.
Strategy does get a mention in Evans’s interview. “Whilst I don’t see the need for that specific European type ‘director of football’ role I do see the need for someone [Lee O’Neill] to have oversight of the protection of the club’s long-term strategy and principles agreed last summer”. Again, the evidence contradicts this. If there was a long-term strategy, why was a manager unproven at Championship level allowed to completely dismantle the squad? There weren’t many signs of ‘principles’ on display in the transfer market last summer.
Let’s briefly revisit the timing of Evans’s interview. He knows that things are currently at the lowest of several low ebbs during his 11-year tenure. He knows that supporters are increasingly holding the owner, rather than the latest incumbent of the manager’s office, responsible for this situation. In one sense, he deserves credit for increasing his public profile during the toughest times. But in another sense, it’s hard to escape the condescension inherent in the gesture. “Wow, things really are bad. I suppose I had better give the people some succour by talking to them”.
It's not just the timing of Evans’s interview which gives that impression, it’s the patronising tone. Already familiar from Evans’s occasional “Notes from the Dear Leader” pieces in the ITFC programme (of which more later), Evans’s gift for talking down to supporters is undimmed by the club’s lowly league position. When musing on why it had taken so long for Evans to give a media interview, he blithely states that “I felt that quite a lot of the questions that fans were asking were being answered anyway”. Did you? On what basis? Did the fans get any say in whether or not that was happening? Apparently not.
The disconnect between what supporters want to hear from their owner and what Evans thinks they deserve is nowhere more evident than at the start of his interview. “I used to put something in the programme at least once a season, maybe twice.... I tried for those club interviews to be slightly no holds barred anyway. I said ‘look, if we’re going to do these, let’s cover all the things a journalist or somebody else may want to ask’.” Really? I must have missed the bit in the programme where Evans’s interrogator shook him by the lapels and shouted “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING TO MY FOOTBALL CLUB?” into his face.
Giving an interview to a newspaper is a step in the right direction for Evans, but if he expects accolades for finally doing what he should have been doing habitually for the last eleven years, he will be disappointed. After over a decade, he is approaching the bare minimum level and standard of communication which can reasonably be expected of someone who owns a significant artefact in the local community. He has still not spoken directly to supporters.
More worrying is the continued and apparent belief that Town fans will meekly accept the wisdom of Evans’s “business” experience: that his talk of flat hierarchies and video conferencing will put us back in our “let’s just accept that the man with lots of money knows what he’s doing” box. Supporters should be asking whether he knows what he’s doing with our football club. Think back over the various decisions made by Evans and Milne over the last few years. Now contrast them with the decisions made by their counterparts at Carrow Road. Now look at the league table. Tragi-comic timing: you’ve either got it or you haven’t. It’s about the only thing that Marcus Evans has to offer us right now.
Thanks to Rob Freeman and Steve Moore for contributions to this article
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