Little voice...

Just in case you have somehow managed to miss it, the second "Supporters Trust"meeting is being held this evening in the Conservative Club in Charlton Church Lane. I will go to learn more but the big news on this front was the decision of one supporter (and his wife I think) to donate the voting proxy to their 500,000+ shares.

Donating your voting proxy costs you nothing and it means the ST (when established) will be able to leverage your share when it comes to decision-making. You can always withdraw your proxy if the ST is advocating something you don't support. Clearly, the larger number of shares it controls by proxy then the bigger it's little voice. It will only work on the basis that it's views are largely representative of what the fans want although that wouldn't appear to be a problem in the recent climate. The ST is welcome to my vote when the time comes (500 shares).

The immediate target would appear to be to garner 1 million votes which could come from 1000 supporters donating c 500 shares each and adding these to the half-a-million already pledged. Whilst an impressive sounding target, we ought to remind ourselves that there are c 64 million shares issued, so even that would represent less than 2%. However, there are likely to be a number of larger single investors who aren't on the Board who feel relatively powerless today and who might similarly donate their voting proxy to the ST.

The Board control c 80% of the club's shares, so, theoretically at least, it might be possible for the ST to eventually control a good share of the other 20%. If they could establish a proxy on 10 million shares, then they would begin to have a say, albeit still a minor one. However, just like minority political parties in hung parliaments, little voices can become very loud when their vote swings the balance of power. In reality this is still very unlikely at our football club as enough of the majority shareholders are always likely to vote together. The difference is that a voice controlling 5%+ would need to be listened to.

Elsewhere, it was interesting to watch the Norwich performance at MK Dons last night. The Canaries probably scored too early (17 seconds) because there was an inevitability to the result after that as Milton Keynes eventually fought back to win 2-1 albeit thanks to a controversial penalty - the referee appeared to signal that the Norwich player had got the ball but then over-ruled himself in favour of the lino. If you were looking for scraps of encouragement, Norwich fielded a young side containing three 17 year-olds and lost two players to injury early on.

First time I have seen the MK Dons stadium (albeit on telly). It looked impressive enough, especially with a top tier that looks like it has been built for expansion when they might need to install additional seating.