BURWELL LEAVES | What This Might Mean For Sunderland?!

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1:00Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit go to LinkedIn.com slash campaign terms the conditions apply. Kals football is back. So Hilton called me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwick up call at 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. Hello, everyone. I'm Chris Wind and welcome to an impromptu emergency edition of How We Are That Podcast

2:05to be cost and news has broken today that Tom Bowel has, I was going to say Michael Bowel there, just a bit of a Freudian slip there, but he's left his position as interim chief executive officer of Sunland AFC. It came as a bit of a surprise to us all and probably more of a surprise to Bowel himself, to be honest, but we've jumped on to give some initial thoughts on the ever-changing landscape of the Sunland boardroom and I'm very glad to have Andrew Smithson with me. Hello, Andrew. Hello, Mara. What happened to nothing ever happened during the National break? Yeah, kicked off with Jacque, didn't it? And then it's just going straight and even stranger since then, nothing. But yeah, we'll come on to my Freudian slip as opposed to at some point. The Michael Bowel with Tom, Michael Burwell, I'm getting myself confused. But anyway, are you sure, Mike Kim, is this a surprise to you as well?

3:06Yeah, the first answer was a message on the WhatsApp group saying, is there anybody available to react to the news? I thought, well, what news? So yeah, I wasn't expecting it, I don't think anybody was. No, well, just on that, let's start with Sunland statement. So where this news came from, as I found out way after in the chats and wondered what all the, where I had a ton of messages lined up in my chats to catch up on. But there was a statement placed on the club website and it read, Tom Burwell is left as position as interim chief executive officer of Sunland Airsea with immediate effect. The club, thanks Tom for his contribution over the past five months, which is in well for the future. Sunland Airsea owner, Kyrill O'Lewee Drafis will assume the role of executive chairman working closely with the club senior management team to lead the club day to day. The club will make no further comment at this time.

4:09So we're going to do what everyone does and pick the bones out of what the four sentences that the club put out. And the first one was this confusion I've had without the whole, throughout the whole five months as I'm reading on there actually, because they've made it very clear in that first sentence, he was interim chief executive officer. Now, I thought he was interim and then I thought he got the job permanently and now they're making it very clear as interim and he's out the door. Yeah, that confusion hasn't helped matters I don't think. We, Gavin, I spoke about this a lot during the pod discussing the minutes from the support is collective meeting recently in which Tom Burrwell was a big part of that meeting. So certainly, as recently as two or three weeks ago, he was being seen as a lead representative.

5:14But I think it's interesting that Sunland there have made it clear that he's interim. Almost as if they're saying don't panic, he was only ever temporary. You know, it looks slightly less concerning if an interim member of staff is heading off to pastures new. So that'll be why the club have pointed that out. That whole thing did Chris it left questions, didn't it? Yeah, and it was really strange though because like Tom Burrwell has been, you know, almost, you know, I don't know how long David Bruce was in the role actually will come onto that kind of transition, I suppose, how that's failed in a minute. But David Bruce, even though he went to the meetings and he was very visible at fans meetings and fan group things, he didn't really do the interviews. He didn't seem to do many, you know, very public things, whereas one of the first

6:15things Tom Burrwell did was publicly do that big kind of business podcast talk about his role at Sunland and talk about Sunland and things like that. And it seemed right from the off that it was just a different approach straight away from how David Bruce did it. Yeah, but from the outside, it probably looked like local ad done good gets moved on for buzzwords speaking linked in addict Tom Burrwell, you know, you're right about David Bruce the only time I ever saw him do anything or the only time I recall him doing anathem public facing was when there was a kit launch, I don't blame them for this at all, but I mean, that's a pretty sweet gig isn't it? If you're the fellow that's brought Hummel back to Sunland, it's probably going to do you some good if you're out there, dishing out the pink slices and what have you, you know, everyone's going to be pleased to see you,

7:17where it were, well, whenever he got asked a question, it was usually about why is this gone wrong? What's what's happened with that? But I'll take your point that yeah, the first time any of us ever heard anything from him was when he spoke on a, it might have been Charlie Methens podcast, I think, and a couple of people understandably said, why is he talking to him? Why is he not talking via official Sunland channels or talking to a local newspaper or something like that? Yeah, and the big news out of that, he did get started off in a bad foot and with getting, as I was trying to emphasise before, getting Kevin Bowles name wrong in that interview called the Michael Bowle. Easy though, you know, I'm wondering if Kevin Bowles got as good a voice as Michael Bowle might never find out, but yeah, I mean, the other thing is, well, if he's interim, does that suggest, and there was nothing in the statement, obviously, because there was virtually nothing in the statement,

8:19but if he was interim, Andrew, do you think there was a possibility somewhere there, because I'm just trying to read between the lines like everyone else, but is there a possibility that being interim, he was maybe quite easy to remove from the post because he wouldn't have signed, you know, the same contract as a permanent person in the role. So whether he was working month to month or whether he had a six month contract, if whatever that contract was up, then that might have been an easy way just to say, okay, well, thanks, you know, that period of time, whether it was a month or week, six months, whatever it was, is up. We're going to look in a different direction, or we're looking to make that permanent position to give it to somebody else or something like that. Do you think that's maybe the case here? Yeah, it probably makes this type of decision a lot cleaner to carry out. It's with immediate effect, so there's no sort of, he's on gardening leave or he's got a server notice period. It's basically, he'll turn up the stadium a like the day, and there's a box

9:23for him at his desk, you know, packing your plants and your photos are not in, you know, chuck your ID badge into reception as you walk out, play the alarm. If Martin Beent took the plant, he would have made tens of thousands with me. So I'll try to fit like a cryo chamber in the back of his, got a cryo chamber. What was it? It was somebody used trying to squeeze it into the back of his I assumed that yeah, if you're on a month to month or some sort of short term or role in contract, you're probably not looking at a huge payout or compensation or anything like that. So it perhaps was an easier thing to carry out. If I remember rightly, I think one of Tom Burr world's may humans or expectations was that he was carrying out the interviews with a view to find in a permanent chief exec. So I maybe, maybe the club decided they don't want a chief exec

10:29permanently. Maybe they don't think there's anybody out there suitable. So now that that process is dead in the water, time for him to move on. Yeah, there's a lot of questions isn't there, Chris? I don't think any of us will know with certainly what's going on. Yeah, absolutely. But I mean, just going into that where this has come from because we're talking about the past five months, but of course we've already mentioned David Bruce and that's who we took over from. He's now down my neck of the woods down here at Cheffa Wednesday and he's he's been doing a good job there. It's funny actually because I was talking about Cheffa Wednesday a plan the other day and I mentioned David Bruce and how he's gone in there and what he's done. It was quite funny because he went, oh, he's absolutely brilliant. I went all right. So what's he done? When first thing he did, he brought in all the old gear from the early 90s. He went, oh, we're loving it. We're absolutely brilliant. I know it went well to be fair. That was the last time Cheffa Wednesday went any good to be fair, but

11:30but going back to that where I mean, Tom Burwell, I big shoes to fill because I remember, you know, that was a big shock to him if I've approved going. You know, he was one of our own. He was, you know, on the face of it, we thought he was doing a cracking job. Something must have been going wrong somewhere or, you know, that, you know, Keralui Jeffers wanted to go in a different direction or he wanted to have a certain makeup of people behind the scenes and, you know, Tom Burwell worked for for other parts of the business, if you like, and the moved him across, but it was always going to be big shoes to fill and to get it right. And it's funny because some of the things that David Bruce might have been working on, obviously came in under Tom Burwell and started to go wrong and people then blamed Tom Burwell. And you do wonder whether, you know, that was because Burwell came in or that might have happened anyway because off the pitch, we just,

12:32very rarely do we, do we seem to get things really spot on and right for the fans, do we? Yeah, I think had results on the pitch not being as positive. We might have heard a bit more noise in the last few months. It's really difficult though because for all we know, yeah, Bruce to us seems fantastic, but we never got the full story with Bruce. For all we know, he was because whilst he was doing good in terms of bringing Hummel in, he might have dropped a whole load of rickets, and maybe Burwell has been having a fight fire's ever since. That's not a criticism of Bruce or Burwell. I'm just saying it. It's difficult for fans to know what to think because we don't have the full story. And unfortunately, when you don't have the full story, it allows rumors to circulate. So I heard of one person who could be talking absolute nonsense that the Hummel deal

13:36whilst the fans are over the moon, Hummel got signed up to a long term deal that really doesn't suit the Premier League club. That could be utter rubbish for all we know. But because there's that space that allows these things to breathe. With Burwell already, we've seen comments in the group there, different suggestions as to why he's left. I said it is a little bit of a joke, but the more I think about it, you could see it having legs, has he been moved on because we're clear in the decks to allow new ownership to come in. It's really tricky. And whilst I understand the club only wanted to give us a short statement and knock a bog down in things, we could maybe do with a little bit more context just to keep everybody calm and just assure everybody that, yeah, okay, this has come out

14:36of the blue, but it's for the right reasons. And this is what we're hoping to do in the coming weeks to move on from Burwell's time. Yeah, well, that's it because I'm an agreement with you that, you know, this sort of thing in business can mean that way. They're kind of not playing the decks, but making it very easy for somebody else to come in where those positions don't have to be, they don't have to be sorted in terms of paying people off for big contracts or whatever. But yeah, just going back into you know, that in terms of filling that role, part of that statement was saying that Kool-Ali Jeffers is going to move in the position of executive chairman, which I found really strange because he's always been this, or you know, this figurehead who's put the right people into the right places. Now, it's slightly concerning that it wasn't a statement saying, well, Tom Burwell's gone because we

15:38need to fill the position permanently and we're going to do that or we're going to complete the process or we're going to do that. And he's moved into this position of executive chairman with a more hands-on role. Now, Kool-Ali Jeffers has done a fantastic job since he's come in, but he's never done that. He's never been hands-on. He's never been at those meetings really where he's listened to fans firsthand and he wanted other people to do that and do the job well, which is a great manager that somebody runs a business very well. And I'm slightly concerned by the fact that he's moved into that and the statement wasn't saying we're going, we're pointing someone straight away. Yes, yes. I actually took it as a positive because to take us in a completely different opposite route to what I was saying about potential sales. And it is just potential sales. This is just again, it's rumour. I'm not saying we will sell or that I want us to be sold or anything like that.

16:38But I actually took that as a positive that he has been in the background for so long. He's seen how things have gone. And if he's unhappy with that, I think it's great that he's saying, well, I tell you what, rather than tell other people what to do, I'm going to do it myself because that suggests to me that he is still fully on board with Sunland. He isn't an absent owner. He isn't like an Ella Short who just, I don't know, at the end of every month read a report and said, yeah, I'll sign the check. Continue what you're doing. You're right, though, in that this is the first time he will actually be acting on making the things happen rather than telling other people to do it. Maybe he thinks he's old enough and he's experienced enough to do that. Maybe he, maybe those for far-need discussions, maybe he thought, well, it's a piece of cake. This why

17:41I'm a pain of the people that do stuff for us. I'll just, I'll just do it. Again, Chris, there's so many possible reasons behind all of this. But as I say, on a personal level, the fact that Louis Dreyfus is wanting to be more involved in the day-to-day running for me should be a good thing. Okay. Well, you've just said something there, strange at the end, where you've said, Kool-Aliwie Dreyfus wanting to be involved. Now, do you think that's actually the case? Because in all of the years, what was it? I'm going to go back. It was it beginning of 2021 when he first came in. Is that right? I think we'll play in shrews, free. You didn't have to say that. You have to bring that up. But anyway, it was good few years ago anyway. But because he's never wanted to do that. You've just said he wants to do that. Again, to me, it feels like a stopgap.

18:46I don't think I just don't think he wants to be that face. I don't think he wants to do this role. I think again, it's another interim thing that we're going to go through. It could well be. And Chris, if you and me set something in our diary for three months time, we might have more ideas. You're very right. It's hard to know, is this a choice because he now thinks this is the time to move in? Or is it a case of, I'm sick, the death of other people mucking it up? I'm going to have to come in and do the tidy and up. Before the season, even Kicks off, soccer fans are already making predictions. Who wins the league? Who qualifies for Europe? And who's lifting the trophy at season's end? On Kowshi America's number one prediction market platform, your trading against peers in a live market, meaning there's no house. And as the probability changes, you can buy in and out of your position. For a limited time, download the Kowshi app and use code CUP26 to get $10 when you

19:49trade 10 KALSHI Kowshi. Trade the beautiful game. 18 plus only restrictions and eligibility requirements apply. Event contract trading and vols risk can may not be suitable for all investors. Rises, values and available markets may differ from those mentioned. For more information, see Kowshi.com slash regulatory. Hey, Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. Now, I don't know if you've heard, but Mint's premium wireless is $15 a month. But I'd like to offer one other perk. We have no stores. That means no small talk. Crazy weather we're having. No, it's not. It's just weather. It is an introverts dream. Give it a try at MintMobile.com slash switch. Up from payment of $45 for three month plan, $15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer for three months only. Then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See MintMobile.com. Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great. Till the CFO sees them, that's bullspend. And marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions. I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.

20:53Cut the bullspend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit go to LinkedIn.com slash campaign term secretions apply. On that then, on the mucking it up as you put it, I wanted to bring in the the minutes for the latest supporters meeting which you and Gav went through. But just in the context of what we know now with the developments that's happened. Obviously, there was the big thing which was the meeting was open with a statement which hasn't been done since after that new castle debarge in the FA Cup. And it was really interesting. Tom Burwell's reaction to that way. He said he recognized that there's work to do to rebuild the trust with supporters. That's how he opened his reply to that. He said he's committed to doing that. He then said, you know, customer service team is stretching at the moment. Clubs trying to move to a digital approach which we've heard for

21:57God knows how many years now. But yeah, they're moving towards a digital approach to help support get answers faster. I mean, I'd argue just to get supporters answers. Never mind faster, just get just provide people with some information of be fantastic. The copy up there, Chris, would be correct answers though. Can I just point out? Yeah, exactly. I mean, yeah, but I'd like to assume that information that went out from the club would be correct, but there's probably a false assumption at times. But he then went on to say the SFC app will play a big part in this. Of course, it will. When it appears, magically appears from wherever. And that's how they're going to give a direct way at the keep fans informed. That would be really interesting to say if the communications on that app will be proofread unlike on the social media. He then said currently 20% of club emails are opened, which was a big thing. So the club is aware, better ways of need it to re-suppose.

23:00Do you think again, going back through and it's funny actually because we mentioned Christian speakmen before we came on. But if you think of people like Christian speakmen, like maybe if you even look at like people like Stuart Harvey, David Bruce, you could even go lead Johnson. You know, you can argue Tony Morbree, there's a ruthless streak that goes so out quite a lot of the decisions. Now, if you're the manager of your, you know, Humboldt will superior and you see the fans come out with a statement saying things haven't been good enough, then you see the person who's trying to fix it come up with a statement like that saying it's nothing's good enough and you've been in the post for five months. Could we put all of this down? Ecarol O'Leary Jeff is just being his usual ruthless self. Very, very possibly you're right. We've seen it time and time again. People come and do a job

24:10to us on the face of it. A lot of these jobs are done to a very high standard. You mentioned Tony Morbree, there I don't think there was many people calling for Tony Morbree to be given the bullet. But Louis Dreyfus had decided that he'd hit a ceiling, he'd taken us as far as he could and said, thanks very much, we're going to move you on and we're going to try and take the next step. And he's done that throughout. So yeah, it could well be that there's no anemosity with Tom Burwell. It's not a case of Louis Dreyfus thinks he hasn't done what he wanted him to do. It could just well be that Burwell's done as much as he thinks he can and Dreyfus wants to now get the next person on board and that it might be him in this instance. I think where it's slightly different is Tom Burwell has worked for the Louis Dreyfus family prior to Sunderland. So we might get some hints if over

25:16the next few days there's changes to his, I've forgotten the name of the sports organisation. Something might move there as well and that would perhaps if you read between the lines give us more of an indication. So yeah, Tom Burwell has had a lot of flak from fans and by the way, somebody's done him dirty because within minutes of him leaving the club have announced ticket details for Coventry City. Now bear in mind he was forever getting grief, for ticket details not being brought out on time. It's almost as if somebody's gone, Burwell shifted on quick, get that information out there. But yeah, Tom Burwell wasn't popular with fans. For all we know, Keraloo, we Dreyfus was fine with that because he wanted him to be unpopular. He wanted to take the bullets and deal with the flak and be the person in charge when

26:18the membership came in. The membership process by the way which hasn't gone down very well, that might have been something which has gone against him because the implementation of it hasn't necessarily been as good as we thought. But yeah, Louis Dreyfus might have said, well, I'll let you take all the flak for bringing in a membership scheme. I'll move you on and then I'll step in and take all the prodits when the good stuff starts to happen again. So who knows? Yeah, we'll just go back to something you mentioned earlier that you know talking about clearing the decks because at the minute we haven't got a CEO, we haven't got a chief operating officer as far as I can tell. And it's funny because I only kind of mentioned this to Kieran McGuire the other week because we were talking about financial stuff and I was talking about it in the context of where some and currently stand and what the position of the club is because

27:20we're now, you know, we've just finished seventh. We're in the Europa League, we're trying to establish ourselves as a Premier League club and on the face of it, we haven't got many people kind of in real kind of important positions to make important decisions. And I did put it to Kieran McGuire, I said, you know, if you take all the emotion out of it and just leave it as a talk about Sunland and football clubs as a business, you looked at Kieran and we drew for some what he's done for the club and how much he probably put in at the beginning and how much now the clubs were and the fact that Sunland are in a unique position in that we all now are stadium and we all now are training ground, which not too many Premier League clubs do. And I said, you know, if you take all the emotion out of it, if you're Kieran Louis-Jaffers, would you think, ah, I've hit the ceiling with this club and it now is the right time to get as much money as possible back or to make as much money and walk away to, you know, whatever new project or whatever

28:24that might be. Now Kieran McGuire's comment on it was Sunland are, you know, in football terms, oven ready. And he said he gets phone calls from all over the place from people saying, you know, I've got this ton of money which football clubs should I buy. And he's like, it's not quite that easy, but, you know, if we're in that conversation somewhere, it's like, well, you know, you can buy the, you know, lock stop and everything, you can buy it. He said, he actually said it a figure, he said something around 500 million would buy you the lot. But it just, I mean, I'm not saying that this is the path we're going down, but if you take all of the emotion out of it, it would make sense of Kieran Louis-Jaffers wanted to do that. Exactly. It would make sense. And as a neutral viewing this at the moment, you could probably be justified in saying those are the actions of of somebody looking to move the club on now and get a profit at potentially, like the maximum

29:30level you're ever going to get. By the way, oven ready is perhaps the biggest compliment you can pay, Kieran Louis-Jaffers, when you compare what the club were like when he did take over, whether it was the same night walk in, true spree or not. He has all the scene, this whole regeneration of Sunland AFC. He's been the plotter though, hasn't he? Rather than like you say, the man actually getting his hands dirty, doing it, he's, he's come up with the constraints and the budgets and the ideology and then set the other people make that work. So yeah, that is potentially a slight change if I become an executive chairman, he is going to be doing the the actual graft. But yeah, I could

30:30see exactly where Kieran McGuire was coming from and you did well getting them when you did because his world has just blown up since then. Literally the day before and all, and we were laughing and joking about it, talking about it as well. Well, I think I listened to the episode after I'd heard about Man City, so I was able to like, you know, have a little rise smile about that one. But, but from an outsider and from a business point of view, which sadly football is to a large extent, we've got an emotional attachment, but to most people, it is a business. The business side of things has come on tenfold. It's a bit, I don't know, it's a bit grubby, isn't it? That some people could just pick up a faunt at Kieran McGuire and say, who should we buy? You like to believe them when they give the press release after the deal's gone through and they say something like, or followed someone from afar or my life, and I've always had an affinity to the northeast or whatever.

31:32You like to believe that, don't you? Where is that? Not necessarily what happens. So, yeah, time will tell whether this is all preparation ahead of a sale. Again, as I'm talking to you, Chris, my mind's just throwing things out at us. You could argue that Marseille, who with a club he did have an affection for growing up, you could say they are desperate for somebody to come and save them. So, if you're a pessimist, some are going to be sold to some uncairing consortium who just picked us out from a list and Kira Lewy-Dreyfus is going to weave his magic in Marseille. But if you're an optimist, you could say, Kira Lewy-Dreyfus is all in now and wants to be the one spearhead in Sunlands Charge. Will not know for months, maybe a couple of years, sadly.

32:32Actually, I was going to bring up, I think there was Guy Mourbrier who said, the more you find out about what goes on in football, the less you actually think about football. I think that was a case with Kira McRoy. But look, let's just wrap it up because, like you said, it's hard to tell where all this is going and how significant it is because if he was interim, then it was always the plan for him to go at some point. So, this might just be a completely natural thing where he came is as an interim thing. But I do think the muddie the water is a little bit by the announcer in that Kira Lewy-Dreyfus is going to tip the position as executive chairman. I think that muddie the water is a little bit. But look, we've been through in our time, Andrew, we've been through quite a few, ownerships. I remember when the day that Terry Butcher got sacked and Bob Murray resigned as chairman and John Feathersden took over as chairman. But it wasn't really the chairman. Bob Murray was still kind of the chairman, but not the chairman and name and all that sort of

33:35stuff. So, we've been through plenty of this sort of stuff. But look, should we be that concerned about positions like this? Because look, we concentrate on the pitch. And it's funny because we always say as well, we're all good jobs and all this and we always say quite often, are those people upstairs do now anyway? I mean, should we actually be concerned or too bothered about these sort of positions being opened like this? I wish it was like back in the day and the 90s when I did just concentrate on the who was in charge and who was putting on the shirt. But I do think we do need to have a little bit of awareness of these things. You don't expect to be told every single thing that's happened inside the club, but I think it's important to have a rough idea of who's in charge of it and who's making the decisions. Because let's face it, they do impact our lives

34:38from an emotional point of view, from a financial point of view, from an image point of view and your relationship with the club. So, I think we need to be aware of these people. I'm reminded of Charlie Mathford's ridiculous comments about people from Sunnland, not be in very business literate or whatever, apologies there, I might have miscouldered them slightly. There are plenty of intelligent people follow Sunnland and there'll be experienced in business work, in how business works and they could be looking at this and thinking there's not a single thing to worry about. But it's our club, it means a lot. We do need to know who's in charge and where the general direction of travel is. I would, if possible, I would like

35:39Keralui Drifus to maybe expand on this because this press release is it's brief to say the very least. I would like if he was to sit down and just, you know, maybe calm a few nerves. If that is done, it would make sense to come through an official channel rather than us to have to pick it up off some business podcast or whatever. But I think that might be nice to just reassure people and tell everybody that things are all on track and then we can get back to worrying about what Reggie Slebriss is going to do and who he's going to pick and get back to the fun parts, the fun bits about supporting a football team. Just the last point I'm going to make actually because you're actually right about that communication. We have been talking about the club having this poor communication and might be part of the

36:40reason Tom Burwell isn't in his role anymore. But that statement, it kind of followed the trend, I think, of pretty roby communication. I mean, they might say it as a clear good thing, he's gone and this is what's happening. But I think you're right in that there could be, there almost needs now to be a little bit of communication to say, we're at a bit of a crossroads. You know, we had, last season was fantastic and there's a crossroads where it could go either way as much as we might want to think that we can progress and better last year or get 40 points by Christmas or whatever that might be this season because it's the second season. It's going to be tough and we need the same sort of organisation that we had last season where the club and we said it on team times that the club made events of every home game. So the made it feel like a cup tie and they generate that atmosphere, which is fantastic. When the clubs

37:43working like that, it was what we can, what we're going to achieve. But when things are going, you know, that two big positions have opened up on the board and Kerala O'Jeefer's a step into positions he's never really done before. I think we could do with a little bit, a bit more communication to say, look, it's fine, the clubs were heading in the right direction, we know what we're doing, don't worry about it, we'll fill these positions, we'll crack on its business as usual. But that four cent in statement or whatever it was, I don't know, it just, well where are you talking about it? And I think maybe if it was more communication, would we would we be jumping on thinking right, well, we need to discuss this. Yeah, yeah, because a lot of this talk, Chris, you and I both say it, it could mean this, it could mean that and I don't know. We've got plenty of possible explanations, but we don't know for sure. So yeah, that statement there felt very matter of fact, very perfunctory, you know,

38:47he's gone all the best to RR, which again, in a business point of view is probably all you need to do. Would had David Bruce being at the club, just for example, and by the way, I don't actually remember what David Bruce's job title was, I can't even remember now with Burwell was a direct replacement for him, or if Bruce was going to go, yes. Anyway, I think, well, I think I think actually David Bruce might have been stepping into, potentially stepping into that role and didn't, or he was seeing, or something like that. Yeah, well, if there do, but had there been somebody like Bruce in the upper echelons of the hierarchy, they might be able to say, listen, lads and lasses, you can't just release a business press release here, there are going to be people who rightly or wrongly are concerned in your nature, add a bit more flesh to the story just to keep everybody

39:52on side, particularly ahead of a really busy few weeks for Sutland, it's going to be hectic, there's going to be loads of games coming. I don't think this will happen, but if Sutland were loose to lose a couple of games on the bounce, it then or suddenly snowballs and it would much bigger drama than it needs to be. I think roughly this time last year, it might have been a little bit later, Louis Dreyfus did something on a Monday night football game that was live at the stadium, I can't remember. Yes, yes, it was, well, remember, he talked a bit about what he wanted and what his vision was. I think it would be nice if we had something he might not have the time, now if he's running, if he is tailing the, he's too busy ordering, print the ring for the

40:53as you can see, if he's sorting the ticket office out, he's going to knock it out for a minute, is he? If he could find himself 20 minutes to just let everybody, you know, put everybody at ease, that might be appreciated in the current climate. Well, look, I think you summed it up, the fact that we're talking about it is because we do care, and the fact that we're now adults and we spend our own money in the club rather than our parents, like the witches, I think, but the reason we care more about losing in these positions, but I think we should we should leave it there because as usual, we've talked for longer than we meant to, Andrew, which is always a delight. So thank you very much for your time, as always, mate. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks, mate. I was worried that I'd gone like half a deal without talking about Sunland, so panic order. We nearly made it, nearly made it, but the club dragged us back in, as always, but thanks again, mate. And thanks again, everyone for listening. Look, we've got lords coming up, planned podcasts, imagine that, as well as our impromptu emergency

42:00ones when the club make a full sentence statement. So look out for everything that we're putting out, or every single day on how we the podcast, of course, but from us, it's bye for now. This episode is brought to you by Born in Roma fragrances by Valentino Beauty, the iconic fragrance duo. Donna Born in Roma Ode to Parfume is a feminine fragrance featuring juicy black current central Jasmine, Woody Cashmurren and warm vanilla. Its masculine counterpart, Wilmo Born in Roma Ode toilette, has notes of fresh violet leaf, aromatic sage, green vetiver, spicy ginger and mineral salt. Shop at macy's.com. Before this, there's this. As you celebrate the game, take a deeper look at its roots. The people grow in the grass,

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