Honesty is the best policy

I've taking some time to post this, pausing to think before committing words to screen. A rarity for me.

I'm not quite sure what to think about mothballing the club, to be honest. Since the season ended, Rev, myself, and the Phoenix staff have worked and planned and come up with ideas and its kind of difficult to see some of that disappear for a year and some of it disappear for good.

The problem British hockey has had since before I started watching it, is honesty. I've never been involved in something that can be as highly politicised as hockey. I've seen clubs being run as almost private fiefdoms, with fans fighting to be "first with the news" and running gossip networks. Those clubs have not been about the sport, they've been about the people involved. It is - in my opinion - one of the reasons the Storm failed as miserably as it did in its latter years. Sure the money ran out, but what was there was spent badly and by the wrong people.

A true story this, in the final year of the Storm, I went to Sheffield for the first game. We got beat 8-4 or something and I retired to the pub to talk with some friends. We had a meal and found ourselves next to the table containing the Storm marketing department. They started the conversation with "How are we going to sell next weeks game?"

This was the first game of the season, and they hadn't even *thought* about it.

I knew the Storm were doomed when five minutes later, the conversation switched to which of the new players they would like to shag.

As I say, true story.

The Phoenix has been different. From the outset, the management has been completely open and upfront. They've involved people who, I believe, were in it for the right reasons. Not for the glory and not to be at the apex of some pyramid, to somehow prove themselves "better" than other fans.

I suppose that is easy for me to say, I'm an "insider". Someone accused me of "winning the battle of the fan sites" to become Phoenix webmaster. The truth is much more simple - it was an accident of timing. I'd walked away from the sport, but my girlfriend said "Look, if they do another site, and they do it wrong, its going to bug the s*** out of you." She was, as usual, right. So I dropped an email to Carl, a surprised Carl emailed back and less than a week later we had a site.

Like everything I've seen people do with the Phoenix, there was no mess, no fuss, no glory, just a job to do and the desire to do it as well as you can.

Tuesday night was the same. The fans took a look at the books and decided "No, this is not to happen to our team again." Again, I am of the opinion that that wouldn't have been the case in the Storm days. The fans would have hoped to help, the management would have crossed fingers, the season would have gone ahead and it would all have gone tits up by Christmas.

That is, of course, if we had been consulted in the first place.

The way the Phoenix fans took the most difficult decision is vindication of the policy of honesty. The debate was free of blame, of name-calling, of avoiding the issue. The one thing people wanted to hear was "Is the season ticket money safe?". The answer was "Yes" and from that point on it wasn't about anything other than the issue at hand.

That wasn't to say the meeting was unemotional. I stood by the door near the front, and occasionally walked out of the room to grab some air, stare at the roof and occasionally kick the wall in frustration that I had to go through this. And I was only an observer, Mark and Neil had to deliver the bad news. (And I'll be blunt, I've cracked jokes for 15 minutes to a wall of silence and contempt, and it is a walk in the park compared to what they did.) I saw Mags in tears at the decision she had to make.

But she made it. My respect for her, and everyone who voted that night, for carrying on or mothballing, is total.

It was possibly a unique moment, fans deciding to sacrifice the short term in favour of benefits down the road. In todays "get it now" society, and especially in sport, this is an incredible thing. I hope it was worth it.

No. I know it will be worth it.