I opined via Twitter Quote @BucknDusty@LondonBroncosRL A real shame that this avenue to fans seems to have been forgotten. Surely someone from the OBSA or LBSA can be persuaded to don the suits. Other clubs have their mascots back.....'" Got this response...... Quote Replying to @GU????FAX and @BucknDusty We have asked for volunteers for this job, score board operator, media assistance, shop assistance, Kit Man assistant, hospitality, fan liason and to assist with various things at training. [uThere was very little response. [/u Email hello@londonbroncosrl.com if you can help please.'" Now. I'm on the other side of the planet and can't help much, but it's interesting that the OBSG seem to be nowhere to be seen (is the coach to leih still on?) when they're asked to help. Have the club (or an ex-employee) burnt bridges beyond repair? LBSA sponsor the academy, but I am sure many of them are on the banned lists now.... It looks like there's no staff at the club now other than the CEO and the community staff.....when I left the UK in 2010 I reckon I knew at least 2 dozen people who would have stepped up help........

I opined via Twitter Quote @BucknDusty@LondonBroncosRL A real shame that this avenue to fans seems to have been forgotten. Surely someone from the OBSA or LBSA can be persuaded to don the suits. Other clubs have their mascots back.....'" Got this response...... Quote Replying to @GU????FAX and @BucknDusty We have asked for volunteers for this job, score board operator, media assistance, shop assistance, Kit Man assistant, hospitality, fan liason and to assist with various things at training. [uThere was very little response. [/u Email hello@londonbroncosrl.com if you can help please.'" Now. I'm on the other side of the planet and can't help much, but it's interesting that the OBSG seem to be nowhere to be seen (is the coach to leih still on?) when they're asked to help. Have the club (or an ex-employee) burnt bridges beyond repair? LBSA sponsor the academy, but I am sure many of them are on the banned lists now.... It looks like there's no staff at the club now other than the CEO and the community staff.....when I left the UK in 2010 I reckon I knew at least 2 dozen people who would have stepped up help........

Not a BOSG member, those that I do know that are on the committee, I do not see on match day as they go into hospitality, so sit in a different area to us .
As for the coach to Leigh it has all gone very quiet, most likely the cost will have to rise due to the rise in the price of fuel. So maybe it is off.
A lot of those that I know that are blocked on SM are LBSA members. It is too much for the club to expect these people to put themselves out to help the club out. Bridges have been burnt.
Certainly you are right, there appear to be no staff. A lot of the functions of the club are put out to firms like TicketCo. Wether the office is manned through the week, I suspect not.
Some of the BOSG do help out, the kit man I believe is a BOSG volunteer and the Chair helps out at practice. They and others also help out on the pub crawls through Camden.
Alcohol seems to be a theme that runs through the BOSG.
Thats my take on it.

Not sure if bridges can be mended, but the NEED TO BE
Just made and tweeted this the the club now and also sent a message to a fan who I know would love to help out with the Kits

To be blunt, why would anyone bust a gut to help a club that has treated them like dirt for years and rejected offers of help? So the club can afford £200k minimum on a groundshare but can't afford national minimum wages a few times a month for training cooks, mascots, scoreboard operators, hospitality, kit man assistant and so on. That's a fundamental flaw in the strategic plan.

The simple truth is a good mascot person, good hospitality person etc will want paying as other clubs will pay them. These positions are important for fan engagement and should not be left to volunteers in the professional RL ranks.

Then devastate the support base and move ground so few fans live near the new ground and then get upset they can't find volunteers. Really?

Surreal. If the plan was to make Wimbledon work off the back of volunteers I despair. This was the last chance surely, and it needed professionals to drive 5k in three years.

BTW which is it, there's no Buck and Dusty due to red lists or due to a lack of volunteers. A slight inconsistency there.

Loubser bet it all on blue and yellow and guess what........

Hindsight: Hughes tells Loubser we are part time and "this$$" Is what you get to per year for 5 years to make us self sufficient.
Loubser sees 5k as unattainable at Trailfinders and imagines SL is the only way we'll ever get close
Loubser sees part time as the only way to stretch the budget to get us into a stadium that is SL acceptable, ignoring the fact that part time is an even harder route to SL.
Loubser moves us away from our core base in the hope that Wimbledon will be different from The Valley, Stoop, GP, Hive Trailfinders and his coach assembles a L1 standard squad.
Loubser is now isolated and alone at the club. He has the budget to get through the season but if we go down, we need to plan to move back to Trailfinders and relaunch as a community club.

If we are relegated, I genuinely don't see any point in Hughes carrying through on the remaining 4 years of funding........but he never admits he's wrong, does he.

You reap what you sow. The club has shown no respect for its fans so is it any surprise they struggle for volunteers.

Maybe Hughes himself should don the mascot outfit.

He certainly is the back end of a Pantomime horse.

This ship has sailed.
The behaviour of the club to its supporters over the last few years, has lost them a lot of good will to the people they need to keep the club alive.
People will not volunteer with current mgmt in place, not going to happen.

I actually think the Broncos brand is so tarnished they actually need to reform under a different name, there is just no good will left.

The volunteer thing is an all to accurate reflection of how Monkey has misread the whole Broncos thing. He established the BOSG on the back of the super keenest supporters wanting to be part of this new initiative. He then selected who he perceived to be the most committed of the lot to run the show, putting the onus on them to find the volunteers to fill in the roles. Maybe it was more manageable at Trailfinders and they have been found out at Plough Lane, as most of the guys - and I apologise if I have got this completely wrong - are then for a beer and a catch up rather worrying about the strategic stuff and ensuring these roles are filled if Monkey's assertions are correct. So now Monkey has been left with a significant part of his selling point for Plough Lane and going part time undermined as he hasnt got the volunteers to ensure the match experience (off field) is excellent and the match day logistics well supported.

Nothing wrong with the name/ brand.
Only the current owner/ management.

Says it all when the club no longer has any members of the thriving volunteer movement left or even a single SAG committee member attending games, shame the last two were told by Monkey they were not welcome at games, The reason they were banned was because when they tried to give constructive aid to the monkey they were told they dont know what they are talking about and were not welcome

Let me get this straight.....the LBSA sponsor the academy but some of them were told they are banned from games for disagreeing with a staff member who has set up a rival fan group who sponsor nothing other than his ego?
Does David Hughes even understand what's going on at the club?

I could help out........but I have zero interest in anything the club does or says tbh. I have the occasional nose on here (I'm banned by the club on SM) so why in gods green earth would I do anything for them??

Let's be honest, it's disgusting the situation the club is in. Part time club, full time shambles

You would have thought that forming an official supporters group would have been run past David Hughes.
Simply, he alienated many fans by allowing it. So David, you reap what you sow.

The original Broncos Official Supporter's Group was chosen on a vote basis, from the first 50 members to sign up, and the voters were from the supporters and no one else.

It was really orientated to try and help fill an activity gap, with supportive activities, perhaps on a match day, to try to help the club.

The club had found prior to that, that it was difficult to get much of a level of co-operation and support.

I'll give my views on the BOSG.

I personally felt that Brian and his Wife made an ideal Chairman and Secretary; they were retired and had previously fulfilled the roles at London Broncos. I wasn't sure they were well known enough at the club. Thus I was supportive of Andy being a co-Chairman as he had stated he would also be retiring from working life and thus be available and I felt that he and Lesley would be a friendly male and female face on a matchday.

The other members of the Group I saw more as offering a specific skill or experience; for instance someone with a financial background could be a treasurer or someone who had fund raising experience could raise funds.

For things to work the Group needed the Chairman, co-Chairman and Secretary to be working regularly in their own time and for the Club to provide a trusted leadership figure with ongoing direction and openness with a deep commitment to the role, and someone who could hear criticism and want to respond to it and better the club.

Within the first few weeks, it turned out that the Chairman and Secretary were not seen as being compatible with the club representatives; the co-Chairman did not retire from working life and committee members would simply drop out. Other people would chime in and claim to have a skill but not move things forward in any way, only to disappear, without even any reasoning, yet feel free to criticise despite their proven negligence and indolence.

There were also people within the group who did have a skill but it could realistically be best placed or only done a matchday.

It was difficult, and I felt by this time last year that the Group could likely only move forward properly if either the BOSG set out a list of issues, or the club set out an overall strategy, and that there was a commitment to move forward on at least one of the two.

If neither happened, then it would be a talking shop only and might even be seen as making the club worse.

It didn't happen; my paper was simply disregarded after point one and a fallacious view given on it being wrong. It was not wrong. The data fully supported my argument and nothing other than an opinion was given.

As time passed, the club began to be seen as somewhere you couldn't discuss things; more about banning and blocking than discussing and the disconnect between club representatives and the supporter base grew, and paranoia grew.

I personally tried to hold the club to account, although not being the lead on things. I put a series of forthright opinions to the club around a suite of different topics as diverse as the AFC Wimbledon move, club lottery, fan engagement, pricing and even a proposal for a different club representative to interact with the BOSG. But as time passed it was clear that no such strategy would ever be shared with the BOSG and that there was little interest in going beyond lip service.

I think over the last 18 months events have not helped, that is for sure, but I hold the senior leadership team at the Broncos to account for their responses.

I do not think the club's media manager should have been furloughed and I do not think he should have been made redundant and I do not think there was anyone capable of replacing him at the club, on even a temporary basis.

I do not think tickets should have been sold at far higher prices for a move that was never going to take place that season and in my opinion the price has doubled for half the quality. I think the price was too low, but you cannot take away everything of value and double the price.

I do not think the existing players, including the club trained players, needed to wait almost the entire season to be told the club was going part time a week or two before the end of the season. This no doubt caused alienation and player departures, well beyond what I think the club had expected.

I think the club could have retained the majority of Walters, Hindmarsh, Sam Davis, Jones, Meadows, Boafo, Hodson and Ogden without the club doing things this way and I also feel that the likes of Fozard, Aston and Sammut were all retainable as I cannot believe anyone has broken the bank to get them.

Anyone who understands the costs of London understands that you would not get players to move to London on little money, unless they were either lower level, locally based or somehow managed to find a high paid job.

I do not think the club trained players still at the club are standouts; this includes the halfbacks who did not set-up tries for excellent players like Hankinson and Miski and are unlikely to do so for lesser players.

I do not think Leyland, Horsman, Blakemore and Oakley would be first team regulars even in the top half of the third division.

The likes of Latu, Macani, Palumbo, the Greenhalgh brothers, Dalton Grant, Thomas, Tuliatu, Coates and Ramsey were unlikely to all be of a Championship standard.

I do not see how Coleman could have been appointed in the first place. He had a win streak at London Skolars in 2017 when the weaker southern based teams were all in the league. 2018 was poor. 2019, he had another win streak, which ended in May 2019. After that he won one game over a year later against Coventry in May 2020. Apart from that Coleman has beaten only West Wales.

Broncos haven't won under him, a streak that is 6 losses, and 8 losses as a club. How could anyone rate him as the best available option, surely he cannot be seen as a better option than Tsang, Mbu, Ward or even Powell who were all locally based.
It just doesn't make sense. It is a very hard sell.

Regarding "help" there seems to be an army of people in orange Jackets with no specific skill, paid to be about on a matchday, when there is zero chance of crowd trouble, who could be allocated to specific roles after 3pm.

Also I do not see why the club cannot get the non-selected players to fulfill the matchday roles; I would not for instance expect Wellington Albert to dress up as Dusty, but I cannot see why the non-selected players can't do the administrative roles like manning the ticket office.

I think as things stand the way forward for the club is to declare an amnesty for the dozens or hundreds of blocked supporters and to bring in a friendly face to try to win back them. The club needs that person to be focused upon the customer experience.

I would be comfortable about supporting the club, even on a matchday, if the wrong people go and the right people are in place.

I suspect that there are others like me.

I pray the club can start to do things right again.

^^^^^^what he said^^^^^^^

Thanks Mark. It was very interesting to hear a little bit more about what has been going on behind the scenes. Many of us, whilst appreciating many of the challenges, have been baffled by much of the decision making and the lack of joined up thinking. I

I've not. Ever since Gus told Petra she was surplus to requirements at QuinsRL.......there is no excuse. If an apology is coming it needs to come from Hughes. He has done this, although I genuinely believe he has little idea if what goes on at the club other than "rugby" and "his money gets spent".....HIS APPOINTMENTS are his responsibility.

Yep, Hughes has to take the blame. He has slowly but surely screwed the club up.

Thing is, everyone else can see the problems (and have for a long time) but those at the club that matter, cannot.

I also would happily come back, even help out if the club showed they are interested in building bridges and moving in the right direction, but let's be honest, we all know that will not happen.

The club could do itself a huge favour, but they are either too clueless or too stubborn

And once crowds will fall below 1K average, then who will get the blame for the move failing, the few remaining fans not the idiots who gutted the squad, while forcing a pointless move, while increasing prices by such a jump.

Its just a question of which game it will be when DH finally realises that the move has not worked, and then his reaction will depend on if we still have a club.

Also looks likely that Wimbledon might also get relegated this year, they lost again today. Sorry about this @smithers

More chance they want the club to stay (need the money)??

Mark, I wasn't a member of LBSA - I joined the day BOSG was announced having previously refused to do so as I thought it should have been London RL based, not Broncos based. I struggle to see how BOSG offered a way forward. Please can you let me know why we are in disagreement here? After 20 plus years as a season ticket holder I haven't been a game since BoSG launched. That's partially due to Covid, to family ill health and me being ill but I hope to return soon. What am I missing?