"Charlton CEO surprises a young supporter at The Valley"

This is odd. It's kind of equal parts nice publicity and sheer nutcasery. I think it's nice to get a young fan in and talk to them like an adult and like their opinions mean something, because they do. On the other hand something like this works better when paired with actual continuous communication at a sensible level. If the club was transparent and we felt like we were kept in the loop and hadn't been treated like mugs recently it would just be a nice additional thing. Without that as context though it's just weird. Why is the 15 year old kid the only one getting public answers? Why do the rest of us get a snarky article in the Evening Standard? If this is the start of the club actually responding to our issues regularly then great, I'm all for it (though it's been done in a weird order). If all we get is this and the VIP meeting doesn't provide any useful discussion then it's not going to go down too well.

It's easy to be cynical about everything that a regime that you don't buy in to is doing and you do have to try and take a step back and see if it's your perception rather than their motivation which is wrong.

That said, this in itself still seems pretty cynical to me. Smacks of spin doctoring. The young lad came across extremely well but his questions weren't really answered.

For me, one question overrides all others: Is Charlton Athletic being run with the ultimate goal of it achieving the highest possible level of sustainable success on the pitch?

There are other important questions around individual decisions which have been made, the club's place in the community, its history (and even the matchday experience if that's what floats your boat) but most things can be justified if they can be framed in the context of answering 'yes' to this one question.

Personally, the actions and communications which I have been privy to (and these are only those in the public domain) would lead me to believe that the answer is a fairly resounding 'no'. Success on the pitch may be a coincidental by product of RD's aims (though there is of course very little evidence so far that this will be the case, it is theoretically possible) but it is hard to accept as a football fan that those in charge of running the club measure its success not in terms of league positions, points and trophies, not ours anyway.

The reason that I think so many fans have been disgruntled by the Luzon appointment and the way that it came about is because it was the clearest example yet of incongruence with what should be the ultimate aim of a football club. There is simply no way that KM and RD could have come to an honest decision that he was the best man available to the club in such a ridiculously short space of time after sacking Peeters (despite apparently interviewing 'several' candidates in the intervening hours). And though we won't know for sure, there is a relatively strong indication that he was put in place because he will do what he's told. For the good of the network, to push on towards RD's aims.

And this is why many of us fans, fans that have been extremely patient with the way the club has been run in the past are so concerned with the way it is being run now. These are fans that are generally pretty forgiving of mistakes, fans that have previously stood by people getting things wrong because they at least believed that they were trying to do them right.

Maybe to many feeling that the 'heart and soul' of the club that has been ripped out it is because they have lost that sense of a shared goal, that sense of staff, players, owners and fans pulling together. It is a struggle to feel proud of a club which is effectively a vehicle being used to satisfy a means quite contrary to that which it was established to strive for.

A fluff piece with a young lad, however articulate he may have been, doesn't change any of that.