This is the second part of my series of blogs looking at the inside perspective of life at Hibernian FC since the protests against Rod Petrie at Easter Road in the summer of 2014.
Since then, Leeann Dempster has made several sweeping changes at the football club, including appointing two supporter-elected representatives onto the board of Directors. I had some time with one of those Directors, Amit Moudgil, ahead of Hibs' 2-0 win, where he gave me some insight into his role and what changes he's seen at Easter Road since coming on board.
Tell me about your experience in the role so far.
It's been great, it's been an eye-opener, it's been exciting, it's been challenging. Hard work, as well. It's been excellent - I've really enjoyed it. Above all, it's been an absolute privilege, as a supporter when you go from sitting in your seat to coming in to help, taking that view that you and your pals have sitting next to each other and everyone else that's sat round the table talking about Hibs and being able to do something with that is really powerful for the fans, so it's been great.
How have you gone about doing that?
I've tried to be as inventive as possible. I've tried to make myself as accessible as possible and as open as possible to people, so attending various meetings, whether it was Working Together - and I'll be the first to admit that I'd never attended a Working Together meeting before joining the board, not because I didn't want to but because I didn't really know what it was about. I started to attend them when I came onto the board and it quickly became apparent that the format had lost its way a bit and needed to be refreshed, so a few of us got together and drew up a battle plan to re-energise that whole thing.
For me, up until the relegation season loads of folk felt they had been grinded down and grinded down by just what's gone on in the last seven or eight years at the club. You can understand why people are staying away because there were so many more reasons not to come to the football club than there were to come to the football club.
Towards the end of last year I had a meeting with George Craig - for about four hours - about how to raise funds for the Academy, but it turned out in the end that I took on a volunteer job with Graeme Mathie with the recruitment side of things - so co-ordinating scouts, and I'm still doing that today on a weekly basis.
We revamped the whole structure. Towards the end of last year, there weren't enough people, there was myself doing 13's to 17's, co-ordinating eight scouts trying to cover as many games as possible. It was very difficult.
With the goodwill towards the club we've been able to bring in more people and that's helped me fall back in love with the club, and I felt re-energising Working Together and getting people to get involved with the workstreams and groups would get them to fall back in love with the club, too.
That's just one thing, another thing is being more visible on match days. I go to the Hibs Club before and after games, just walking around speaking to people I've never spoken to.
I'm a confident guy so I don't feel nervous talking to people I don't know. If I'm up at the bar I'll end up chatting to someone in the queue and I'll ask if I can sit with them. It's never a problem, they really enjoy it.
They don't know who I am, I came from nowhere in the Hibs community, really. I only went with my own group of friends so it's really good to get out there and chat to people who might not have seen me round the Hibs Club before. It's good now, I've started to recognise people and they recognise me. They think it's brilliant having a Director coming to chat to people in the Hibs Club. For me, I just like to talk about Hibs, and as Hibs supporters we could do that all day. I don't think anyone would tire of that.
I'll do walkarounds in Behind the Goals or in the stands. Today I'll sit in my own seat in the East, I still have my season ticket and just because I have a seat here (in the West) every week,it doesn't mean I want to use it.
For me, importantly, the big change is I attend more away games. I'm probably not alone in that, a lot of people who'd go to away games would go in big groups. A lot of my friends couldn't afford to go every week, so we'd plan a few away games throughout the season. It'd be the usual, Aberdeen away or ones where you had good memories from the day out and the trip.So now, I try to go to as many away games as I can.
First and foremost I still want to get the experience, the reason I put myself forward is that I wanted to take these supporter views and put them forward at board level, but I think you also have to understand what your role is.
You can't just think 'I'm a supporter', you have to think 'I'm a supporter but my responsibility to take your view and everyone else that is there, what are these people worrying about?'.
So I've tried a 'Director on the bus' thing, where I travel on the buses, I'll pick a different bus every week to go to games, so I've got a captive audience for an hour or however long the trip is. I just walk up and down the bus, chat to people. I'm all club-tied up so for me, because I'm not as well know as Frank, for example, in the wider Hibs community, it's important for me to be recognised as someone who's representing the fans at the club.
It's been really good, really great, and if they've got a bowling club that they go to before the game, then I'll go there as well, and I'll sit and have a juice with them as well. For me, it's about bonding, and listening to them, the people that go to away games might not go to the Hibs Club every week, it's about being as accessible as possible, and that's what I've been trying to do.
Then online as well, it's difficult, I can't be on hibs.net or the bounce or wherever every day, I have an app on my phone if I'm on the bus on my way to work, or have a bit of time I can just get through what's going on, particularly if people have sent me messages or highlighted my name.
I try my best to be wherever I can, I have to try and go to the people, and be their conduit, so I need to allow them the opportunity to speak to me.
What would you say have been your successes since coming on board?
Working Together has been a huge success, I stood at one of the meetings and spoke to Greig Mailer after a few meetings and said we had to change it. We wanted people to fall back in love with the club again, and that's what I did doing the recruitment work with Graeme Mathie, George Craig and Eddie May.
You don't know how powerful that is, to fall back in love with the club again. It allows you then to get over the hard days, maybe Stranraer midweek where we won the game but people came away thinking 'we could have done a lot better there.' I think, for me, falling back in love with the club allows you to bear those little dips when they happen.
So I think that's been one, but generally just getting about hearing different people's views. I have listened to a lot of people who I might never have spoken to or had a reason to speak to, now I feel I have a responsibility to do that.
One success is that more people are feeding in to me so I get a much better idea of exactly what their view is. It doesn't matter if you're a Hibs fan on this scale or that scale, a pessimist or an optimist, the guy that goes to every game and the guy that goes to no games. I'll keep in touch with folk that don't go to games and that's just as important. The success has been trying to bring people back together. I have one mate who's so stubborn about not wanting to come back and we've got a Whatsapp group and I just continually work on him.
I guess other successes, even before I was on the board, is revamping the structure for scouting for the youth academy. So we have a new set-up where I'm a sort of administrator and I have three folk that feed in to me, and we've split in such a way where there's not such a work load on myself.
I have my own job that I do 9-5, average 40 hours a week, have to do the board stuff and this stuff, so doing these things that I'm working on but I think the success is being able to deliver on what I think I'm meant to be doing.
I think in a year's time if I'm not re-elected or if don't choose to be re-elected then I can hold my head high and say that I've genuinely tried to make myself as available as possible.
Social media is something that I had went off, I had moved into a new role and thought social media was quite a dangerous place to be. I wanted to be more client-facing so had a bit of a cleanse, there wasn't anything controversial or anything, I think it was just a case of I wasn't on Facebook, I wasn't on Twitter, but what I've now done purely because I need to be an avenue for all supporters whether you're old or young or social media savvy or not, I need to be available.
I think my biggest success has been getting out there and listening to people, going to the people - I think that's important. I might sit next to someone today in the stand but it might not be the best time for them to talk to me about things. It might be that I might need to take the time to go to them and sit with them when they've got time to talk about it rather than me saying 'well it's convenient for me to sit in my seat and listen to you even though you might not want me to sit here asking questions.'
For me, it's important and the success is going there and it shows people you care about their opinion. At Dumbarton away, I sat next to this guy and he sent me a message afterwards - I didn't know his name on the messageboards - he said it was so refreshing that you can just sit there and hear about what's going on at the club and give feedback.
For me, I'm as passionate as the next guy but that doesn't mean I shouldn't listen to the next guy. I should listen to everyone. For me that's the biggest success, and really participating in the board meetings. I might be the youngest guy on the board, I might be the guy who's not as well known as everyone else on the board but I think that by the time I do leave I'm pretty sure I'll leave my mark in the boardroom and they'll know exactly where I'm coming from.
I'm not one of these guys that's easily phased at all. Age, experience, it doesn't matter to me, I'm a clever guy I know exactly how to get people's opinions across in the right way so that they're heard correctly. Some people think that if they rant and rave, or if they talk quietly - they think they're both powerful in their own way and you can take those messages and ensure they're both heard.
How did you find that first board meeting that you had?
I was excited. In the industry I've worked in for nine and a half years, and for the last six years I do a lot of client meetings. On the Wednesday before the Stranraer game I was in Glasgow presenting to fifty clients as one of the key presenters. Those situations don't phase me, I maybe get excited more than anything else, there's a wee bit nerves, but the first time I went in, the first thing I thought was that I had preconceptions and I wondered 'what are they going to be like?'
Actually, to be honest there were people on the board that I had no idea who they were. I genuinely had no idea of their background, didn't know what they did. There were only a couple that I knew of or knew what they did, so it was interesting.
After about five/ten minutes it felt like most meetings that I've been in, albeit more interesting because it was about Hibs and about football, but then again I treated it like any other meeting that I've been in. I treated it with respect and importance, and with responsibility that I have.
I'm one of these guys that as a board member I need to be responsible, so you get all the board papers the day before so I went through all of those, tried not to leave any stone unturned, and if there's a question, I'll ask that question.
It was exciting, I went in and I thought "Wow, this is actually happening.", but for me, that went away very quickly because it's not about me, it's about everybody, It's about every Hibs fan that talks to me or gets in touch with me, or I read about or see what they're saying, like your blog or Jamie Montgomery's blog, or anyone that's doing stuff.
It very quickly comes down to me being able to fulfil that purpose and ensure that no matter what decisions are being made that I'm making them with a more informed point of view than some of the other directors, because they're putting in from their own expertise, mine and Frank's expertise is to be the voice of the fans, and we need to have that voice heard in the boardroom, so we need to know exactly what the fans want.
To be fair, we are heard. There are no issues. Everyone's driving in the same direction. People are aware that the club is working very much together and it's all very positive.
Don't get me wrong, there are hard times when you come out and see the hard work that you do and it's maybe not reflected on the park or it's not happening on the stands, but do you know what, that's something that we need to deal with as a club and it's for us to drive that, we have to make people want to come back.
How much has your role improved the connection between the support and the club?
I would say, if I only talk about my own friends here as an example and it'd probably reverberate throughout all my experiences, and you've got to remember I'm talking to people I've never spoken to before and I'm talking to them for the first time, so first impressions count and it's not like I'm there saying things just to flatter people, it's straight from the heart because it's about us and the way I feel about the club.
I think I've genuinely made a good... a better bond, even guys in my smaller group, it was them that I looked to before I joined. I said "Guys, I'm falling back in love with the club, doing this stuff with Graeme, this opportunity has come up to do something with the board, do you think I should go for it?", and they said "Amit you're definitely the right guy for it, you've got this, this, and this, you should go for it. We think you can be the person for the voice."
If folk on my Whatsapp group are feeling down I'll come on and say a few things, and one of the guys will turn round and say 'That's why you are where you are, because you've got to look at the big picture.'
It's hard to see beyond16:45 on a Saturday, but when you let the dust settle, and what you say and what you'll achieve with what you're doing that's going to allow people to see exactly that there might be a disappointment there, but there are amazing things happening at the club that you know a little bit about, but I can see all the things happening and when you see these things in totality you can see it's like a huge wave of change coming along.
That's just the feedback from my friends. Having a bit of feedback from people on the bus before games, or in the Hibs Club, or on Twitter, an email, someone will just say "That was really good, it's great to have someone on board who's making the effort."
You've got to go out and do it, it's not just Amit going out and going to the games. I thought I'd only wear a suit five days a week for my job, but I feel really proud going out my house with the club tie on.
What would you say to supporters who are maybe reluctant to come back?
I don't want this to be a big one, I want to let this one resonate. I would say that the past is the past, we can't change that. We've all been there, we've all been hurt. There's things that we've all not been happy about, but if you speak to someone who's going to games regularly, or has contact with the club, if they're coming to Working Together or doing something of their own accord, you are the people that can deliver that message. Look, come back and see that it's night and day. I'll ask people when was the last time Hibs had a side that was nearly the same core as the season before?
It's always been change, and change, and change. That's just one small thing. Most people who go to a game, one game, or even read about that, you can see that we've managed to hold on to someone or bring in other players.
Give the club a chance, that's just one thing. Come along and speak to us at the club, it's a far more open door policy. It's our club, we decide what we want to do with it, if you want to come and back it, then come and do it. I can understand that there are people who have their reasons not to, but I'll do my best to convince them that there are more reasons to come back than not to.
Many thanks again to Amit, Frank Dougan, Stephen Dunn, and Colin Millar for their time.
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