My chat with Darren Eales on Wednesday night

This week, I attended the first of what will hopefully be many NUFC supporter events. We heard from Eddie Howe, Becky Langley and Shola Ameobi to get an insight into their workings with our players before Darren Eales (CEO), Peter Silverstone (CCO) and Dan Ashworth (Sporting Director) answered questions from supporters on a range of topics.

Unsurprisingly, ticketing was a hot topic - although there was a noticeable lack of questions around away tickets. Many of the speakers stayed around to interact with supporters after the event, so I grabbed Darren Eales for a chat on a personal ticketing situation of mine.

I’ve no doubt that the man is extremely well-trained in both public and private speaking, given the positions he’s held in football and the frequency with which he’ll meet impassioned and opinionated supporters, but Eales is magnetic.

He’s got a cheeky chappy vibe that makes us instantly warm to him; and while it could well be a carefully crafted persona, I feel like a lot of it is genuine. Call me a club shill all you want; I’d absolutely go for a pint with the bloke and chat nonsense.

Not only did he come off affable during the event, but when I approached him to discuss a personal frustration with the club, he was attentive and empathetic. I gave my Bournemouth ticket back to the club due to illness and having no money (I had to rebuy multiple train tickets to and from Germany because of cancellations – and I’m still waiting on the refunds). Because I didn’t take it back within the 72-hour window, I wasn’t given my refund – despite the fact that 72 hours before the game, I was still travelling back from the PREVIOUS game!

With all the drama around away ticketing and supporters (or at least one) having loyalty points taken away, I was naturally quite nervous about my ticket not being scanned. The fella at the box office reassured me that they’d put a note on my account to say I’d handed it back, but I wasn’t convinced, so I followed it up with an email as a digital record.

Eales listened intently as I relayed this story and immediately told me that this is the kind of the feedback the club wants and needs to hear. We discussed the fact that so much can happen in a 72-hours window and that, even though it wasn’t great, the previous policy of 48 hours was better.

He told me he agreed that this was something worth looking at, and advised me to pick it up in an email to supporter services to create, as he put it, “a paper trail we can follow up on”.

There’ll be sceptics out there who think this was all a ploy to fob me off, but I felt listened to and valued. He made an effort to ask how I’d been feeling since the game and remembered my name following a lively chat. It’s certainly not something that would have ever happened under the previous ownership.