Charlton Athletic supporters from the CARD group are planning protests against their owners on the day of the game against Coventry City on October 15th.
The group have issued the following statement:
A message from Charlton Athletic fans' group The Coalition Against Roland Duchatelet (CARD):
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The Coalition Against Roland Duchatelet (CARD) is to resume its full range of matchday protest activity beginning with Charlton’s home fixture against Coventry City on Saturday, October 15th.
CARD announced during the summer that in keeping with the general wish to give Russell Slade and his squad every opportunity to demonstrate their ability ...to mount a promotion challenge and to begin to reverse the club’s decline, it would not interrupt early matches.
The team’s performances and results have given little indication of any improvement, but more importantly the messages from the club in recent weeks have shown that claims that they have learnt lessons and corrected mistakes are little more than empty rhetoric.
The cowardly, secret visit to London last week by owner Duchatelet, who has not attended a match in England since October 2014 and dismissed the club as merely 1.5 per cent of his business interests, shows that he has no intention of reforming his attitude and behaviour.
His chief executive Katrien Meire continues to focus on her personal agenda when the club she supposedly runs is in crisis - joining the FA Council, unsuccessfully seeking election to the Football League board and next posing as a judge at the Football Business Awards.
Meanwhile, and despite a switch to a British manager and players, an arrogant and foolish interview by the regime’s Belgium-based computer analyst and scout, Thomas Driesen, confirms that he is just as involved as before, still interfering on the basis of watching video and live feeds of matches.
The cumulative effect of this incompetent and increasingly ridiculous leadership is failure on the pitch and failure off it, encapsulated by the loss of almost 40 per cent of season ticket holders this year and a corresponding collapse in the atmosphere at home games.
Any manager would struggle in these circumstances, notwithstanding the obvious flaws in the squad that has been put together and the arguments behind the scenes during its assembly.
Charlton remains a club in crisis and that crisis is caused by the ownership of Roland Duchatelet. We will now step up our efforts to remove him and we call on all those who care about the club’s future to join us.
Given the likely make-up of the crowd for Saturday’s Football for a Fiver match against Rochdale we do not propose to take any disruptive action this weekend, but further announcements about the Coventry match will follow.
We call on all Charlton fans to come and support the protests on October 15th. We are liaising with Coventry fans and hope that they will join us, in force, to show the contempt all football fans have for the Duchatelet and Meire regime.