Kick me
There are many things The Note admits to having little or no expertise in.
Welsh soccer is one of them.
At least, until this week. Now we know a whole more, after discovering that local barrister Stephen Owen-Conway QC was recently appointed to the board of Cardiff City Football Club.
A resident of Perth, Mr Owen-Conway was born and raised in Cardiff and has been a long-term supporter of the club despite living in Australia since the mid-1970s - long before the internet and Foxtel made such passions easy. But his appointment as a director comes after a more traditional means of communication - a letter to the club’s biggest shareholder, Tan Sri Vincent Tan, the billionaire Malaysian owner of the Berjaya Group conglomerate.
Mr Owen-Conway told one of The Note’s colleagues he wrote to Mr Tan earlier in the year, supporting the Malaysian’s audacious plan to change the club’s colours and logo from blue with a bluebird to red with a red dragon, with the promise to invest 100 million pounds to push to club into the English Premier League if his livery alterations were accepted.
Mr Tan believes Cardiff would be attractive to Asian supporters, especially Chinese, with red colours and a dragon, even a Welsh version, because these were associated with good fortune.
After flying up to meet Mr Tan in Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian decided Mr Owen-Conway would be able to represent his interests on the board.
“It was quite extraordinary,” Mr Owen-Conway said.
The Perth lawyer has just returned from three weeks travelling with the Cardiff team and getting to know the club.
It is worth stating that, before being dragooned into the club’s governing body, Mr Owen-Conway’s exposure to soccer was not limited to being a distant supporter.
He played pro soccer for Brisbane City and then Floreat Athena when he came to Perth to teach law in the late 1970s. He has also been on the board of the former Perth Italia club and ECU Joondalup.
And, on a final note, his soccer and Cardiff club connections run even deeper ... to his uncle, George Owen-Conway, who played for the club in 1940 under the name George Conway.
Name shame
The problem with highlighting silly things is it becomes unstoppable - like our irresponsible decision to highlight that Austal USA’s new board member, John “Dugan” Shipway’s, name is an aptronym (it matches his occupation).
So, having started down this appalling track, we felt obliged to continue when a colleague asked if the election of Dennis Mutton to the board of the Cooperative Research Centre for High Integrity Australian Pork also made the grade.
The Note remains uncertain and will leave it to the reader to decide.
