This is extremely poor PR and no way to treat the Membership, who are all reasonable people and will understand if given some sort of explanation. I object to being "fobbed off" with a mere "unavailable". I ran a professional sports team back in the day, with a large fan base and healthy attendances of between 5k and 10k depending on the opposition, if we had just said to our fans a player was "unavailable" there would have been a huge backlash. If a professional is "unavailable" there has to be a good personal reason, which we would all understand if we were given some sort of a clue ......... "unavailable" is simply not acceptable, we deserve to be treated better than that, "mushrooms" just does not come into it.

paulbear wrote:

Unfortunately when a player is not in the team and the club (All clubs) do not wish to give a reason, the PR oppo's who are employed, tell all players to come out with the same old line if spectators should ask about a certain player. I remember when Rikki Clarke was not playing in one game v Durham in CC, a few spectators around the ground were asking a few of the staff "Where's Rikki", "Why is Clarke not playing", every single one of them at some stage said "He is not available for selection", which we all know was short for, "He did something wrong and we do not want to tell anyone what it was".

I may have missed it, if so, I apologise, but have we been given a sensible reason for the omission of Burgess from the team? Merely unavailable just does not cut it. If it is deeply personal then say so, we will accept that and move on. If he has been dropped then say so, we might not agree but we will accept that and move on. But we deserve more than simply to say he is unavailable.