We might not have been able to play at Lincoln today, but there’s been some highly significant activity at The Racecourse as we’ve brought in an important new face this weekend. Not a player, but an appointment which could be as crucial as any new centre forward. Except a cloned Gary Bennett, of course. Or that Messi chap.

The new commercial sales manager has a big job on his hands. The WST have never hidden the fact that to keep a fan-owned club afloat we need to fully maximise its commercial potential. Introducing a professional element to that area will be a crucial move in the right direction.

Steven Cook has certainly built up an impressive CV. Stepping up from being part of a team at a huge event like the Open to being the front man at a Conference football club is a big move though. He’ll find what in salesmanspeak would be described as a business with great potential for expansion. That means a business which hasn’t been fulfilling its potential to the rest of us.

It seems to me that we need someone with a bit of savvy who can take a good look round, take in the big picture, and work out what the right questions to ask are, and who should be asked them. Otherwise, the unique resources which a football club boasts will be unexploited.

A small club needs to make the most of its supprt, and a fan-owned club ought to be looking to do that in spades. There’s lots of goodwill around the place, but you can’t run a professional organisation on kind thoughts and the efforts of volunteers alone.

That’s not to denegrate the efforts of those who give up their time to help the club: in fact, failing to utilise their energy would be suicidal. On the contrary, there needs to be an attempt to see if more support can be garnered, and then given clearer direction.

While some areas are well covered, others are in desperate need of reliable, regular help and there’s a real requirement for some strategic leadership to ensure that supporters wanting to help are deployed where they’re most needed. As I said earlier, it’s time to marry eagerness with professionalism.

This is such a crucial moment for the club and hopefully Cook will be exactly the man t take us in the right direction. There have been too many commercial false dawns in the past. I recall a particular commercial director from a previous decade who dazzled everyone with big talk and what looked like a terrific background, but did little of substance and, in my personal experience, came up with nothing if it required effort on his part. I recall another who was superb at getting into the media but didn’t deliver commercially at all.

In more recent years the problem has been more about a systemic failure than poor appointments. A club which wasn’t really run as a business squandered so many opportunites to raise funds that it was criminal. That offered the WST a terrific opportunity to come in with things at a low and make a real improvement. Appointing then offloading an experienced commercial manager wasn’t how you’d expect them to go about things, so there’s pressure to ensure that this is an appointment they’ve got right.