Since the late sixties I have watched us in an almost permanent struggle to look like a top flight club, struggle which had started ten years earlier .
This long endeavour has been mostly in vain , but has been punctuated by the occasional emergence of a team with the potential to genuinely look at home in the top division. Each of these occasions has seen the club reach some sort of crossroads, seen them have to make a decision about whether to push on or settle for the modest progress already made. We all know that they have always chose the second of these paths, and always with predictable results; a declining team headed back to it's natural level, which has been shown over this fifty odd year period to be around the top of the second tier.
This summers transfer activity has suggested that we have once again opted for the option of pulling up sharp, like a horse refusing a difficult fence when it realises what is involved in jumping it. The Jones transfer epitomises this perfectly. A player who, without being a genuine top ranker, has been very important to our remaining in the premier league for the last three years, is sold to a club of similar stature just because they are persistent and offer some money (and hardly a can't say no price either).
If Jones is replaced by a better player, these are all wasted words, and I will happily eat them. But does anyone expect that to happen? I for one do not, and expect to see the cheap option of another loan signing or an an old lag brought in to fill the gap.
It may not be the end of August yet but the impression of financial retrenchment at the club is overwhelming. It may be that this is unavoidable, that there is little money and that the manager has been shown a blueprint for the way the club needs to be run. If so then fair enough, but any such plan was kept from supporters in the early summer, when ST decisions were being made. Any one signing up then on the strength of "just two or three quality signings" would be excused for thinking they had been given a false prospectus.
I really hope I'm wrong, but it has happened too often before to ignore the likely-hood of it happening again. Better not jump that fence, it might hurt. Normal service is resumed.
Read more: http://www.readytogo.net/smb/showthread.php?t=514701#ixzz0wKKh9Cwo
