Welcome to the close season.
Sometimes, no news is good news. This morning, according to the SLP, Millwall have agreed terms with Tom Elliott. Obviously, it’s yet to be confirmed, but given that the SLP is the in-house paper at the Den** I’ve no real reason to believe it’s bollocks.
** – as a Palace fan once put it, they could win the Champions League and the next edition of the paper would focus on a new reserve Millwall keeper. .
To be honest, losing TE was always inevitable, especially when he was out of contract. And I don’t blame him for taking a punt with a team playing in the Championship next season.
Whether he’ll make that step up remains to be seen, but he could have made worse choices than go to SE16. He’ll get a decent wedge, for a start, and given his injury issues in the past (which were starting to haunt him towards the end of last season, lest we forget), he’s taken that one big shot.
I don’t think there’s anyone at AFCW who wouldn’t wish him well, it’s not like he’s left us with a sour taste in the mouth (watch him call us cunts now), and from our point of view, it’s simple annoyance that he’s out of contract.
Not to mention the big hole in our forward line that we currently have.
TBH it’s going to force us to sort that out once and for all. Elliott’s 99% off anyway, we all have our opinion on Barnett, and Taylor won’t be able to do it all by himself. And I don’t doubt that this hasn’t been in the plans since even before the Franchise game.
NA is apparently on holiday until the 5th, not that he doesn’t deserve a long break, so if Elliott is gone before then it will leave us short at the moment. But we don’t even start pre-season training for about another four weeks.
It’s this time of year where we have to play the waiting game, but with good reason. Last week, this from the Peterborough chairman caught my eye, and it will explain why you’re probably not going to check out Soccerbase right now.
It would explain why TE (or more likely his agent) has decided to go across South London. Millwall need to move a bit quick on transfers now they got promoted, they’ve signed somebody from Bradford as well today, and they simply have to shell out where otherwise they might not need to.
We need players, but we’re in that odd situation where we don’t need to panic-buy just yet. It’s often said on SW19 that in L1 as well as L2, it’s very easy to pay a lot of money for shite, and this close season will continue to prove that.
True, you can’t leave it too long – look at last year’s transfer dealings – but there’s going to be a lot of talent next month suddenly having to get realistic about wages. Our modus operandi seems to be one that we top-load our wage structure to get the slightly better players in, at the (literal) expense of other areas.
It’s worked so far, and I bet we’re not the only ones in this division to do it.
So, have we got anyone in ourselves? Are we even likely to do so before the clocks go back? The rumour mill is suggesting we’re signing a keeper from the Championship, though that’ll only be confirmed when the cheesy photo on the OS pops up.
I suspect we’ll get quite a few announcements in quick succession, as that’s what tends to happen. One thing is guaranteed – as soon as we sign anyone, somebody on social media will post “he’s shit” within ten seconds of putting pen to paper…
Other than that, it’s all been pretty quiet recently. I’ll be honest and admit I’ve quite enjoyed not having anything AFCW related to talk about for the last month. We’ve needed that mental health break, and another couple of weeks definitely won’t hurt.
I genuinely forgot that yesterday was the fifteenth anniversary of our whole football-supporting world collapsing. I suppose it’s like the death of a relative – eventually, you move on because you need to.
I even forgot that this time last year, we were heading to Wombley. Yes, I know that date-wise, it’s tomorrow, but it’s amazing how time flies. Yesterday, our L2 playoff trophy got passed to Blackpool, which will no doubt be one of the more popular away trips of the season.
True, they’ve got seriously cuntish owners, and it takes a lot for people to boycott a playoff final. But it will be a new ground for most of us, and Blackpool is still a famous name. Just watch our game there be on a Tuesday in February.
Come to think of it, the fixtures are due out soon, aren’t they?
Finally, we’ve got a new website design, which looks nice. It’s better than the old one, although even SW19 was more readable than the previous piece of garbage. You don’t have to click on that welcome screen any more, which is a 100% improvement.
Perhaps it’s gone under the radar, but the new iFollow media stuff looks interesting. Most eyecatching is the newly available live streaming for anyone who lives outside the UK/Ireland – so now the whole world can see how bad we are up front.
This does beg a couple of questions though. £110 per season is presumably for the live streaming, and admittedly I don’t know how much DonsPlayer is per year. But it seems a lot for those who will be geographically restricted.
Will UK/Ireland subscribers get it cheaper? If not, could one go abroad and watch games on the same account? Obviously, nobody would surreptitiously do anything illegal with such an account…
Will people given the choice stick with Radio WDON? It’s pretty popular, and has been since its inception (when there was no other way of getting any updates at games), but how many will prefer to watch rather than listen?
There’s obviously a market for it, and live streaming from games is clearly cheap enough for AFCW and others to do nowadays. It’s amazing how many people are around on matchday from all over the globe – hell, when last year’s playoff final was on, apparently one bar in NYC had about 15-20 of us in there…