And again, sorry about the lack of updates – up until we get regular news again, don’t expect this to be updated daily…..
Anyway, the inevitable has happened – Sully will be a Spurz player on 1 July. Be honest, if you’re remotely surprised then I suggest you stop doing an ostrich impression. Sully still loves us, he reckons that TB could possibly get us back up (yeah, if he gets rid of the wasters he will), but “I may not get the chance of joining a massive club like Spurs again and I just couldn’t turn it down.”. And it wasn’t about money either, despite getting paid £25,000 a week. And he claims that it wasn’t money? Hmm – my feeling is that he really wanted to go to Arsenal, but Wenger wouldn’t pay the dough.
I suppose we have to accept it – we’re in the first division, and when a Premiership club (owch that fucking hurt) comes in with big bucks like that, there’s not a lot we can do. Still, inwards and upwards, and we now have the experienced Paul Heald or the inexperienced but promising Kelvin Davies wearing the light blue next year. Unless we get Espen Baardsen in.
Assuming we don’t sign anybody, I can see us sticking with DB for now, playing Kelvin occasionally in the beginning just to get him used to it. I certainly don’t forsee major problems with either two goalies, Healdy was always solid for us (some say his handling ain’t good but then neither was Sully’s at times), and Kelvin doesn’t look out of his depth (certainly in the reserves), so really I’m not overly upset with who we’ve got. One side effect of this is our defence – for way too long now, we’ve over-relied on Sully to stop us conceeding goals (didn’t exactly work though did it), with somebody like DB or Kelvin in goal, the uncertainty may mean the defence has to tighten up a lot more. Well, I’m prepared to think anything like that to tighten our back line up….
KC won’t be in the Eire tour of Scotland and the USA – in fact, he needs a groin op. Expect him to be wearing “Tiny” next year.
Conflicting rumour time : our greatest ever player, one Nigel “God” Winterburn, may be returning to us as player-coach. This was a Sun story. The News of the World (the Sunday Sun, if you will) says that he’s going to West Ham. Go figure. Now, assuming this story is true, it will mean that we have a potentially pukka defensive coach, which is half our problem.
The other side to this is the way things are coming together – think about the people who we’ve been legitimately linked with for managerships, who’s currently employed by WFC etc. Add Nige to the list, and you have a great deal of players who were there during the barnstorming 86-89 team. Not only that, but they were never considered “custodians” of the CG shite – they were just very good players (for the record, I mean Carlton Fairweather and Lawrie Sanchez) who didn’t go in for the puddle throwing shit. So does this signify a return of sorts? No lame “crazyness”, just solid coaching and a desire to win? Hopefully this more professional approach will destroy many myths around the place, whilst making us more successful in the process.
One man who could never be accused of letting the CG lie is one OGEM. He’s convinced he should be getting the Celtic job, but if that twat O’Neill ends up at Parkhead, then expect the Walkers Crisps supply in Leicester to run dry. Now, much has been made of the fact that he won’t go up to Sheffield, but you can easily do Sheffield from Mill Hill in 2.5 hours. Which has to be a similar time to what it took him to get from his house to the RE training ground. Perhaps that’s why he never turned up for training half the time?
Also considering new pastures is Carl Cort, who is going to shock us all with a transfer request. Presumably because his agent has told him he really is something special. Actually, if Cort really wants to shock us, he could put slightly more than 10% effort into a game. Or even trap the ball. Still, he played for the England U21 vs Italy, presumably because all the other England U21 strikers all died in a plane crash, and got subbed. His contribution was a couple of won headers in the box and about 6 lay-offs to other players. Well worth £5m, surely? Surely?