OK dudes, special AM edition before the Cottaging game, just to clear up a few things : firstly, again, apologies for lack of updates (even by my standards) – this is due to a mixture of me being under the weather, huge amounts of work and the complete fuck up they call the US election (and if you think that FL is going to be the end of it, you’ve got another think coming….).
Secondly, I posted my thoughts on REMBE’s retiring on the guestbook, I’ll repeat the gist of it here : it’s sad, and it’s unfortunate, but it’s a shame that my last abiding memory of his playing career was his poorly timed “misquoted” articles in the Substandard last year.
Thirdly, the new kit is yellow (you can tell I haven’t been updating 🙂 ), maybe we’ll find out how many people voted in today’s programme. Or maybe not.
Fourthly, WFC are now openly advertising for somebody to “support” the marketing department. Insert your own snide comment here, I can think of at least 30 such forms of abuse here 🙂
Fifth, and the main jist of this morning, is a response to what Weird and Wonderful World put in its news item last night about us needing to cut £4m off the wage bill. Firstly, it proves that my conservative estimates on our wage bill (see “Planet Reality”) were indeed, too conservative. I thought that my figures were bad enough, they’re now even worse than I thought. It’s been reported that people like Wild Thang and TP – both long term crocks – are on £7k a week, and Michael Thomas is on (wait for it) – 8k a week.
It is also apparent that TB won’t announce that we’re in such a pickle because of “supporter morale”. In other words, he may say that “we need to cut our wage bill and we may need to get rid of JH”. Two points : (1) Will getting rid of JH really be so universally unpopular? I’m not so sure, quite a few people I speak to are starting to get slightly fed up with his lack of goals and his general all-round attitude. Most people think he’ll go anyway, and if TB lets on about the wage bill being so high, his sale may be a little bit more accepted – witness the increasing regularity of comments like “as long as we sign a decent lower league striker I’ll be happy with him going”. (2) If the above figure on Michael Thomas is correct, that must make him one of our highest paid players. MT was a TB signing.
TB was pissed off with dipping out on Dunne (him yet again) because of problems with the wage bill, yet seems happy to sign players with just as high wage bills. So the question to ask is, again – does TB have a clue about the admin side of transfers? Worth pondering, especially if he starts doing a sob story about how little money he’s getting (no, I’m not starting a TB Out campaign).
Finally for this section, and a point proven again? When REMBE announced his retirement, he told some people at WFC about it. Fair enough. So, how did a great deal of WFC’s staff get to hear about such a big thing? Through the Substandard. What were the people who knew about this doing? I’ve mentioned in the past that much of WFC’s problems stem from the lack of communication between various people in the club, if half the staff don’t know that a big player has retired then what hope have we got for doing anything remotely contentious?
Enjoy Foolham, I’ll be the one in block D, row 21 shivering…..