And there’s a joke to be had somewhere.
So, the long awaited big tall striker has arrived at SW17. Welcome to AFC Wimbledon, Sam Cosgrove.
That’s CosgrOve. With an “o”. Not CosgrAve, who is one of our other strikers.
Though there’s the potential for lots of #ePicBAntZ with those two very similar surnames. And you can bet at least one media outlet will get the two mixed up…
All he needs to do is to lift the club, score lots of goals, not get injured and help pay off all our loans at the same time.
No pressure, like.
What do we know about him? He’s on loan from Brum until the end of the season. He’s 6ft4, 25-years old, and makes Robbo look as short as your editor in that OS piece.
He was also on loan at Shrewsbury this season, although their fans don’t exactly seem upset to see him go.
I always take those sort of comments with a pinch of salt – after all, how many times have we heard Player X is great from previous clubs’ supporters, then they turn out to be shite?
And I believe that Cosgrove fell out with Steve Cotterill, so it’s possible life in Shropshire didn’t suit our new signing.
MR himself seems pleased to get him, and not in the usual we’ve-signed-somebody-who-we-don’t-really-want-but-here’s-the-platitudes-anyway style.
I did find this bit intrigung though:
There was one other player we went for who would have settled straight in because he knows us, but we were told that he wasn’t being loaned out.
Given that the rumour mill was suggesting Piggy was available, is this a reference to him? We’ll never know.
And really, we probably don’t care.
In among all the hype of our new signing, we also made a second addition. Nathan Broome is joining us permanently.
He’s been on trial a few weeks, apparently, and I assume he’s there to step in for the Bulgarian Kiwi when we inevitably sell him this summer.
Keepers are one of those sort of signings where you think it’s a waste of money until you end up with a bad one inbetween the sticks.
Broome is 20, ex-Citeh, and might well end up becoming the next Tzanev.
This is one of those ones you can file under “One for the future”, which knowing us means he’ll be a first team regular come September.
Back to Cosgrove, and what his signing means is one of two things. Firstly, we’ve given ourselves a fighting chance of staying up now.
It was painfully obvious last Saturday that we needed a replacement for OP the day before.
Now we’ve got somebody, a big bastard at that. In League One, sometimes that’s all you need.
Neither Cosgrove or Broome are eligible for tomorrow, annoyingly (so why have a transfer deadline that rules them out?).
So we’ll need to rely on the other strikers we’ve got – but at least we know it’s no different to when we lost OP through injury.
Life has become just a tad easier for Pressley (if he ever gets fit), Ablade, CosgrAve and whoever else passes off as our forwards.
CosgrOve might not be the silver bullet to our survival, but at least we’ve now got someone. And that’s half the battle.
Secondly, and more importantly long term – it’s vindication of the Recruitment Panel (or Transfer Committee, or whatever the fuck it’s called).
Had it messed today up, then serious questions about why we have one would have been asked.
It’s been a week since Ollie Palmer left for North Wales, and with time being short (and patience being even shorter), they had to produce something.
This situation was the very reason why we had a Panel to begin with, and they can now say they’ve done their job this window.
Whether we could have had more in I don’t know. Although as the clock ticks on tonight, we’ve been busier this month than we thought.
Cosgrove, Broome, Lee Brown, Terry Ablade and Tomas Kalinauskas makes it five incomers this window, unless I’ve missed somebody out.
All have played, or will play, a part in first team football already.
With such a gruelling schedule ahead – and the need to start picking up wins – we’ll need everyone fit and raring to go.
In case you’ve forgotten, we have the little matter of Cheltenham at home tomorrow, a game we need to win if at all possible.
As said above, we’ll have to wait until Charlton on Saturday to see Cosgrove in action, but at least it doesn’t feel quite so hopeless now.
And we can put all the transfer speculation to bed, until the end of the campaign anyway.
Your editor knows very little on those things. Although I do know that at 19h30, at the Riverside Road/Batsford Way junction, the stadium doors were wedged open with a traffic cone…