That’ll teach you for vegetating in front of BBC Sport’s live transfer feed and/or (most likely and) Sky Sports News all day.
This time last year I was still mulling over the 11th hour Berbatov deal and the ridiculous Robinho saga at Man City. This time around all I have is a vague confusion over which Collins now plays for which claret and blue team and which one doesn’t anymore and which one is the ginger one and stuff. I am hardly looking forward to tomorrow’s back pages if they are filled with Ibrahima Sonko interviews about how he is delighted to have swapped Stoke for Hull- kind of like swapping dog shit for a cow pat. That’s not being derogatory to either team by the way, it’s just this particular deal doesn’t illuminate my imagination as to what we can expect defensively from Hull now.
There are two problems with transfer deadline day. Problem one: the amount of fantasy the day not only encourages but now embraces. On BBC’s live feed, a small cartoon of a flying pig was placed next to any crazy sounding deal that a bored so-and-so has texted, belittling the claim and emphasising it’s absurdity. But the BBC is also very clever with this, because although they point and laugh at the texts that flood their inbox, should the unthinkable actually happen, they can say they were first to report it, even though it was actually footballfan87 sitting at Heathrow airport with a packet of Quavers reporting via text.
Being ‘first’ means the absolute world to the media, and we live in such an immediate environment- before you hear the explosion you are standing next to you’re seeing it on the news- that stories have to be made and not reported.
‘Robinho to Man City? Come on, surely not. Stick it on the news feed though, in case he’s right. And stick a patronising flying pig next to it…make sure you can remove it later though…you know...just in case…’
Problem two: the football economy. The colossal increase of money in football was supposed to increase the excitement on transfer deadline days, with clubs fighting it out for the next greasy wonderkid from Brazil or Argentina, throwing fifty pound notes made from recycled twenty pound notes at their clubs in the hope of landing their man. Agents licking shoes of other agents, chairmen and managers so they get their slice of the pie and see their man shoot to the top of the world scene.
But the biggest deals of the summer all went to Real Madrid, and after that we pretty much have to look at the Eto’o and Ibrahimovic swap deal amid of course all that happened at Man City. But even they wrapped it all up over a week ago with the Lescott drama finally coming to a head when- shock horror- he did what we knew he would do all summer and packed his bags. After that, there wasn't much left for everyone else.
Every club now fears that if they offer X million pounds, another club with their own bearded and oil-rich billionaire will come in and offer X million pounds as well, but throw a family pack of Twix bars into the deal. After hijacking the deal, the team who made the initial bid must admit defeat gracefully, unless you’re Rafa Benitez, in which case you launch a scathing attack on the player in question and wonder if all these clubs with all these millions and endless amounts of Twix’s in the cupboards are ruining football altogether.
Soon enough we will be seeing agents and managers meeting under lampposts at the 3 in the morning in the inner city alleyways, their faces lit only by the glow of their last cigarette, passing players between their long coats and checking to see if any rival managers are lurking around to mug them as they walk away trying to look innocent. This is the future of football- secret deals and back alleys. And you will sit and watch it on Sky Sports News all day.
New to Flog, it’s Fact of the Week: only three out of the last ten players to wear the number 3 shirt for Tottenham have made over 10 appearances for the club. This means they have had seven left backs that were so rubbish they couldn’t even make it to double figures before being sent on their way. Worryingly for Spurs fans, this logic tells us that these seven were worse than Mauricio Taricco, who made no less than 160 (awful) performances for them.
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