My best mate must have been delighted yesterday when I arrived from the bar (having had only one lager, honest) for the lineup at his wedding and greeted him with the immortal words "Congratulations on your special day, but a few of us were chatting and decided that this is only the third most important thing happening today, after Andy Murray's match and Michael Owen signing for Man Utd".
I like to think he understood. Only time and the number of dinner invites I get from the happily wedded couple will tell.
It's a sign of just how little transfer activity is happening that the Michael Owen deal is such a big story. There's too little going on to call it a transfer market. It's more like a stall on its own, one of those cappuccino ones in town squares that sells a few coffees now and then, but isn't making much money because everyone goes to the Starbucks beside it.
La Liga is Starbucks. They're getting all the fun. Kaka', Ronaldo, Benzema, Raul Albiol - all right, the last one isn't glamorous, but he cost Real Madrid 10mil and is a flipping good centre back, by the way. Meanwhile, David Villa looks likely to end up at Real or Barca, and the last good player who appears to be available just now, Franck Ribery, looks about as enthralled by the idea of England as Barack Obama is by the idea of the Ku Klux Klan.
So in England we've seen the HUMONGOUS deals for WORLD CLASS players, such as Glen Johnson, Gareth Barry and Luis Antonio Valencia. Does the sarcasm come across well enough in writing? That said, in Scotland we have had...drum roll please...Dundee spending 150k and 125k on Gary Harkins and Leigh Griffiths. As far as I can tell, these are the biggest transfer fees North of the border so far this summer. Talk about a credit crunch.
The more worrying trend in the SPL has been the further haemorrhaging of players to clubs in the Championship - cheerio to Scott Severin, Paul Hartley, and, um, pretty much all the Motherwell squad. Okay, I exaggerate a touch - David Clarkson, Paul Quinn, Graeme Smith and Maros Klimpl appear to be legging it south, but no wonder they lost to Llanelli, they had to go down to the local boozer (sorry, boozers plural, after all it's Motherwell) and dragged the least obese blokes they could find away from the bar and told them to form a solid midfield quartet. I bet the set pieces were a bit hopeless.
Anyway, the trend in Scotland so far seems to be that the Old Firm are no stronger, but everyone else is weaker. Great. No wonder we can't get a decent TV deal. Still, a few weeks to go, we'll see.
L.
No comments:
Post a Comment