THE TRANSFER WINDOW: Another year, another January transfer window passes without any Brazilians making a late dash for the Keepmoat and joining Doncaster’s relentless march to the Champions League.
I have some sympathy with Stoke City boss Tony Pulis who described the window this week as ‘a circus’.
But no-one makes clubs go out and do all their business on the last day of the window – even the last hour of the window. Yesterday I read that, having missed the deadline, that Sunderland have been allowed to sign Benjani on loan from Manchester City despite missing the deadline, blaming technology.
Why is it always Benjani? Wasn’t it Benjani who a few years ago was almost left in limbo when he joined City from Portsmouth but too late?
Anyhow, Sunderland had the best part of two weeks to agree that deal. They didn’t. So should the player be allowed to join Sunderland? No.
They missed the deadline, they shouldn’t have left it so late. Tough.
And you can’t help but think the biggest losers of the transfer window now are the smaller clubs, in financial trouble, who can’t now sell a player for however many months.
But the biggest loser of the window for me is teletext page 323.
During the ‘off season’ is gets reduced to loan transfer for out of contract Frenchmen signing for Unibond Division One clubs. It’s a shadow of the page’s glory days.
Being a supporter of lower division teams, it really was the oracle, it’s where you got your news. Forget the first few pages, where it’s all about Terry’s love life and the England captaincy or Wenger’s latest rant.
323 was where you found Donny have signed an unknown Ethiopian witchdoctor on trial, or that we’ve taken Bolton’s reserve goalie’s mum’s milkman on loan to solve our goalkeeping crisis. Or even that our manager’s been sacked.
Because such is the way of lower division football, that some weeks that’s all the BBC think it’s worth, a snippet on 323, when a manager of a club in the depths of the football league gets his P45.
Although these days, riding high in the Championship, we even get a page of our own... occasionally.
Back in the good old days it was 312.
That was before the internet, before the news was available everywhere, in the days when google was my sister’s term for a bad ball at cricket.
That was in the days when on an old television, not digital, you had to wait for the pages to come round.
You couldn’t skip through the news about Ebbsfleet United like you can now, you had to wait, page by page. It built up the suspense, the thought that page 6/9 might be the one.
And then there was always the dilemma if you missed a page. Tried to finish making that cup of coffee before the page turned again having left on page 6/9 – now it’s 8/9.
Or the phone rang and interrupted your soaking up of lower division football trivia. The nagging question always remained and ate away.
What was on page 7/9? It could have been something vital.That Honduran left back you’ve been linked with, or your bid for the Andorran captain.
There never was news for you....but you had to be sure...
Later in the day you’d flick on teletext again and go to page 312. It was page 3/10. 10... new news!.. What do you do now?