Damp Squib!

"Transfer Deadline Day" is akin to Christmas Day for football fans. The anticipation of what present you're going to get allied to the fact that Father Christmas is as generous as the size of your parents' wallet ensures that the rich kids get their bikes and Scalextrics whilst the poor ones don't even get the Action Man that was on their list; instead they are given the crappy plastic doll from Hong Kong whose clothes don't fit, cannot hold a rifle and that falls apart before kick off on Boxing Day! So, watching the BBC coverage of "Transfer Deadline Day" via the web, it was disappointing to see that the Beeb was pandering to the dreams of the rich kids (Premier League) in speculating what Santa was going to bring them as a late Christmas present at the end of January. As a fan of a proper football club, i.e., someone who supports the team of the town of their birth rather than pretend to have some affiliation with a team in a city they've never been to and whose dialect they wouldn't understand, I had one eye on the webpage of the Swindon Advertiser to see what business Paolo Di Canio was conducting after the horrendous decision by both the off-going and oncoming boards to sell Matt Ritchie to AFC Bournemouth for a mere fraction of his worth. 

Matt Ritchie

I went to bed feeling that, although David Beckham would be kicking himself for choosing an obscure French team in which to play out the last few months of his footballing career rather than take pride in putting on the sacred shirt of STFC each Saturday, at least the three players that had been lined up would do a decent job for Swindon in the run-in towards the end of the season. As I snuggled into the duvet, I felt assured that all the various parties had to do was sign on the dotted line and the poor kid's Christmas morning wouldn't be the damp squib that it usually is each year. Imagine my horror to find that, when I woke up, not only had Santa not left the toys, but the owner had repossessed them before my parents had left the toyshop -"You don't look like you can afford them, so you can't have them!"

I dare say that Bradley Wright-Phillips, Marlon Pack and Danny Green will be Swindon Town players come the start of the "Loan Transfer Window" in a week's time, but, as a fan of Swindon Town, it has been deflating and I'm left to feel like the poor kid at Christmas, playing with the Hong Kong soldier doll whilst the rich kids cycle around the estate on their new bikes.