On Friday the transfer window will slam shut for the summer and in some places the excuses are being gotten in early, like how the best of our business may well not be done until January.
By then we’ll have played all our European group stage games, on the proviso that the second leg against Suduva results in a victory, which 888sport believe it will. The first domestic trophy of the season will already be won or lost. The picture of our league season will largely be clear.
In short, in order to materially affect this campaign the business will have to be done in the next four days. If it is not then the manager will be angry and the fans will be right to be. The board, which has dragged its feet so shockingly over the course of the summer, is almost out of time to make it up to us. Champions League football is gone already.
The apology already needs to be a good one.
The media is throwing names around like confetti; loanees from England, French footballers, more nonsense about McKenna at Aberdeen, although that story has been flatly refuted by the manager who knows, as we do, that there’s no more time to waste.
There’s also garbage about Dembele, a player we’re trying to get to sign a new deal and who the board has expressly said is not for sale at any price. The number of clickbait sites linking him to a move to Marseille grows as our lazy media cuts and pastes the story and this, in turn, generates more spread. This is what we’ve become used to.
We’ve become used to this too, to this unseemly last week scrambling. To a board that waits until the last possible moment to get things done. It is ridiculous that they took such chances this year, and the manager has been angry about it.
But for all that, when he spoke last night he sounded like someone who has been given assurances that players will be delivered before Friday; the Boyata fiasco has shown the dire need for that promise to be kept.
If the board fails to do it then Hell should be paid.
I don’t expect heads to roll, but they should.