So long, farewell, auf wierdersehen, goodbye...

Fear not dear reader, it’s not from me. Despite a week long hiatus (for which you can blame/ thank my employer) I can assure you this blog will not fall victim to any cost cutting exercise.
No, it’s a belated U’s-blog arrivederci to the various players and staff who have departed the Abbey over the last week or so as a result of our failure to turn up at Wembley the other day.

“We’ve got a lot of young lads coming through, and it’s time to push forward the youth we had here,” said our Jimmy, while hanging big FOR SALE signs around the necks of Brown, Convery and Super Lee Boylan. An admirable sentiment, were it not coming from the man who, in the run up to the play off final, was stressing the importance of having experienced players, ho hum.

It’s obvious that some or all of the departures are financially motivated, and the question on everyone’s lips (in the absence of any statement from the club one way or the other) is whether we about to lurch into another financial catastrophe?

At this stage my feeling would be probably not. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that we couldn’t sustain the number of experienced players on the books that we had by the end of last season. And the dashing Courtney Pitt aside (miss you Courtney), most of the departures/potential departures can be justified by the players involved being too old (LFW, Peters), too injury prone (Brown, Hyem, Boylan), too rubbish (Convery) or all of the above (Chilli).

Off the pitch, everyone knew Willy was going, and since the arrivals of Mssrs. Gauntrey and Rolls I imagine the positions of Heather and Andy Duncan had become slightly redundant. Certainly Duncs’ value to the club has diminished since we signed some other likeable, successful players – what’s the point of keeping an ex-player on to open shops and kiss babies when you can get your current squad to do it?

So nothing to worry about then? Well of course this only works if JQ can bring in some quality signings to augment the players who do remain. By my reckoning we need about five new faces – an attack minded left sider, a cheaper version of Carden, two or three strikers, and possibly a centre back should the persistent rumours of Albrighton joining Stevenage prove to have any substance.

Obviously if we end up with five untried youngsters I will have less confidence in our ability to mount a challenge next year. But it’s still early days and for the moment we have to put our trust in the mighty Quinn. The occasional Marvin Robinson aside, he’s usually come up with the goods in the past.