Ling in, but working on a shoe-string?

What a happy day to be a Cambridge United fan. We have three points on the board following our 3-1 win at Ebbsfleet, and Martin Ling is back at the helm.

Going by the statement on the official site, it sounds like the directors have thought things through and put a plan in place to move forward sensibly. Whether they stick to it or not remains to be seen, but at least we're beginning with good intentions. An over-reliance on youth players is not a particularly desirable thing in my opinion - ideally you wouldn't want to bring in more than two or three a season - but in our position we probably don't have much choice but to bulk out the squad with the CRC players, and from what we've seen so far they certainly don't lack the ability to succeed in the Conference.

The return of Ling will hopefully herald a new era of board room discretion as well, it's not healthy to have directors shooting their mouths off in the media every five minutes. Talking of which, it's a shame to see fresh revelations from ex-Chairman George in the paper today, talking of a shock 900k shortfall in CUFC finances.

George obviously possesses plenty of axes following his resignation, but it's a pity that someone with such a lot of passion for the club feels the need to grind them all at once. The 900k figure makes for a nice headline, but when you look at it more than half of that amount (£535k) came from one-off, transfer, income. That's not something you would ever budget for anyway, so to call it a shortfall is a bit misleading. It seems money will be a lot tighter at the club than it has been in the last two years, but I would hope think that the situation is not quite as bad as that article makes it sound.