Its all hotting up in the football transfer market as the window of opportunity closes in under 4 weeks time. So come and grab a last-minute bargain while you can. There’s a 2-for-1 deal going on at Southampton, as there has been for about 10 years really. Great bargains to be had. Though all that’s left on their shelves currently is trainee left back and an ice-cream seller. Their manager left to go to Mecca. Or perhaps Jerusalam, as he jumped on the rotating door that is the Spurs job. I’m confident that ‘he’ is ‘the one’. Not like I thought about the previous 15 incumbents over the last 5 years. Their best attacking players went to Liverpool, their best defenders came to Spurs and everyone else there from last season is scattered about the leagues like confetti. Like parmesan on your pasta.

Because Southampton has become the growing fields for ‘home grown’ talent. Theo Walcott, Gareth (the holy one) Bale, Alex Oxlaide-Chamberlain to Luke Shaw, Adam Lallana, all wonderful, all super-talented Southampton kids, all gone on to bigger and (in some cases) better. The only decent player Southampton ever managed to keep was Matthew Le Tissier. And only because he was too fat and lazy to move his arse, other than to score a shitload of wonderful goals. That was in 1937. Or seems like it. If I was a Saints fan I’d be very depressed.

I’m a Spurs fan and I am very depressed.

This is August. This is ‘our time’. When we buy players from all over the world. Superstars. Big names. Players with reputations big enough that they can crumble upon arrival at the Lane. We should be out there buying up the World Cup galacticos, sweeping up the ‘debris’ after Rio, and bringing back a sackful of talent. Yet all I read is how we’ve failed to sign another. Then another. Then 4 more don’t want to play at Spurs. Even Chelsea are losing players all over the place. And now possibly Petr Cech may leave for the Bernabau, under threat from the unpronouncable Belgium keeper who’s been on loan for 2 years and now returns to Stamford Bridge a World Cup hero and wants his Number One shirt off the big Czech. Goalies are like princes; you need an ‘heir and a spare’. But in goalie-world no-one wants to be the spare.

So the season starts in just over a week and Spurs look pretty much like we did last year. Unless… unless… unless Mauricio Pocettino has weaved his magic upon the unquestionable talent that so miserably failed last year. Like a fairy godmother waving his magic want, turning Soldado back into a striker, Lamella back into a (fucking expensive) footballer, Chadli back into… whatever it is he’s supposed to be doing, because, like the rest of us, he never seemed to know either.

The football season. The thing that gives meaning to our frail and pathetic lives. A cause for celebration? Or misery??

9 days to go.

Happy thursday

A xxxx