Its all about time. About timing. Because the clock never stops, it just imposes arbitrary constraints on almost every facet of our lives. That’s why my favourite kind of holiday is one where I take off my watch when I get there and don’t put it back on until I’ve missed the sodding flight home. Dammit. But the joy to wake when you’re ready, to eat when you’re hungry, walk when you want to, stop for a coffee just because you can, not because ‘yeah, I’ve just got 18 minutes before my next meeting/appointment/anger management session’.

Yesterday was the last day of the football transfer window. It opened at the beginning of August and ended 6 o’clock yesterday because Monday was a bank holiday over here and you can’t end a transfer window on a bank holiday. Jesus! End it on bank holiday? What were you thinking??

And so as the clock did its inevitable thing, ticking away, slicing off chunks of our lives and putting them in the bin, deleted forever. With every click the price of players went up. The deals got nastier, the prizes more sought after, the panic more apparent.

Manchester United are unhappy. They won their first few games but not comfortably (at Spurs we take ‘winning in discomfort’ much more philosophically) and they looked shabby. And they’d only bought 3 ridiculously expensive players so far, in Schneiderlin, Memphis (as we have to call him) and Old Schweiny, who was actually transferred from a Munich hospital to the Manchester General Infirmary where he’ll spend the rest of his 4 year contract.

So on Monday night Luis Van Gaal and his team secured a teenager from Monaco, Anthony Martial, for a mere £36million (rising to 58 mil on performance stuff), the next ‘next Thierry Henry’. Another will be along shortly.

Whilst on the other side of Manchester, the City side, the Gallagher side, having already paid almost 50 mil for Raheem Sterling, they coughed up another 55 for Kevin De Bruyne the Woolf of Wolfsburg.

Yet the most startling transfer was one that didn’t happen. David De Gea, the Manchester United goalie, didn’t move to Real Madrid for £30 million. Nor for 80 million or even 2 million. The move failed. Everyone was responsible, in an irresponsible way, for the failure of the most talked about, most protracted, most stupid non-transfer since Cesc Fabregas didn’t move back to Barcelona 3 years running. It was the Gareth Bale sage all over again, but they changed the ending. Thus David De Gea can stay at the club he… err… well, at the club who own him, with the manager who… errr… who he can’t stand and just play on like the true soldier he was never likely to be. Disgruntled players who want away? They’re useful.

Like Saido Berahino. West Brom kept him from predatory Tottenham. So he can tweet his unhappiness and share it with the team he no longer wants to be with.

Ahhhh, I love a transfer window. Can’t wait for January. Its only a matter of time.

Happy Tuesday

A xxx