Best Of

It looks like my final match of this era was away at Shrewsbury, for a resounding 4-1 win, masterminded by the legend Matt Bloomfield, just before Christmas, with my son, and I also got to see and say goodbye to the other legend GA. Perfect.

On the whole I find the musings of journalists only marginally less unreliable than the odds setting of bookies, but that is me. I fully accept others experience & mileage may differ.

The salient points underpinning my post were

a) none of you are insiders so everything is speculation

b) if it is genuinely a done deal & he goes to LTFC then of course we have the right to ask why he felt this was the right time when he had over 17 months left on his current contract, thouvh I wont hold my breath on anyone at the club telling us; and Blooms is too respectable to disclose the details until he writes his memoirs.

Yes, pretty much this all over.

Time moves on, football moves even quicker, and new heroes and legends are made, but it just feels a waste of what could've been.

MB taking us to the championship would've been a story to perhaps even topple our first promotion there. If he becomes the manager he's shown the last year, who knows where he could've taken us.

Rob Couhig looked silly in his Stetson and dad trainers, but at least he was at the ground.

We laughed at the Wycombe Way and the Worldwide Wycombe Phenomenon, but at least it was all about Wycombe, and not numbers on a spreadsheet.

Thought I'd distract myself from today's rather depressing scenario by reading the new When Saturday Comes but it's just made me even more depressed about the general state of football, from the decline of the FA Cup simply to placate the biggest clubs and the threat to the 3pm blackout and its impact on non league clubs, to the greed-fuelled edging out of season ticket holders in the Premier League. There's more - the state of Swindown Town, the ineffective nature of the rainbow laces campaign (something close to Bloomfield's heart). Just made me feel like football's not worth it all anymore and I'm just a dinosaur on my way to extinction.

Still, a win at Mansfield on Saturday and I'll be my usual chipper self again, right? Right?

Matt will obviously take his team with him and that will leave us pretty short for a little while until the new head coach arrives with his own team.

The piece from the Sky Sports reporter said MB had asked Southgate for advice two months ago? TWO.

I agree completely. I'm not even sure if I'll be that bothered if we get promoted or not given the way the ownership has handled the situation.

Bloomfield is a legend, and the ideal kind of forward-thinking, successful young manager to spearhead a data-informed revolution at this club. To allow him to leave without a fight when we are second in League 1 is as far as I am concerned mismanagement of the club.

Dan RIce can get fucked. As can the stupid academy project.

Hopefully I will feel more positive when things have settled down but right now I can't see it.

Yes I also share that concern.

I’m worried that we now join the treadmill that so many other clubs are now stuck in of appointing from the circuit of head coaches not trusted to have any input on the signing of their own players but then responsible for moulding them into a promotion winning team - and rarely succeeding

Even worse we end up one of those clubs where it is apparent that the head coach doesn’t even have total responsibility for picking the team.

Obviously all just total speculation on my part at this time, but as I said it’s what I fear for our future. The mood music around this whole episode isn’t doing much to allay my fears.

Maybe it’ll say….

“The data model will demonstrate that the new manager will be a really shrewd appointment….”

I won’t