LIKE A KID IN SWEET SHOP AGAIN!
IT’S been a routine, a ceremony, that I’ve upheld almost every morning since I was a kid. Before the kettle goes on, before the cat gets fed, the most pressing task has always been to check the latest transfer talk. As a teenager, the overwhelming reason for becoming a paperboy, for getting up at silly o’clock and facing the dark and the cold and the rain, wasn’t the meagre pennies they paid you every Saturday morning. It was the opportunity to read the sports pages of every newspaper as you went about your trade, scrutinising the latest rumours, the transfer tittle-tattle. By doing so, you had bragging rights at the boys’ end of the school playground that morning. It was you and you alone who could announce that Man Utd were sniffing around Clive Allen, or that Steve Nicol was eyeing a move to the Bundesliga. You could also expertly decree how likely that move was. The more papers that had reported it, the more credence the 13-year-old you could give it. As technology developed, the addiction prospered well after I’d hung up my paperboy’s delivery sack. Page 312 of Ceefax kept me abreast of the latest moves, before the arrival of the internet offered umpteen different gossip columns of varying reliability. It was still always the first thought, the first task of the day. But that earlymorning ceremony has been, over the last few years, less religiously observed. Increasingly, I’ve found myself disconnected from what I’m reading. There are simply too many names that are unrecognisable. The pleasure was always envisaging how a certain player would fit into a certain new team or alongside a certain new team-mate. It’s hard to do that with someone you wouldn’t recognise from Adam.
Mountain
And then there’s the financial aspect. Our brains, quite obviously, aren’t programmed to be able to envisage, let alone make sense of, the hyper-real amounts of money being bandied about. I remember a photo that appeared in the pages of Shoot! magazine either in the late ’70s or early ’80s, which showed Ipswich defender Kevin Beattie surrounded by a large mountain of cash. The story was that Beattie, having been the subject of an unsuccessful £400,000 bid to whisk him away from East Anglia (memory suggests it was either Man City or Aston Villa who aimed to do the whisking away), wanted to see exactly what 400 big ones looked like. He needed to get his head around the amount. Indeed, now, if a magazine wanted to set up a similar photoshoot with an Mbappé or a Lacazette, their photographer would need a seriously wide-angle lens. The sum of £100m is impossible for our brains to compute otherwise.
Incarnation
But, thankfully, transfer gossip hasn’t lost its sheen in Non-League. Here, of course, the prices being quoted don’t resemble the GDP of a medium-sized country, allowing the observer to easily evaluate whether Player A is worth X amount of cash. And, with the players in question being right under our noses and not playing for some remote outfit in Colombia or Kazakhstan, we’re connected to them. We’ve seen them play, we know their game, and thus we can imagine how they might fit into the team they’ve being linked to. Indeed, transfer news hasn’t got my juices flowing so much for many a season as they currently are when looking at the side that Phil Parkinson is constructing at Altrincham. Not only has he added two of Salford City’s most exciting players – James Poole and John Johnston – to reunite with their former skipper Chris Lynch down at Moss Lane, Parkinson has also swooped for FC United legend Jerome Wright. Until pre-season friendlies start next month, we can but imagine and speculate exactly how they’ll all fit together. It promises to be an extremely exciting line-up. This is exactly what transfer talk does. It ensures fans are future-facing rather than backward-looking. It’s about what’s to come. It allows us to dream. And that teenage paperboy would be delighted to learn that his fortysomething incarnation is still dreaming.