Guest Post by DC
However and whenever they occur, changes are afoot. Make no mistake about that.
As the saying goes, time waits for no man. A quick glance to the end of last season and we can reel off names like George McCartney, Matt Taylor, Joe Cole, Jack Collison and this season Vaz Te. They all seem from quite a distant past already.
Without wishing two seasons of football away, look towards the short-term future and we’ll soon be adding new names to that list, Cole, Demel and Jaaskelainen (2015), Collins, O’Brien and Nolan (2016) and Amalfitano, Downing and Jarvis (2017). Within a year the squad ‘should’ be totally devoid of the ‘ex-Bolton Factor’ that is Jasskelainen, O’Brien, Taylor, Nolan and Vaz Te.
Of that whole list mentioned, perhaps Matt Jarvis is currently the only player that the club could and would want to trade-in to get some sort of return on.
We then have the issue of certain loan players to resolve e.g. Jenkinson, Song (and Diarra). If we’re serious about planning for the long-term it seems a good argument to make Jenkinson the priority.
And so we turn to our main assets: Adrian (2016+2), Kouyate and Sakho (2018), Carroll, Cresswell and Valencia (2019), Noble and Tomkins (2020) and Reid (2021). Maybe we’ll be fortunate to add a few young guns to that list in the shape of Potts, Burke, Oxford, Poyet and Lee, but let’s be brutally honest, old Harry would say we’re not too far away from being “down to the bare bones”.
So as the cries for change intensify over the next 10 weeks or so – and they almost certainly will do – we can be confident of one thing. Whatever happens, changes are a coming. They have to.
Ladies and Gentleman – welcome to the calm (or not so calm) before the storm!