Second Yellow by John Smith;

Author:John Smith;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

DONE DEAL

‘Don’t buy those carpets’

At times, these days, it can appear that actual football matches have been reduced to a mere sideshow next to the headline act of transfer speculation that drives newspapers and websites and provides the necessary globs of glue to keep Sky Sports News from catastrophically tumbling down around Jim and Natalie’s ears.

Today, we’re a long way from the sort of situation Graeme Souness experienced at Newcastle, where his assistant Dean Saunders informed him that the purchase of Michael Owen had been completed at 1am by ‘throwing stones at my window to wake me up’. No, what with countless gossip columns, gossip column compilations, websites, 24-hour sports news channels, social media and iPhone push notifications, we couldn’t avoid receiving news of Shrewsbury taking a 17-year-old on loan from Brighton even if we wanted to. DONE DEAL!

To be honest, all that hyperbole leaves us a little cold, but because it has become such a huge part of the game, we’ve been left with no choice but to hold our noses and dive in to the murky Transferic Ocean. To be fair, once you’re in, the water’s fine. There’s loads of fun to be had – like Bryan Robson’s delicious nugget that had Liverpool offered the same amount of money as Manchester United when he was at West Brom, ‘I would probably have gone to Anfield.’ Face facts, United fans: for one of your biggest legends, you were second choice.

It’s important to remember, though, that transfers are life-changing events for the players involved. Have a read of this pure poetry from Neil Redfearn: ‘For the first ten years of my professional career, I followed the golden rule – never fall in love with a football club. Then, on 6 September 1991, I walked through the players’ entrance at Barnsley to start a month’s loan and that was me for the next seven years.’ No, you’re crying.

Stay at a club for that length of time and not only do you generate an affinity, but it feels like home, like family. When Patrick Vieira left Arsenal after nine glittering years and went to Juventus, the poor lad didn’t know if he was coming or going. In his book he explains that he began rooming with Lilian Thuram, but after their first night together he woke up all discombobulated when he looked over and saw Thuram rather than his Arsenal roomie Thierry Henry: ‘Where was he? “Oh, OK” I told myself, “I’m with Lilian because we are about to play an international” (that’s who I shared with when the France team got together). It took me quite a while to work out where I was, and why it was that Lilian was in the room with me. Not only that, but for the next couple of days, whenever I saw him in the room, I had this instinctive feeling that we were about to play for France, not for Juventus. I just couldn’t get my head round the fact that I was

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