luke young

[gullno4]

hopefully we can set up around him and that the physical side of the conference won't prove too much! if anybody can bring him up to speed with the physicality, Hargreaves will be the man!

[yellowforever]

If we play the same system as we ended well on last year, he should be ok. We had Lathrope (who hopefully will resign) alongside Mansell, which gave us a nice defensive base in midfield that allowed us to play the likes of Goodwin, Yeoman, Coulthirst, Benyon and Cameron who are not necessarily the best at getting stuck in.

[ferrarilover]

Here's my take on it:

http://www.westernmorningnews.co.uk/Tor ... story.html

I think things are starting to build quite nicely...

It's not fair to say that Chris hasn't been moving quickly in the transfer market at all.

It always amazes me that football fans seem to think that the only things that go on are the things which are reported by the club on the Godforsaken internet.

I'm trying to think of the best analogy... Think back to your university days and writing your dissertation. It takes an academic year and all you had to show for it was 15000 words. The writing of 15000 words, the actual typing, probably takes less than a week. Typically, they're proposed in September and submitted in May the following year. So, we must presume then, since typing it only takes a week, that you spent the September-May doing nothing. Except that isn't true. Between September and May, you read 1000 published articles, spoke to 500 experts, tested and debunked 150 theories, read, reread and condensed 800 text books, spent 10000 hours on the internet researching, spent 50 hours proofing and editing the finished article and about 1000 hours making tea to keep yourself awake. And that's just the things which are directly related. It's to make no mention of the hours spent in class or at work to pay for books. Negotiating with friends for help or third party proofreading and a million and one other things.

It's the same with transfers. I absolutely guarantee that Chris was into the market on the afternoon of the Wycombe game and has been dedicating at least 12 hours a day, every day, since then.

We see startlingly little end product for all the effort. There is a tribe, somewhere on Earth, that survives, partly, by digging for a sweet sap which grows in the roots of a particular type of tree. The roots grow deep and, although it's highly concentrated with fructose, the tribesmen have to work so hard to get at it that the eating the sap is actually energy neutral. They put in all that effort and spend hours digging in the sand all to get back the same amount of energy which it cost them to do the digging in the first place.
Football's a bit like that. You put in masses and masses of energy, only to come out with a tiny return on that investment. As nice as it would be to be Barcelona, a club for whom you sign if they want you, we aren't. We're Torquay United and I suspect that, for each player we actually sign, not less than 240 man hours are consumed. That's a normal month at work for a Tesco employee or an office worker.

This isn't a personal assault against you, Steve, it's merely been prompted by the quoted line in your article. It used to be our Austrian friend who would level this accusation at the club and I would split my time between replying in this fashion and ignoring it and hoping he'd learn.

Those charged (by Beelzebub himself, perhaps) with the duty of taking care of our club are working infeasibility hard to get the most from it that is physically possible. Some of them are wealthy people. They could happily spend their summers in the south of France, sunning themselves on the Riviera, playing poker with bikini clad lovelies and having no greater worry than whether to order a Mojito or a Cosmopolitan. But they don't do that. Instead, they spend hour after hour stuffed into a cheaply decorated room in a depressing south Devon town full of fat Brummies enjoying their 10 nights in a caravan and leaving their litter on our beaches. And why? All so that you and I can turn up once a fortnight and watch their cheaply assembled squad of flawed but enthusiastic footballers knocking a ball about. I imagine that it is particularly hard to find motivation in those circumstances and I imagine also that the difficulty is only increased upon reading that the supporters who are the only reason they do all this in the first place seem to think that they don't do it at all.

Matt.

Now edited so it actually makes sense (go on, someone say it).

[taxilady]

& now I call DerbyAustryAndyGull & Brucie to the Bar m'lud for the Prosecution statement.... (but I suspect that Matt isn't far out in his estimation of man hours per signing...)

[exilegull]

We see startlingly little end product for all the effort.

Much like your posts Matt

Only joking - ayou went a bit surreal when talking about tribes digging for sap, but otherwise agree with what you say.

[Kit_robin]

Matt has this bang on. It's worth adding that it would be very easy for us to go out and sign players left right and centre - but they would all be crap. If fans want good signings (and I think the two so far are) then we have to understand that this may take longer at Torquay than a big club because we get knocked back much more.

For what it's worth, Hargreaves' first two signings have given me a bit of confidence in te level he's aiming at, and in quite happy to wait for the right men.

[ferrarilover]

Much like your posts Matt

Only joking - ayou went a bit surreal when talking about tribes digging for sap, but otherwise agree with what you say.