In the good old British tradition I was plumping for Cardiff today being the underdogs. I thought they did really well and on another day could have snook that one. Not that Liverpool were bad having said that. It was a decent match and it could have gone either way during normal and extra time. Mason certainly didn't look out of place in the match and took his chance very well for one so young. I keep hearing that the Cardiff fans think a lot of him and there is no doubt they got him for a fraction of what he should have been worth. If only we were not desperate for the cash at the time I think the fee would have been a lot more than it was and with clauses added on. Cardiff have become the annual nearly team for a few seasons now and I do hope for them that this one will be theirs.
Young Joe is a Star in the making, they recently did a piece on him in one of the matchday programmes, he is still very loyal to Plymouth and names Home Park as his favorite ground/plymouth favorite team, he will be worth millions in the future and i just hope there are clauses in the deal that gets you guys something, i see on of my old time favortites Pursey is now playing for you and your defence seems to have tightened up since his arrival, i really hope you survive this year as i reckon you will be a good bet next season. Good Luck guys and once again thanks for Joe. We will get promoted this season, however is the Premier league a poison chalice, i prefer the championship personally.
Glad to see someone with a sensible attitude to the Premier League! PAFC is a salutary lesson in what can go wrong and I'm afraid you got Mason for a fraction of what he was worth or would have been worth if we hadn't been totally broke as a club. I doubt we were in any position to get any favourable sell-on clauses either. We also had to let go Craig Noone who's doing well for Brighton, Bradley Wright-Phillips who's banging them in for Charlton and Jamie Mackie who's a regular in the Premier League for QPR. A front 4 of Mackie, Wright-Phillips, Mason and Noone would have frightened a few on current form! Still, good luck to you, it was our fault we flirted with financial disaster, not yours! On top of that, things were so bad, it was only money from player sales that kept us afloat.
notDistant you've touched on one of my favourite subjects.......Mrs LaLa and sensible keep telling me to shut up about past players. It can be painful thinking ....if only things had turned out differently.......In hindsight the damage done to PAFC by the previous regime goes miles beyond financial collapse. Mason,Noone,Mackie and BWP is only a few of the many we lost. The turning of the knife by one of our failures the other night.......Donnelly is an example........and the checking of other results showed that BWP had scored an hat trick that same evening..........I had seen him score on Saturday against Stevenage........who gave him a torrid time.........the Charlton fans love him......he's now on 18 goals. Nostalgia.........Mrs LaLa/sensible is all part of football history.........like the beating of Millwall in 1967 (who were unbeaten in 59 home games,so unexpected at the time)..........shut up sensible I will still have my dreams.
I tried not to over-exaggerate the effects of the financial crisis by listing only those players who were definitely given away in desperation. I left out Ashley Barnes although he's has scored a few for Brighton because a) he didn't play much for us and b) I think from memory he went before things got really bad. Donnelly hardly got a game for us so whether that was right or wrong, we can hardly complain if he's now doing OK for another club. Use it or lose it! There's also Gosling now regularly on the bench at Newcastle, although again his departure wasn't because of the administration. I agree the financial crisis did great damage all round but maybe we should maybe give some credit to those anonymous persons who brought those people to the club in the first place. It seems still to be happening through Luke Young, Curtis Nelson and Matt Lecointe and others from the youth squad. Maybe Hourihane and Berry together with MacDonald and Lennox and Hemmings can be the next "wee nuggets" if any of the last 3 sign on permanently. It's inevitable that we'll remain a selling club for the foreseeable future but hopefully we can make better value from players on the pitch while we have them and in the transfer market when they go than's been the case before.
