Not so happy clappy post with no jokes......

So, a summer's hesitation brings a winter's desolation...

The unexpected promotion, and fettered expectations for the season ahead, fostered a management's understandable pre and early season reluctance to tie our best performing players to longer more lucrative contracts. We feared the debt. We feared we'd fail.

Who was then to wager, before a ball was booted, that in a league above their experience Hourihane would statistically reign supreme, or that Winnall would finish finer than ever? That Bree would blossom? That the whole team would look like they belonged in the second tier?

Few.

But we mixed it with the rich boys and came up smelling of (white) roses.

Few in June therefore would have anticipated that it would come to a January transfer window wind blowing away the smell of Oakwell success.

Further down the league table this transfer month, and no other club would have noticed nor wanted our players They would not have departed.

Further up, we would have been a team still reaching for the stars. They would not have departed.

Instead, we are now presenting to those rivals around us (whose superiority is measured in money rather than craft or class) many an expertly coached bargain priced ready to go lightly used (needed by us) footballer.

And this because we've done well, but not well enough in believing we would do well.

 

If we hadnt gone up last season we would have lost winnall and conor and possibly more.

 

Do you really think if we had offered a couple more thousand , these players would have turned down these offers from said clubs to stay with us.?
Or are you saying we should have matched these offers?
Either way I'm baffled how you get to them staying at Barnsley tbh.

 

Hindsight is a wonderful thing; many of us expected us to struggle against the big boys this season. It is a crying shame that we have lost players, especially our esteemed captain but we can't compete on the same playing field so we need to trust in Hecky and the team spirit. As Josh says, every game needs to be played like the Leeds game.

 

Well I appreciated your prose if no one else did. Totally Bardass.