Another Thursday, another new signing..
So, welcome to AFCW Darren Jones. He’s a defender, and quite a good one by the sound of it. He’s here until the end of the season, he was last at Shrewsbury, and his previous clubs include Newport and was at Aldershot with Worner and Aaron Morris.
Oh, and most importantly of all, he was once jailed for twatting somebody outside a Newport nightclub.
NA is clearly made up by getting him, and you can see why – a bit of a Framps mark 2, if his pedigree is anything to go by. Obviously, our manager has little faith in both Antwi and Rhys Weston, especially with Morris coming along last week as well, and it does look like we’re finally solid at the back.
Whether we’ll get to keep Jones beyond this season we don’t know – obviously the likely replacement of Benno will have to be done during the close season. But from now until then, at least we should keep them out a bit more at our end…
Of course, that doesn’t mean our spending should stop there. The obvious need for somebody – anybody – who can put it in the other end on a semi-regular basis is a pretty urgent one. The rumour mill will undoubtedly be churning away for the next week or so, with some intriguing names no doubt getting bandied about.
Especially as we now have two games coming up where we could really do with a win in at least one of them. It is time we started to walk the walk, rather than continue to do the footballing equivalent of Waiting For Godot.
We made a very good step forward with coming away from Glanford Park with a point, but it’s going to become seriously annoying if once again, we fail to capitalise on that. The more that happens, the more you wonder if we can make the next step forward under the current regime…
Which is why I’m expecting NA to be hustling the powers-that-be for some more coppers found down the sofa. I doubt if he’d want another end-of-season where he needs new underpants and massive amounts of valium.
It wouldn’t be a total surprise to see us do what happened last year, namely doing some significant business literally minutes before Jim White on SSN has his usual coronary.
Actually, reading back over that, it’s funny how in the space of under 24 hours back at the end of January last year, we went from being underwhelmed to being gobsmacked to needing your jaw surgically put back in its socket.
And no, I will never quite understand why Benno got released from Cheltenham in the manner he did. Not that I’m complaining…
We only really need another striker and a central midfielder, and even then another Jones-eque signing (ie somebody without a club who has been paid off) will do us.
Or even another loan or two – it sounds as though Porter has finally fucked off, and the grapevine does hint strongly that indeed, it was he who caused a training ground ruckus which led to him going (and us being affected for Torquay because of it).
With Wyke the only loanee we’ve got (and whether he’ll stay remains to be seen), it’s not going to hurt us by putting in somebody temporarily. We have built up a squad mostly with our own players, which is at least avoiding the farce of loanees we ended up with last season.
Speaking of loanees, one of our other ones – one M Smith – has left Charlton for Swindon, fee officially unknown but around £100k plus another £100k, apparently. So well out of our price range, although it was always a long shot him returning.
It’s quite good business by the Addicks for him, as it goes, and it makes you wish we could start getting any sort of transfer fee for our players, let alone six-figure ones. Maybe in time, as the development catches up with the first team, and the famous Wimbledon conveyor belt has some WD40 sprayed on it…