Guess Who?
Most of us, of a certain age and from a pre-Playstation era anyway, will have played a game called "Guess Who?" at some point in our youth.
If you haven't then I'll try and explain it to you. Essentially you have a load of pictures of different (made up) people. You then pick a card which will match one of the people and your opponent will have to guess who it is by asking questions about what he/she looks like.
Is he male? No, so then you knock down all the pictures of the male characters as you know it is a female. Does eh have glasses? Yes, so you'd then knock down all of the pictures for those females who do have glasses. It carries on so you have only a few left and then you can guess and, hopefully, you get it right. I lost the cards out of my set so I used to choose one in my mind. Poor soul.
Anyway, youth revisited, I started thinking that that game I used to play all of those years ago is a little bit like how our transfer rumours seem to start. Based on the things we know, like where we've been scouting, what we've achieved so far in the transfer market, and what we are looking to carry on achieving, it could quite easily be a game of Guess Who!
Is he French/Dutch or does he play in those leagues? Has anyone really heard of him? Does he have something in his history that could put other, perhaps bigger or better, clubs off of him? Is he under a certain age? The answer to most of those would be yes so you'd keep them tiles up.
Are they already well known? Do they have an already established reputation? Are they overvalued? Is he over a certain age? The answer to most of those would probably be no so down those tiles go.
The point I'm making is that most of the stories you can read in the press can be discounted just by looking at the way we have been doing things lately. And the most impressive thing is that a lot of the fans are now also on board with the way we've been playing the transfer market game.
It's unlikely that we'll see much transfer movement until the European Championships are finished, but I think most fans understand this and realise that it's not always a bad thing waiting and seeing what happens.
And yes I've just used a game to try and get my point across, badly probably, but still....