Late May

“What’s going on” (with our football club)? Over and over I’ve heard this. It’s kind of rhetorical but has a touch of despair and almost resignation to not great times ahead. There’s also a bit of fishing but I can’t really tell anyone anything.

The silence just adds to the lowering of expectations. The bookies, who are no mugs, have us at 25/1 to win the league. That’s much longer odds than last season and puts us behind Luton, Bury, Pompey, Stevenage, Burton, Carlisle, Southend, Tranmere, York, Plymouth, Northampton and Newport. That hurts.

But the things that matter are: not when we sign someone, but that when we do they are someone decent and not the odds, but how we actually perform over all FORTY SIX games.

A few signings made by others have been announced in the press but I suspect that there are some rival fans, like ours, wondering why their clubs have not yet acquired more bodies.

Key questions are:
• What sort of packages are we offering?
• Does Gary Waddock have a good network of contacts within the game?
• How good are his powers of persuasion?

As proof of the prevailing feeling amongst us yellows I’m going to quote a downbeat tweet from Oxblogger@oxtweeter – “Disillusioned, disengaged, pessimistic, detached, bewildered, listless, so, season ticket renewed, naturally”.

And Tom Newey has signed again. I’m not dancing in the streets but nor am I disappointed. I think he did a solid job for us for most of last season and his contribution was overlooked by many when we were a proper defensive unit.

Even later in May

At work today I spoke to three fellow Oxford fans. I did not detect an ounce of optimism amongst them. In fact I was left on an even bigger downer because I was reminded that Ryan Clarke will be out at the start of the season – something I’d put out of my mind. And Whingy is going to be unavailable too. Bloody great isn’t it? He’s just the sort of guy you need when you’re a-scrapping and a-scraping in the nether regions of League Two. And that’s my expectation the way things stand. Last season’s squad wasn’t good enough. We’ve lost some of those including the highly talented loanee Ryan Williams and an Oxford legend who nearly became our all time leading scorer. No one has come in. When does it become time to panic hysterically?

That all said, it’s now a month since Sixfields and I’m starting to miss it. Yes, I know 2014/15 is likely to bring hurt, but I’m getting withdrawal symptoms. The World Cup will fill a football gap and probably become all consuming but what will be on offer in Rio, Sao Paulo, Belo Horizonte and throughout Brazil is unlikely to bear much resemblance to the scrappiness we see on the rugby ravaged Kassam and at footballing outposts such as Accrington. As far as England are concerned I’ve got no faith that the football we play will stand comparison with those nations that have the true mega stars, those nations that can keep the football with ease as if it’s a God given right and those nations that when they need to get a goal will go and get a goal. But I’m rather confident that we’ll get out of our group and then as they say, anything can happen.

All of this though is only a minor distraction until early August.

Early June

In my quest for positives all I can come up with is that at least we have not signed anyone that has left me at best underwhelmed and at worst downright angry.

And then as if on cue there’s the first signing – Danny Hylton. I’ve heard the name but couldn’t tell you anything about him, so after a bit of internet research later I’ve decided that I’m neither under or overwhelmed. So whelmed it is then. Except that’s not what whelmed means so I’ll just remain neutral on this one. His goals per game stats don’t look great. My son, the now non-season ticket holder, is more upbeat. It looks much better if you only take into account starts and not appearances from the bench, he points out. And apparently DH is hard working. So that’s the tick put back in the box that became empty as Beano headed down south. But isn’t hard working the minimum requirement we should expect from any professional footballer?

Mid June

The lack of any further signings has now killed off the slight enthusiasm that I’d talked myself into a couple of weeks ago. I am hearing that there will be new personnel, four of them, but that this won’t come about until the end of the month.

So best now to sit back and chill further into the World Cup. If only. I’m writing this with 45 minutes to go before England kick off against Italy.

And …. normal service is resumed. Football giving one a bloody good kicking in the goolies. We were second best to the Italians.

I’m usually keenly anticipating the release of the fixtures for the coming season. But this time I’m not. I’ve only just bothered to do the research to find that 9 a.m. on Wednesday 18th June is when we’ll know.