I think the club is currently at a cross roads.
We can either spend money and try and buy our way out of possible trouble with expensive short term solutions, or we can struggle on with what we've got, topped up by loan signings and the occasional more expensive signing when the right player eventually comes along.
I expect the immediate response is spend, spend, spend. But I think more thought needs to be given before embarking off in that direction. This is a question of long term versus short term.
We've seen what happens when you try and make short term desperation signings, they are called Richie Foran and they cost you £150,000 and are burdens on your wage bill which then don't give you the room to manoeuvre in the future.
This is the game we played in the 90s in what is now ridiculously called the championship, and it nearly cost the club its existence. Dave Regis, Andy Rammell, Jereon Boere - how many of them hung around and were a factor at the club for any length of time? Their legacy was one of debt and desperation, short-term thinking instead of long-term planning. They cost the club approximately £750,000 in transfer fees, virtually none of it was recouped, and God knows how much more in wages. Their goals helped extend our championship stay for a couple more years, but at what cost? The years that followed were the most depressing imaginable, bouncing around in the bottom half of the 4th division, devoid of hope. That is the price of trying to avoid the inevitable.
I expect I'll get a torrent of abuse for suggesting this, but if we spend because we need to do something to get out of the position we're in, we're condemning the club to a spiral of debt. We've got to break out of that spiral. We need to sign players, but until the likes of Foran and Furlong can be off-loaded (maybe even Freedman?), we should be concentrating on getting loan signings into cover the long-term injured. The one exception should be if we can get a playmaker with the flair to replace Mark Gower. At a push I could maybe go for another centre-half to replace Clarke who, after all, is out of contract in the summer and set to walk and lose the club's £300,000(?) investment.
Our club can't afford to be managed on a short-term fire-fighting basis. To be successful we need long term planning and long term security. Let's give Steve Tilson another contract extension (with the added bonus that it's cheaper to negotiate now, then when we are top of the table) and the instruction to concentrate on the long term future of this club so he has the job security to be brave and persevere with the likes of Moussa and Herd, so that he spends time trying to uncover players who might only be able to contribute in a season's time (like he did with Bentley and Guttridge, and like hopefully Scannell and who knows maybe even Clark Masters might) rather than merely plugging gaps.
I don't want to see the club be relegated, but I don't want to see the club burdened with overpaid, underperforming players and unsustainable contracts either. The latter just isn't a price worth paying. What we need now, more than ever, is long-term thinking.
