Deadline Day - More Like Groundhog Day

The January transfer window closed today at 5pm and with it our chance to strengthen the squad with some much needed quality.

It's been a tough and at times tortuous first season back in the Championship and one that has shown a distinct lack of quality in certain areas of the squad. Not only do we lack quality, but we have a side that is woefully short in numbers due to injury and the previous managers' insistence on keeping the squad small.

The failure to add so much as one new face to the playing staff, could come back and kick the hierarchy of this club right in the knackers and it's down to them alone that nobody has signed. Some of the names that were bandied about were not exactly blow your socks off signings by any means, but one or two would have done the job until the summer at least.

The club will say that they won't get people in just for the sake of it and they'd be right. They will also say that they will only get in people who are better than what we have already and they'd be right again. But they can't possibly say there aren't better defenders out there than Lynch, Chambers and Wilson. They can't be serious about that.

We have supposedly got an Acquisitions Team and their sole role in life, is to identify and obtain suitable players for NFFC. What the hell have they been doing lately? Mr. David Pleat is one of them, but he's probably too busy giving his opinion on Arsenal, Liverpool or Man Utd on the telly box. He's far too busy to be scouring the planet for players for li'l ole Forest.

We were of course linked with a number of players and supposedly had bids in for a few as well. Rob Jones at Hibs sounded decent. Although I knew little of him before his name cropped up, he sounded the right sort for us. Lee Croft at Norwich was another that would have done a job, but we failed to bag him as well. Dele Adebola had been linked for a while, but we perhaps did well to miss out there. At the end of the day though and whatever way they paint it, they have failed us once again.

We will be told over the next day or so, that we still have the loan window available to us and we can still bring people in that way. Well, whoopeedoo for that one, we will definitely need it. It's going to be a very nervy end to the season now folks, because don't be under any illusions about this current crop of players that we have. Quite a few of them aren't good enough and many of us know it. Billy Davies has so far proved to be quite a good manager, pretty soon we'll find out just how good he is, because he'll need to be bloody marvellous to keep this lot up.

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