Maurice Malpas, cooking burgers and classy French hair

According to some fans Maurice Malpas doesn’t have a big name and has a dull voice and is therefore unable to attract players.  Perhaps if he was in the hall of fame of a bigger country or could ‘do’ voices he would be able to attract these highly paid professional athletes in the manner required. 

Maybe we should appoint Joe Pasquale as director of football?  Thinking about it maybe the Uefa coaching badges are a waste of time and aspiring coaches would be better off at drama school learning how to annunciate. 

I’m struggling to understand the reasoning of the ‘Malpas Out’ brigade so perhaps someone can explain it to me.  The man is qualified, has played at the very highest level and has signed some seemingly very promising players. 

I’d take our squad right now over the one that we took to Northampton twelve months ago and most pleasingly of all we have started playing football on the ground again.

Obviously if Malpas doesn’t do the business for us in the league then sack him (I’m a football fan so I can be as fickle as I like) but frankly, you have to be a real numpty to start calling for a mans head in July. Let’s see where we are at Christmas. 
   
Anyway, this pre-season, perhaps in part due to the lack of home representation at the Euro Championships, has felt more boring than previous years.  This fact was confirmed to me when I saw a forum post recently about how the club could improve through-put at the hot food concessions within the two main stands. 

I still can’t believe I read it but I did learn some interesting facts about volume broiling.  Who says the soul has gone out of football?

This really underlined to me that football is now so much of a business that even the fans have started thinking of the teams as cash generating exercises rather than clubs of sportsmen fighting for a shared goal. 

It takes the sight of someone like John Terry crying to remind us what this game is really all about.  It’s not money, nor endorsement contracts, nor tapping strippers and getting exposed by the tabloids.  No what it’s really about is watching your tribe win and another tribe lose and then watching them crying about it.

A quick word about Lilian Nalis who has joined us on trial.  If he shows the required level of desire and professionalism over the next week or so I think he could be a very good signing.  While 36 he did play almost 40 games last year for Plymouth and seems to be very highly rated by their fans. 

I think any player still going at 36 will be a good influence on our young squad plus his hair is quality too, I hope that the peroxide Lego-man Barry Corr takes note.

Tristan Maidment