Roger Moore scores: who left the window open?

I don’t like the transfer window. Like almost everything else in modern football, it favours the ‘big clubs’. Your central defender’s gone off quicker than French cheese? No problem, call the agents for a gem from the provinces.

Make him and his club an offer they can’t refuse and hey presto, your problem has become someone else’s to resolve. Far from providing a level playing field, the pitch is now steeper than the North face of the Eiger for those of us playing in the ‘lower leagues’.

Worse for supporters is the level of expectation these windows create. Column inches fill with rumour and innuendo as fans scour the tabloids and teletext for the revelation of a new icon, only for hope to be dashed on the rocks of washed up continentals and players with scrabble-scores for names.

Take the example of my good mate Andy. Come the first of February, he’s on the phone to complain that QPR have made some new signings. It’s not the unpronounceables he’s concerned about, but the squad players who couldn’t make the starting line-up for Wolves. Wolves! he screams down the phone, I mean who would want a player who can’t make it into the draw-specialist eleven?

That’s nothing, I tell him, we couldn’t sign a cheque right now. Thankfully, we’ve managed to trim our squad down so it’s now smaller than the weekly audience for our radio station, but where we’ve lost quality, we’ve added unknowns. And the thing about unknowns is, well they’re unknown. They don’t inspire confidence and they certainly don’t see shirt sales leap by fifty percent.

Granted, who was Alan Shearer when we signed him as a young scholar? But I do like to look up to my footballers, and the idea of worshipping some player who failed to hold down a place at Norwich just doesn’t cut it, not when the self-same club can attract the likes of Robert Earnshaw.

Apparently we bid for Ernie and failed to land him. Sure we did, the same way I prevented World War III last week when I didn’t launch a nuclear attack on Iran. It’s pure fantasy, I’m afraid. We simply don’t pay the kind of wages to attract an Earnshaw and you know what they say about paying peanuts, you end up with Snoopy.

So let’s push Earnshaw to one side, plenty of Premiership defenders have after all, and let’s look at who else we nearly signed. Well, in our desire to solve our goal-scoring problem, we went in for the star of a recent cup giant killing. Brentford, who twelve months ago came within a whisker of dumping our own red and white brigade out of the cup, boast a precocious young talent up front in the form of DJ Campbell. DJ? Apparently he doesn’t lack for twelve inches.

So did we bid for him? No, instead for defender Sam Sodje, who’s response to Rupert Lowe’s sweet overtures was simply to shout his own name – Sod-je!

God, how depressing. Spurned by a man who this weekend will be doing his utmost to guard the Griffin Park goals from the mighty Walsall...

So after failing to land our two stars in this window, who will cameo in the south coast soap opera?

Well, Ivy Brennan (keep up, she used to be in Coronation Street) or Jim as he prefers to be known since the op. Shaping up at left back, he could be Bridge or Babayaro. Time will tell, but I doubt Ashley Cole is losing too much sleep.

Then comes the wizard from the Wirral - Darren Potter. Perhaps he could cast his famous ‘lumos’ spell and enlighten us as to what has happened to the £7.5million receipts from player sales last month?

And then there’s the predictable continental. Well, why not. So far Rupert’s made a dog’s breakfast of the club, so no harm in refreshing the menu. Ostlund? He’ll fit right in here. I mean, Portsmouth to Le Havre, Dover to Calais, Southampton to Ostlund...

This transfer window has seen three top quality Premiership players out in return for three who could be anything.

But then you know what they say. Sign for Southampton? You’d have to be Mad-sen…