Hello, again

I don't know why I started this blog, only to stop again as soon as I started. Call it a false start, and this is the real start.

Okay, so we survived the drop into League Two, by the skin of our teeth. I don't propose to supply an exhaustive history of the last couple of months, the highs, the lows, the opportunities taken and spurned - have a read of the Ciderspace news page for all that. Suffice it to say that we survived, League One footy is ours to enjoy next season and we can look forward to entertaining the likes of Southampton, Norwich City and Charlton Athletic as opposed to dragging our sorry arses to the bleak hinterlands of Accrington, Macclesfield and Darlington.

We'll be favourites for relegation of course, we always are. With our (lack of) budget, that's inevitable. The cost-cutting has started already with Luke Rodgers leaving the club the day the season ended, closely followed by club masseuse Hannah Manton. Rodgers is no great loss to be honest, though he did score several important goals in the run-in. But on the whole he was never fit enough and evidently had a poor attitude off the pitch which was in danger of rubbing off on some of the dafter and more impressionable members of the squad. The masseuse, Manton, is another matter. She's been here since the days of Gary Johnson and did far more for the club than her job description implied. Apparently the board considered she was a luxury we couldn't afford, but given that we will be operating next season with the smallest possible squad we can get away with then I'd have thought that the priority would be to keep the few players we do have contracted as fit and healthy as possible. Her services in that regard would have been important and her absence throws even more pressure onto the now lone physio, Wayne Jones. But it's not as if we've lost a good physio lately because of overwork and the refusal of the club to make changes to working practices, is it? Oh.

To be fair it's easy to criticise the club for being penny-wise and pound-foolish, and they do make it easy to do so at times. It rankles when loyal employees doing above and beyond their job descriptions for a relative pittance such as Hannah Manton are let go without so much as a week's notice when others who are almost certainly paid far more to do rather less are apparently guaranteed jobs for life. Good luck to Hannah in her future career - she deserved better from YTFC than this. I hope Skivo fought to keep her, he as much as anyone will have known how useful she was to the squad.

Away from YTFC anyway and I thoroughly enjoyed watching Chelsea crash out of the Champions League last night after a 1-1 draw with Barcelona. The Blues went 1-0 up after 10 minutes and concentrated in the main on defending that lead for the rest of the game. The Norwegian ref refused 4-5 pretty strong Chelsea penalty appeals which another ref could easily have given and then Barca scored their equaliser in the last minute of injury-time which was enough to put them through on the away goals rule. Hilarious! The reaction of the Chelsea players at the end was as you might expect, surrounding the ref, haranguing him and with several players appearing to jostle him. Didier Drogba in particular covered himself in glory by lunging at the hapless official and telling the Sky Sports cameraman that the ref was a "fucking disgrace". The real disgrace of course was the Chelsea reaction, made even funnier by the fact that they were really correct, the ref did get it all wrong. I look forward now to UEFA showing that they too have a sense of humour by banning Chelsea from next season's Champions League. It won't happen of course, but wouldn't it be lovely if they did? Let's hope Barca can turn Man Utd over in the final, that would make my month.