Now you see 'em....now you don't.

So, goodbye and good luck Gavin and Kieran. The last thing we heard was that Gavin Tomlin had agreed a new deal with the club and that Kieran Murtagh was to return for pre-season training in an effort to prove that he was worth a new deal with the club. Ah, the best laid plans... Tomlin has now signed a 3-year deal with L1 new boys Dagenham & Redbridge and Murtagh is now not coming back at all.

Tomlin probably can't believe his luck. He can return to his native south-east and has the security of a 3-year deal. Three years! For an L1 player that's unheard of these days. Doubtless we offered him a year at best, so one can hardly blame him for taking the better offer. And as much as I personally liked Gav as a player and kept bigging him up both on here and on the various club forums, one wonders whether he would have been first choice next season, what with Andy Williams and the promised Luke Freeman (more on him in a minute) competing with him for a place in the starting XI. Doubtless he would have been a useful squad player however, so from that point of view I'm a little miffed that he's off. As for Murtagh, I thought he was fortunate to be offered any sort of contract at all. There's no doubt he has potential, but how long do you wait for that potential to be realised? At his age (21) he has to be pushing for a place in the first team but in his 2 years at Huish Park he's never really done that. Murtagh has all the physical attributes to succeed, one wonders whether the drive is there. Good luck to him, and to Tomlin anyway.

Pre-season training begins tomorrow (Thursday). In the light of Tomlin and Murtagh's departures let's hope that Andy Williams and Luke Ayling have (a) signed their contracts and (b) turned up. Or vice-versa. Ten days ago the club was getting everyone excited about the imminent arrival of Arsenal wonderkid striker Luke Freeman, but there's been no news of him, or indeed anyone else signing since. Unless you count today's silly season story of course. Lee Trundle is coming, apparently. Yeah, right. I have seen Lee in ASDA as it happens, as well as Tesco, Morrisons and Lidl; how one man can eat so many doughnuts is a mystery, but perhaps I'm being unfair - he may have been having a doughnut party.

In all seriousness we have 11 players on contract at the moment. They are: Luke Ayling and Andy Williams (assuming they've signed their agreed deals), Craig Alcock, Nathan Smith, Nathan Jones, Stefan Stam, Sam Williams, Andy Welsh, Dean Bowditch, Danny Hutchins and Ben Roberts. JP Kalala may or may not be back. Of the rest, Hutchins is on the transfer list; Jones and Roberts are really coaches and won't play much if at all. Skivo has already said that he's expecting 22 players to turn up for training tomorrow, it will be fascinating to see who the trialists are. Not that I'll know anything until after the weekend: I'm off down to Cornwall for another wedding, my daughter's this time. Happy days!

I'm not one to intrude upon private grief under normal circumstances but seeing as England were my adopted country for the purposes of having someone to support in this World Cup then I might as well add my twopenceworth to the debate as to where they went wrong. And didn't they go wrong? England's whole campaign has become a textbook case in how not to approach a major international tournament; their initial selections were wrong, their tactics were wrong, the team's put out on the pitch were wrong and the substitutions were wrong. Under such circumstances one would normally be blaming the manager, but that would be being wise after the event. I don't recall too many people disagreeing with Fabio Capello's selections or tactics before the tournament, though to be fair there were some concerns over the wisdom of taking injury-prone players such as Rio Ferdinand and Ledley King, and those concerns were eventually borne out.

Capello has to take some measure of responsibility for the fiasco that was England's campaign, but to my mind the real fault lies with the players. They simply didn't perform. One can look at all of the players used by Capello in the tournament and with the possible exception of Ashley Cole it's easy to pick holes in every single one of them. The shortcomings of the obvious talents - the Wayne Rooney's, the Lampard's, the Terry's, the Gerrard's, have been detailed exhaustively elsewhere; but it wasn't just the established stars that didn't perform. Aaron Lennon didn't beat one man on his outside as he does week-in and week-out for Tottenham. Glen Johnson is supposed to be one of the best attacking full backs in the world, on this tournament's evidence he can neither attack nor defend. Gareth Barry's passing was uniformly awful. The less said about Shaun Wright-Phillips and Emile Heskey the better. I could go on and on, but the bottom line is that the players are the real culprits. They weren't capable and don't have the footballing nous to get anywhere near the really top teams. Flat-track bullies the lot of them, looking pretty good in the overblown Premiership where they are made to look better than they are by the presence of the foreign stars amongst them, but take away that prop and they are exposed as overpaid and under-talented hacks, not worthy of the magnificent support the fans gave them.

And I can't finish (sorry!) without mention that other fiasco of this world cup - Lampard's goal that wasn't. I've said it before and I'll say it again, in this day and age it is incomprehensible that it is apparently beyond the wit of man (and FIFA) to have some kind of system in operation to tell irrefutably whether the ball has crossed the goal line or not. I see the ludicrous Sepp Blatter has at last bowed to the inevitable and hopefully by the next major tournament some sort of technology will be in place, but it's too late now for Lampard and England. The argument that the game wouldn't be the same at the lowest levels where the technology could not be afforded cuts no ice with me. Cricket, rugby union, rugby league, motor-racing; all major sports in fact rely on technology at the highest level with no adverse impact whatsoever at the grass roots; the argument that football would somehow be different is specious nonsense. Let's hope that there are no more controversies to come in this tournament, it would be inexcusable and absurd if the final, say, was decided by a similar no-goal as Lampard's effort.