"Er, yes, I would, actually.", I hear you say, and so would I. But, then, I'm a clapped-out 45 year old who put a hit-the-bar attempt wide of a gaping goal. I was never going to be a professional footballer in a million years, and neither were you, so the offer of a whole season with the Saddlers would be like having all of your Christmases at once. However, if you had become a pro' how attractive a proposition would you find Walsall FC? Not very, I would imagine.
We've always been the kind of club that only features really decent players when they're on their way up or on their way back down. There are no young kids living in Dorset or South Wales or deepest Kent that lie awake at night dreaming of playing for our beloved Saddlers and most of the games' players never give us a thought unless they're due to play against us, and have a vague idea of Walsall being somewhere in Birmingham. Basically, in the bigger football picture, Walsall Football Club is of no great significance, except to the Bescot faithful.
So, when we want a particular player and are up against other interested clubs, we have to find a way of tempting him to commit to us. Our geographical position probably comes in handy at times as the town is commutable from the majority of places meaning that the player can consider the move in the knowledge that there'll be no need to uproot his family for a move that has no guarantee of being successful, and the club won't have to help with re-location costs. Which, I'm sure is something that comes into Jeff's thinking! Even then, if the player is offered a similar deal by another club closer to home he'll sign up and that'll be the end of it.
How, then, does the club hope to construct a promotion-winning side from players desperate enough to accept a one-year deal? Any player who might have been willing to consider moving house isn't going to do it for just twelve months knowing, if they aren't a raging success, that their stay at the club will probably end after that year. It's a widely-known fact that we don't pay silly wages, so surely we need to sweeten any proposed deal by making it of a decent length, thereby offering the player at least a bit of security. It seems that finances won't stretch that far and trying to build a team under such constraints must be driving Hutch round the bend. If we're offering low-pay, short-term contracts, then who in their right mind is going to come to us? The knackered and the desperate, that's who, and haven't we had enough of those over the last few seasons?
League One, in the coming season, is going to be harder to be successful in than it's ever been with so many, to us, 'big' clubs in with us. We're probably going to have to run faster than ever just to stay where we are so, to me at least, the lack of budget in trying to attract new players is just asking for trouble.
We had the same lack of action last close-season, of course, with players only committing themselves once we got into July, and those that did seemingly did so for short-term contracts. Chris Palmer's deal, if I remember rightly, was renewed just after Christmas, with that of Marco Reich expiring not long after. There is the argument that the club's short-termism worked in our favour a couple of times, in that it was possible for Hughes and Ricketts to leave the club after an unsuccessful year. Had they been on longer contracts they could have refused to go and WFC could have been in the position of the players seeing out the remainder of their deals, or demanding to be paid up in full before they'd bugger off. In that way the offering of short-term contracts makes sense but it just doesn't sit true with the club's oft-stated ambition of becoming a solid Championship club. It seems that those who run the club wish to have their cake and to eat it. I'd love to know whether Hutch was made fully aware of all the limitations that would be placed upon him when he agreed to come to the club, and is he regretting the move already?
There's an undeniable air of despondency among the club's support at the moment, with the 'passion' that Hutch and M O'C were charged with bringing back noticeable by its' absence. How long will it be before there won't seem any point in trying to compete?
And exactly how bad is the financial position of the club?