drove my chevee to the levy

To put it politely, I am getting sick and tired of hearing Mr. Levy quote "we want to bring quality players in but Glenn will need to be thrifty". Does this bloke live on planet earth or is he a resident of cloud cuckoo land - like a lot of us think.

The words quality and thrifty only go together if you are Real Madrid or AC Milan; clubs that can entice world class players on Bosman rulings through ambition and success. Sadly, at the moment, we are not in this bracket.

He must realise that you have to speculate to accumulate. I know it went pear-shaped at Leeds, but they did go a little OTT on the spending. All Daniel-san needs to do is spend £20mil tops in this close season to get a class goal machine, a couple of steely midfielders and someone to sit behind the front two, if we had a good season from this he could probably get away with snapping up a few good Bosman's the next season to satisfy the fans.

I can almost hear the groans from fellow fans reading this article "yeah, what's new ?! We know this already !!", but I have to express my feelings on this subject. The way the board talks about money being tight you would think we were in the position of West Ham or Charlton ! Surely we can't have money problems so deep that the best we can offer is a third of the asking price for players we are bidding for.

If we are not careful, we will become a club that no-one wants to come to and that no opposing manager has respect for. Worst of all, we could be left behind by teams like Middlesbrough and SCBC, who, through spending millions on attractive players and buying dynamic youngsters/foreigners respectively, are likely to make significant progress soon - let's face it, it's only a matter of time before these teams find the right combination of strikers and midfielders to be consistent.

Even one great signing can make a difference, if we ended up signing someone like Morientes think of the optimism it would generate for the coming season. I shudder to think what our last season would have been like without Keano. I know it's bad to rely on one player, but he acted as a catalyst for everyone for a while and actually made people think we could qualify for the promised land at one point.

If I can consistently manage Spurs into the top 5 each season on Championship Manager 3 (with a £15mil budget) then surely it's not impossible to work towards this -REALISTICALLY- in real life !!!!

Lee Bradley