3 games in.. A bit shit so far.

Following the defeat against Arsenal, the familiar feeling of early season optimism being swiftly swept away is here again..

No matter how you dress it up, 1 point from 3 games is pretty shocking. Admittedly 2 of the games were against stronger teams in the league, but they were both at home - although even that doesn't seem to be the advantage it once was these days.

When the best performance is a home point against Man City which should have been three, but for Martin Skrtel's abberation it would have been, then you have problems.

I'm not even sure that the results are what's contributing to the generally shitty mood surrounding the club and it's supporters at the moment. Granted they've not helped, but the lack of a clear transfer strategy it seems is becoming quite alarming.

Letting Andy Carroll leave on loan to West Ham made more sense if he was surplus to requirements as seemed to be the case, only last Thursday when that deal was struck. And it does make sense to get rid of one player, before you get the next one in if you are trying to balance the books.

Bad idea.

But to let Carroll go and then fail to replace him smacks of incompetence. FSG seem to have gone from one extreme to the other and have somehow fucked up two transfer windows with the same player. Bearing in mind Carroll is still on our books, it seems pretty feasible that further transfer windows are going to be similarly shafted.

I don't want to go over the Carroll nonsense too much, but once we agreed to give away all the Torres money to Newcastle in a blind panic we were always going to cause ourselves problems if we tried to get rid of him and face the impossible task of recouping anything like the truly idiotic fee we paid for him.

We have now lurched in the other direction, partly due to FSG getting their fingers burnt last time and they didn't - or couldn't - go throwing the cash around this time round.

The mess surrounding the potential Clint Dempsey deal didn't make an awful lot of sense. The money Fulham were after seemed pretty reasonable although they wanted more of us than they did anyone else which you can imagine annoying a few round the table. But either way.. sign him, (£7m was cheap considering his recent record). Plus he's only 29 I suspect we would have got our money's worth over a few seasons.. although he is American.

Shit.

It would have actually made sense to offer the £4m if there wasn't anyone else in for him.. if he'd been stuck at Fulham until January then we would have got him for that if he was set on joining Liverpool which he seemed pretty keen on. For Spurs to come in at the last minute just takes the piss a bit.

So where does this leave us. Being linked to every free agent going between now and January presumably. Owen, Del Piero.. fucking Drogba. All pretty weird, especially Drogba. He'd probably want what Fulham wanted for Demspey in wages just till the end of the season.

It doesn't help that we've not exactly been eased into the season fixture list wise.. City, Arsenal and Man United for the first 3 home games is a bit taxing considering we've a new manager in charge. Sunderland away next as well isn't going to be easy either.

On the plus side, the teams were hopefully going to be fighting with are struggling a bit too.. Spurs especially. 2 points only when they would have been expecting more from their home games especially.

I suspect we're going to see a few more youngsters thrown in.. Adam Morgan got a start in the Hearts game which was good to see. He would have scored too, although unfortunately the linesman managed to notice the ball going a yard over the line in the build up.Maybe.. can't exactly see him starting at Old Trafford, although the squads looking a bit thin at that end of the pitch so you never know.

A win or two under our belts and hopefully we'll kick on.. confidence is everything in football. 6 (unlikely) points from our next two games and well be flying. I hope so, because the alternative (kicking round the relegation zone for a bit) would be a little bit hideous. It's just unfortunate that we've got the England nonsense first which just leaves more time to get annoyed by the situation, although reading this probably didn't help.