A not-so-cunning plan
27/11/03 | by Alex Walker

We can still chant "Marlon, Marlon" at games. We still only have two fit strikers in the team. Doubts still hang over the manager's commitment to the club and his relationship with the board. So has anything changed this week?

Well, we're £450,000 down for a start. And we've replaced a player with 12 goals this season with one who has only scored five. Did they think we wouldn't notice?

King is a good signing. That cannot be denied. But it still doesn't change the fact that the sale of Harewood was a complete disaster for this club's short and long-term future. All the points I made on Monday still stand. Marlon #1's sale sends out all the wrong messages to the other young players at the club and leaves us without a very important player. King's arrival doesn't change that.

Of course, the club will claim that this was all in the masterplan and that the sale of Marlon #1 was to raise funds for the purchase of Marlon #2. If they do say that, it is a lie.

We had a bid of £1.2m for King rejected four weeks ago. So if that money existed a month ago, why didn't it exist now? We could have signed King for £950,000 this week and used the remaining money to give Harewood the contract he deserved. We'd have had two Marlons up front and, eventually, Johnson - what a strike force that would have been.

By the time Johnson gets back to fitness, we will be too far behind the play-off running to mount a challenge this season. That may have happened anyway thanks to the release of the 'big four' in the summer, but at least with Harewood in the team we had a chance of getting a few goals and sneaking a few wins to get us back on track. Now we have to try that with a forward who isn't fit and not used to playing in the team.

As well as hoping we didn't perceive Marlon's changing surname, the club was probably praying we hadn't noticed that in this week of transfer activity, we also lost Steven McPhail back to Leeds. The rumoured bid never happened. So we're actually two players down, as well as spending £450,000.

If this is the start of a glut of quality signings, then I may withdraw some of my comments about lack of ambition and such like. That's a big if though, and it would take some really good buys to rescue this season.

If we don't rescue this season, we stand to lose even more players this summer. Johnson will probably lose faith with us (having seen his strike partner who helped him to so many goals sold for a pittance), while Dawson and Reid will run out of patience in waiting for their Premiership dreams to come true. We will, of course, get money for them, but like the Harewood sale, it probably won't match their real value and most of it will be swallowed by the debt we seem to have put to the back of our minds.

That debt is the perfect excuse for the board to explain away their lack of ambition. But, as has been said many time before and always landed on deaf ears, the only way we are going to shift this debt once and for all is by getting to the Premiership - Mr Tight himself admitted as much in a recent radio interview.

The club's lack of ambition has been a topic of discussion for a long time now, but the Marlon #1 sale has been an emotive one for Forest fans - far more so than the release of Scimeca and Brennan, even though the negative impact of both of these should prove comparable.

As such it has caused unparalleled anger towards the board. Signing Marlon #2 will placate the fans temporarily, but in the long run the club's management must face up to the mistakes that they have made when the consequences come back to haunt them.