A lovely trip to Leeds today, well I suppose it makes a change from Blackpool, but as per usual it’s not an afternoon round the shops or sat outside of a pub. Instead it’s the 07:06 from Wigan North Western so that I can sit in a hotel conference room for nigh on 5 hours, I couldn’t tell you what we were talking about, not without shooting you afterwards (it just wouldn’t be fair – that’s how I felt), but at least the lunch was nice. Catching the stopping train back into Manchester affords some Last of the Summer Wine views matched against some dingy Yorkshire council estates. It’s a fair nice trip through the Pennines, but you wouldn’t catch me wanting to live there.

The point? Well there wasn’t one as such, other than to give a little bit of context to today’s point. How horrible is it when you’re even slightly removed from the internet, email and all those other completely unnecessary trappings of the information society? Ok I had my mobile phone on me, ok I can get both the internet and email on that, but I could hardly stop the meeting to check the cricket score, and the signal in the hills was erratic. So I’ve been twitchy all day. What if we’d signed somebody and I didn’t know about it in the first few minutes? What if I’ve been outbid on eBay and I’m not there to close the deal?

The thing is we grew up without Sky Sports News, 5 Live and Newsnow.co.uk. Ok so it was a much more naive time, but as is often the case, in some ways preferable. No news was the norm (as indeed was selling players) so mass hysteria at the start of June was pretty much out, in fact a good proportion of our fans would never hear about new signings until the summer had ended. Rumours only spread at the game or in the pub; the Evening Post wasn’t ready for delivery before breakfast and had a bit more about it. We actually had to rely on the local press to keep up with the news. Imagine having to wait from one week’s Reporter to the next’s Observer for an update on the attempts to sign a) b) or c).

These days Jason Roberts can slag the club’s wage policy off from the relative safety of Grenada and we all get to hear about it. Given the panic on the streets of rivals, that’s probably not a good thing.

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