Pin The Donkey

Pin the Donkey, or more correctly Pin the Tail On The Donkey, was a game played by generations of kids in gentler times, when there were no mobile phones, computers nor the dreaded 'soshul' media! The game involved being blind folded, spun around and then released with pin in hand to stick it in the target, which was a Donkey's 'Arse'nal!

The target more often than not, being made out of felt or some other soft absorbent material sourced domestically at little cost. The alternative being an expensively purchased 'proper' Chad Valley game, complete with party hats, it could provide hours of fun, with the odd injury to boot.

During the final stages of the summer transfer window, Pin the Tail on the Donkey morphs into Pin the Donkey! It doesn't matter where, just so long as a pin gets stuck, if the target is home made and it gets wrecked it can always be remade, whereas the set that was bought from a shop has to be replaced at some considerable expense.

That's enough of the Donkey analogy for a Friday afternoon, but poor humour aside it does bear some semblance to the truth when it comes to Barclays Premier League clubs and their 'aiming' at transfer targets. Some of the lack of due diligence shown depicts decisions 'made in the dark', the 'most popular league in the World' is littered with very, very expensive duds, a scenario West Ham fans are all too familiar with.

Real concrete transfer news is about as rare as a Taliban disco, some of the 'targets' Hammers are supposed to have been 'aiming' for beggar belief, the 'targets' will continually roll off the rumour production line until the window 'slams shut'.

Oh well, those bastions of unbiased honesty, Clarity&Hugh, have been getting in on the act with an obviously tongue in cheek criticism of David Moyes's reluctance to spend his transfer budget, a budget that has mysteriously altered from £75 Million to £45 Million in their article. Now not being Maths geniuses, we at the Org reckon the club has so far spent £2 Million on making Les Dawson's loan move from Watford permanent, a further £2 Million loan fee to PSG for Alphonse Areola and that's that!

Even factoring in the wages of both players for the next season into the equation, approximately £6 Million, the figures most certainly still don't add up. There appears to be a £20 Million black hole doesn't there? PLaying lip service to your masters is one thing, but trying to pull the wool over the eyes of fans is neither clever nor productive. Or was the purported £75 Million shown on their site previously a 'falsehood'? It would never do to print falsehoods would it?

Here is a Fans kit for transfer clarity, it is the newly refreshed 'Agents version 2:0': Use it to find out what's really going on!

The wonderful Blind Hammer just reiterated how he feels about Moyes's transfer acumen on Graham Howlett's excellent KUMB site, in his article he listed just a few of the 'Pin The Donkey' competition 'hits' that have arrived at West Ham over the last ten painful years. All brought in to appease angry fans, usually just before the window 'slams' shut, the list reads like a who's who of failure and evaporating hopes.

Sometimes no news is good news. -Ed PS: See how many of the names you can list in the comments section, without googling?