Well its that time of year again where I spend 80-85% of my free time circling between the BBC's transfer rumours, the 606 messageboards, and the Guardian's sport section like a big blue vulture, in the vague hope that we'll be linked with some unheard of Venezualan striker. Which is precisely what's happened today, the latest transfer rumour being that we are trying to sign Venezula striker Giancarlo Maldonado from Mexican club Atlante, this is in addition to the previous rumours of (in no particular order) Henrik Larsson, Jo, Tchite, Michael Owen, Alan Smith, Djibril Cisse, Pavel Pogrebnyak and countless others.
What is clear is that we are in desperate need of another striker... Or are we? In fact ever since The Yak got injured, we've kept 5 clean sheets in the last five games and have won four of those games, the sole exception being the nil-nil draw with Chelsea. As I said in one of my blogs a couple of months ago, I felt that if there was an upside to our lack of striking options it would be that we'd have to revert to our classic 4-5-1 (or in this case 4-6-0) formation which seems to work so effectively. I hate to blow my own trumpet, but if I owned said instrument I'd be blowing it like one of those girls you see in those windows in Amsterdam.
Anyway, my suggestion is this: Manually injuring our own strikers. Say we bring in a loan signing in January (lets say for arguements sake, Cisse) give him a couple of starts in the league, then just as soon our performance levels start to drop get Steve Round to take a baseball bat to his knees. The effect being that this will galvanise the squad once more, just like whats happened with The Yak. I can literally see no downsides to this.