Surely you would have thought, after several weeks in the role, and apparently with numerous viewings beforehand in his back pocket, that the weaknesses in the team would have been fairly evident, possibly even before he started to warm the seat in the manager's room. Is he being too selective in what he wants? If we can't find two or three players to fit the budget (supposedly £1500 a month) then get one good and experienced midfielder which now has to be our priority.  That should at least see our forwards get some service, our younger midfielders benefit from some guidance, and overall see us getting a couple of results to take us out of this mess.

As time has passed, whether we now get someone from Manchester United or Canvey Island has become almost irrelevant so long as the right person is brought in at the right price to do the job needed. Time is running out rapidly to allow any new entrant to have the desired effect.

As regards our already surplus to requirements players, what do we do? We can show however many we want to the door, but what would we do when we got there? We would be very fortunate to have clubs ringing up to take the players off our hands, and so would be in the position of having to buy them out of their contracts. Whatever the sum involved, it would be significant, given our perilous financial position, and who will foot that bill? Then there is the issue of finding replacements, which allowing for the fact that we can't find one more loan player at the moment may be a bigger task than we could possibly imagine. Even if we were successful, we would then have to bed down what may be a new team yet again.  Do we really have the time for all this?

Despite my plea in the match report, Brian Flynn still claimed to have taken something positive out of the game against Kidderminster and again from the Cambridge outing. There is a lot of apprehension around at the moment that the after-match quotes are wearing a little thin, and how many of us have had the nightmare when John Hollins emerges from under the Brian Flynn mask in a blaze of clichés. We have heard that we only need two wins to move us up a bit, well that would be something at the moment seeing that we have only achieved two wins all season.  

I sometimes think the time has come to arrange for a commemorative plaque to be placed on a wall somewhere at the Vetch thanking the 'Consortium' for saving the club when it did. I say this with all respect for what they achieved, but also in the hope that people will then be able to exorcise these sentiments from their minds, and at last start to move on and think forward to what needs to be done at this football club. What they did, saved the club, but that was almost a year ago, and we do seem to dwell on the past a little too much at times. The fact that the current board members are fans delivers no guarantees as to the future survival of the Swans no matter how many continue to cling onto the warm and pleasant thought that it does. The words coffee, smell and wake up come to mind here. A fan is a fan, that's fine, but how many businesses do you know that are successful purely because the people at the helm liked to watch, eat or drive the product? There has to be more to it than that, and the future is still far from certain, although we could all possibly accept that at face value, the financial affairs of the club are clearer than they have been in recent times. I don't think anyone would be so bold as to claim that they were particularly robust or even stable at this stage, but certain things have progressed, although the part time nature of all the directors' involvement has probably been prohibitive in many ways.

With on-field performances being so poor, the clicking of the turnstiles has taken on the rhythm of a slow waltz rather than that of the latest Fat Boy Slim release, and this has resulted in income falling below that expected when the CVA budgets were drawn up, and weekly losses now rumoured to be in the region of £12,000. With this in mind, it really does put into perspective what little impact a £50,000 investment, which seems to be a benchmark to becoming involved in the club, actually makes. At current figures, such an investment would merely cover one month's losses, and with the inevitable winter postponement of games, and the severe effect that this can have on cash flow, the ever-anonymous backstage benefactors may well find themselves issuing a few more cheques than the doctor recommended.

Football is now a financially vicious game, and there is no turning back. It is being controlled and manipulated by businessmen looking to add to their own wealth, having no concern or ambition to be charitable to those less fortunate clubs in the game.

There have been many calls for the distribution of football-generated cash to be more evenly distributed throughout the game, as it is a game for the people. Is that ever going to happen the way people would like? Of course not, so let's forget it. There have been several excellent articles in the serious press of late regarding such issues.

You could argue that shopping is also a people's game, but do the Sainsburys, Tescos and ASDAs of this world subsidise the smaller chains or corner shops? No, they will squeeze them out of existence or swallow them up in their never ending quest for a bigger market share of the shopper's purse.

So it is now with football clubs, and the only hope for the smaller clubs in this league is to ensure they have sufficient investment to secure their future well being, a team good enough to bring people through the gate and a commercial department capable of securing good income from local businesses and private merchandise sales. If modest success can secure good income streams for these clubs, and the operation is well managed, then with realistic ambition the club may survive and continue to deliver league football to the local community.

All we need is a club with such investment and income to ensure our season-to-season survival, and if we achieve that, in the current climate, then we must be deemed successful. From a fan viewpoint, it would be good to sense some ambition, no matter how modest, but more important is survival.

The failure of a wealthy entrepreneur to come forward in our many times of need in the past does not augur well for it happening in the future. There has to be potential in this club and in this area for someone to develop a commercially successful business linked to the sporting fraternity, but it would appear that no one has the ambition to do so. We do not have a Madjeski or a Kassam in our midst and so continue to rely on the council simply to play in more modern surroundings. Whenever we eventually move a couple of miles up the River Tawe (and if I were a betting man, then I'd say the commemorative plaque on the Vetch wall would be safe for a little while yet), we still have to make a commercial success of the opportunity, and somehow, I can't get too enthusiastic about that at the moment.

If anyone has any feedback to give me, I'd love to hear from you at pauly@scfc.co.uk