Despite increasingly hysterical attempts from Sky Sports News, this season's transfer window has shut with a whimper, rather than a bang. The fact that Manchester City signing a reserve team left winger represented the largest bit of business done tells us finally modern football is learning some lessons; that Clubs have finally stopped being held to ransom by both players and agents, that financial prudence has finally begun to have some semblance of meaning in the Premier League and that teams will now look for some sort of value for money when looking to improve their squad. I hope this trend continues and welcome it whole-heartedly.

I do think however that Stoke were in a position to do a bit of bargaining in a completely different way in order to improve our squad. Steve Simonsen, Andy Griffin, Carl Dickinson, Ibrahima Sonko, Tom Soares, Michael Tonge, Amdy Faye, Danny Pugh, Liam Lawrence, James Beattie & Dave Kitson all have something in common; they have, through circumstance or design, become surplus to requirements at the Britannia Stadium and they probably cost Stoke City about £10,000,000 in wages throughout a season. Given this was the case, should we have looked to barter our way to a better squad? Don't get me wrong, I think Asmir Begovic at £3.25 Million represents excellent business, but I think we could have done more and possibly should have done more. Given that we have eleven players in the squad who are increasingly unlikely to get a game (and that doesn't include Andy Wilkinson, who I can only assume was part of the Beattie/Lawrence clique...why else wouldn't you play him?) and that transfer fees were something of a premium this January, it makes sense to me, and we could have brought in players who are a better fit for the club moving forward.

It was mentioned that James Beattie was of interest to a number of clubs, and that Fulham made a bid for him at the death which may or may not have been hamstrung by our game in Sunderland on the transfer deadline, but why didn't we ship him out before? He's 32, looks a good half-stone overweight and despite press reports to the contrary, has been far from brilliant for Stoke, plus he's on about £40,000 a week. The money accrued from a Beattie sale and the freeing up of wages could have seen Stoke look at Victor Moses, a young talent playing every week in a hard league and with Warnock's style of football being in a similar vein to ours he could have been a good fit at Stoke, yet Pulis dismissed it out of hand. Why not buy a versatile player who is 13 years younger than Beattie for a similar fee, whilst at the same time ridding yourself of a player who you now know to be a trouble maker who has between little and no chance of resurrecting his career?

Gary O'Neill continues to fester away playing football in a league below his ability for a team that is now looking increasingly like Celtic's reserves, so why not use some of our contracted players as leverage? I'm sure that Tonge & Griffin would have been enough given that he cannot have much longer than 18 months on his contract (he signed for Boro in 2007), and suddenly we have genuine options on the right. Nicky Shorey, a very recently capped England player continues to flit around on loan when a "proper" full back with excellent free-kick ability would genuinely enhance our team far more than the continued choice between Higginbotham & Collins, which to use an age-old joke is starting to look more and more like the proverbial two bald men fighting over a comb. These are just three examples of players, one of which would have been a loan, and two others would have easily been paid for by either off-setting some of our redundant squad or selling one to pay for another. You i'm sure could have come up with others (Fletcher at Burnley for Kitson & Cort could have been another?).

Remember Peter Coates is a shrewd businessman, first and foremost, and that the sheer weight of our current squad is something he will be acutely aware of. Tony Pulis has assembled a squad here where a significant percentage are not challenging for places, even on the bench and this seems ridiculous. Before next season (should we remain in this league) Pulis needs to put the annual trip to Borth to one side and start looking seriously at the potential problems he could be facing. Blind as he is currently to their screamingly obvious deficiencies, I cannot accept Pulis thinks he can get another year from Delap & Diao at this level so they need to be replaced, and given the inevitable moving on of Beattie & Kitson at some point, we need strikers fast (though if we carry on playing away like we did at Sunderland, strikers becomes a problem only at home as it appears we have now abandoned all attempts not only to win away, but also to score). I don't blame Pulis for the lop-sidedness of our squad in many ways; he did some panic buying to bolster the squad at the start and others simply haven't worked out, but we are now nearly two years into our great Premiership adventure and it's time to clear the decks a little, and perhaps using them as bait in order to bring in other players represents the best way to get value for money in 21st Century Football.

NB - Regarding the Terry business. Yes, yes he has broken rule #1 of the bloke handbook* and as such he should be now have done the decent thing and handed back the armband, but who takes it up? The forward who at 16 was regularly visiting brothels to sleep with 60-year old women?** No? how about the influential midfielder who once paid a gangster to beat another gangster up because he was boffing his Mrs?** Him neither? Well that leaves us with the Centre Half who once missed a season through his blatant disregard of the drug testing system, shall we have him instead? Modern footballers live in glass Mansions, and they all have boulders instead of stones, hence the little or no denouncement of Terry's actions. He's just the poor sod who got caught.

* No mowing your best mate's lawn.

** Allegedly, of course.

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