With all of the rumours of a need to get the highest paid players off the wage bill I was convinced that the board would do something stupid like get rid of Iyseden Christie for free to the first person who asked.

It is, therefore, satisfying to read that Lincoln City have been put off by the £50000 asking price as reported in the Lincolnshire Echo.  It has not been unknown in the past for players to leave Aggborough with no recompense for Harriers; Adam Murray springs to mind for one who was set to have the team built around him one day and the next was moving to Mansfield on a free transfer.

Christie, along with Mark Jackson who is interesting York and Wayne Hatswell who is attracting the attention of Rushden & Diamonds, is under contract and we should be able to pull in a fee for him.  Given that we got £5000 for Matt Lewis when he left for Hinckley United, I think that £50000 is more than reasonable for a player who had scored 13 goals so far this season before the turn of the year.  I think that there is a fair chance that even if we keep hold of him through the transfer window we will probably lose Christie at the end of the season when his contract expires as goalscorers are like gold dust and we have in him one who is far too good for the level that he is playing.

Mark Yates will go up in my estimation if he manages to fend off interest in our best players, particularly the one who will help us climb up the table with his goals.  The new manager must, however, find a way to support Christie on the field; we need another striker to take some of the burden off him; at the moment if anything happened to him or he was to leave, it is hard to see where the goals will come from in any numbers.

At this stage I applaud the board for slapping a price tag on the player that will put off many teams but is a good deal for the club, provided that most of the cash goes back into team building, should somebody be prepared to pay it.

Popularity: 23% [?]

Drinking in Woking is not a fantastic experience; there’s the Social Club on the ground or you can take a five-minute walk down the road to the nearest pub.

The Kingfield Arms seems a nice enough pub from the outside and it’s quite pleasant on the inside. It was incredibly quiet, however, with only half a dozen people there; you would have expected more locals there as it’s the nearest pub to the ground.

For the Real Ale drinker there was London Pride and nothing else. For the cider drinker there was nothing else; I was left drinking coke and was on the receiving end of a fair amount of stick from the guest supporter in our group for the rest of the afternoon. He’ll get his comeuppance when Aldershot come to Aggborough later in the season!

All in all, not a great pub by the standards of those in, say, York or Halifax, but there’s plenty worse.

Popularity: 28% [?]

I was going to write about how the board are prevaricating over a new manager but then they went and appointed one and put paid to that idea.

Instead I have to write about our new gaffer, Mark Yates. I’m not overly impressed as I (a) don’t like him and (b) would have preferred somebody with a bit more managerial experience. Time will tell whether he is any good, I’ve been saying for some time now it doesn’t really matter who the man in charge is if we are winning games, so he has one result in his favour so far.

I can’t fault his commitment to the cause; his performances on his last spell in a Harriers shirt were just what was required at the time; we needed somebody to get on the pitch and shout and cajole, which is what he did and probably went a long way towards us not getting relegated from the Football League that season and what was missing from the side for most of last season when we succumbed to the drop. In his previous stay at the club I always felt he was overrated, at best an average player with poor passing skills for a central midfielder, and I wasn’t in the least disappointed when he went to Cheltenham. Although, to be fair, by then I didn’t like him as I had been on the receiving end of his obnoxious arrogance in an off-field incident.

The appointment of a new manager could have been worse, I feel, as I had a nagging feeling that the board would do something stupid like appoint Carlton Palmer and a look at the bottom five or six places in League Two shows why that would have been a bad move. As long as Yatesy keeps getting results he will continue winning over those others of us who aren’t celebrating his arrival just yet although, with a 100% record so far it can only go downhill from here!!

Popularity: 20% [?]