OK there had been a couple of major blips due to dodgy signings. I'm not sure a hat-trick at Cambridge is really enough to justify the £700k we will pay Cyril Chapuis this year, as we continue to pay the bulk of his wages now he's returned to France. There was also Roque Jr, who has surely surpassed Tubby Tommy as the worst signing of all time, now we've agreed to pay him some money to cancel his contract, it's clear that in wages, agents fees and compensation it will have cost us nearly £1.5m - our return on that 5 games, 19 goals conceded and one red card.

However, you can't really blame Birch and co for bad judgement on players and they seemed to be doing an excellent job in warding the creditors off, forcing the greedy b*stard players into taking the pay deferral and keeping the better players at the club to give us at least a chance of avoiding relegation. However, the saga of Paul Robinson's on-off transfer to Spurs last week shows that the running of the club still has a lot of room for improvement. The official line is that the transfer broke down because of a breach of Premier League rules. This is true but not quite in the way that has been implied.

The deal was that Robbo would move to Spurs and then loaned back to Leeds for the rest of the season, a condition that Leeds would have to insist on as with Martyn and Milosevic gone and Allaway out on loan, we would only have had Scott Carson left for the rest of the year. The problem was that Premier League rules forbid a player returning to a Premiership club within 12 months of being sold, and officially the transfer broke down for this reason and has largely been presented as a technicality.  However, the Premier League do have power to give special dispensation to allow the transfer to take place and given our special circumstances (complete and utter desperation), they would have allowed Robinson to move on the basis we needed the £2m to survive. Spurs have gone along with the official explanation, because they still want to buy Robbo in the summer and covering our embarrassment helps them

What really happened ?
Well whilst Robinson was down in London agreeing terms and passing a medical, the club officials were sorting out Michael Bridges' loan move to Newcastle. In the course of this move they firstly tried to get Lua-Lua to come to Leeds as part of a permanent move and when he decided he'd prefer to goto Portsmouth (my god - how low have we sunk) - they then enquired about a centre-back. So Stephen Caldwell was signed on loan as cover for the injured Radebe and Duberry and to allow Eddie to continue his bizarre obsession with playing Matteo in midfield.

However, during all this Leeds' officials had totally forgotten the rule that says Premier League clubs can only have 2 players on loan from other Premier League clubs at any one time. We already have Pennant and signing Caldwell made it two. So of course when details of the Robinson deal were passed to the Premier League, they said we could not loan Robinson back because we'd exceed the loanees limit.  We then had to abort the deal totally because we couldn't risk only having Carson in goal for the rest of the year.

So basically we screwed up the deal ourselves.
At present the club does not look too stupid because the official line is that we didn't want to sell  anybody, this doesn't really tally with the fact Robinson actually had a medical at Tottenham and that Viduka was on his way to Middlesboro before being told to come back.

However, it remains to be seen how much we needed that £2m. Although we'd have probably used it to give new contracts to Nick Barmby and Stephen McPhail, it could be the difference between survival or not by year end and it's also not very reassuring to know that the our club are as ignorant of the rules governing football as Uriah Rennie.

Matt