Mick

Plout Pompey.

Hello Sounders, it is Mick here to mull over that transfer window with you now that it's all done and dusted.

It's been complicated, it's been long, it's been interesting but more than that it's been vital to our club's hopes of survival in the Championship because we had a bit of a dive in the autumn.

The previous window in the summer

simply hadn't produced the players and therefore the results we had looked for and hoped for so we went from finishing last season a championship side looking up to Christmas of this season a championship side looking down injuries really I do honestly believe injuries to important

of the club, team, players made a difference but all teams suffer from those you could argue and therefore they're no excuse.

The conditions under which our recruitment team and John Monsignor planned their squad have been fairly clear since our American owners arrived.

He and his family

would fund and improve the infrastructure to make Fratton a safe and pleasant place for the fans and the club would spend the profits from playing in the championship on future players and indeed Fratton is a great place now and it's a full house the problem is there are no profits

when playing in the championship.

At any rate, they're pretty slender when viewed against the wage bills and the values of average championship players.

Michael Eisner pointed out when he studied the finances of our football club and the British football clubs generally and the championship clubs in particular, he pointed out that

While the club was still in division one, that was fine.

But the spending in the championship, led by aspiration and optimism, was virtually unsustainable, if I can say that word.

Unsustainable.

You needed luck.

And clubs that felt lucky mostly went bust.

or received a terrible financial setback, which took years to recover from.

Pompey adopted a middle route through the minefield to reach for the many millions required to guarantee a prospective promotion winning side.

They had decided to spend part of their budget on buying young prospects