Why doesn't this sit right?

Over the past few days we have seen some recently-released Poppies wash up at various footballing shores.  I don't know why, but seeing them holding up other team's scarfs and smiling broadly has made me feel, well, weirdly bereft.

It shouldn't.  Having our well regarded players leave us and then see them in another team's livery is part and parcel of football.  Whether they come back to haunt us in the strip of our fiercest rivals, or you glimpse their pot-bellied form on the inside page of the ET playing for Bugbrooke Reserves, we have become used to seeing our favourites plying their trade for other pay-masters.

But there's something about Meikle, O'Connor and White grinning happily back at me, knowing they will be playing for someone else, that has hit me harder than it should.  I think it could be because each of these players has racked up a serious amount of games for us. How many?  Who knows.  Does this look like it was written by Paul Cooke?

Along with the large number of appearances there is the sense that they have all been part of our shared struggle to get the Poppies back to somewhere near where we should be in the footballing pyramid.  They've been instrumental figures in dragging us up from the level of one man-and-his-dog footie up to having our results ignored by bored ex-pros on the Saturday afternoon TV football shows.

More than ever, the team and fans have been as one for the best part of the last decade.  And any player to play for us for more than a couple of seasons these days can seriously become part of the furniture at Latimer Park.  And now, three of our own have not only left us, but signed elsewhere.  It just hurts in a way I can't quite explain and certainly can't justify.

The fact that O'Connor and Meikle have both signed for the same club will come as no surprise to anyone as they seem inseparable in a hetro life-partner sort of way.  I'd be amazed if they weren't officially part of each others "bubble."  And they will know pretty much all of their teammates at Tamworth as they played with all of them with us!  They have dropped down a level where their impact should be immense again.  Good luck to them.

Lindon, say it ain't so...!

White's signing for Hereford needlessly annoys me though.  He wants full time football.  Fine.  He'll have it, after a fashion at Hereford.  I'm not sure where this leaves his off-field businesses, but that's his problem, not mine.

I sense this sideways move may go the same way as Adam Sollitt's departure after he cost us the FA Trophy twenty years ago.  With the footballing world his oyster, Adam left us to play very much second fiddle to Lee Harper at Northampton.  We saw him a few years later picking the ball out of his net at Gainsborough Trinity, which suggested his conquering of the football world could have gone better?

Paul White will, presumably, start as back-up to Hereford's first choice keeper and be sat on the bench of a team who finished this season barely any higher than we did, despite their pretensions to get back into the Football League (where they've never actually played.)

Ah well.  At least none of them signed for AFC Scum.  But, given they are losing their best and brightest to St F*cking Ives, it suggests quality and talent aren't exactly feeling the draw to Hayden Road!