Well I guess that depends on what your definition of “up” actually is but safe to say that the off-season so far seems to have been an exercise in proving the maxim “no news is good news” to be bang on the money.
As if losing Brett Levis until the Summer wasn’t enough we now discover that David Edgar is out until the Fall with a knee injury caused by a hit and run driver in Arizona.
And it’s the latter news that really leaves Carl Robinson behind the proverbial eight ball (although if he was behind the literal eight ball that would just be weird).
Edgar was brought into the club last season for two reasons; to shore up a malfunctioning central defence and to provide some much-needed locker room leadership.
Now Robinson finds himself back with the central defensive partnership of Waston and Parker and no substantive change in locker room presence.
Thankfully there are two ways of looking at this.
The first way is burst into tears, run outside and bury our heads in the freezing snow until the City starts to raid local restaurants and bars for salt and the second way is to see every problem as simply an opportunity in disguise.
The first way definitely doesn’t work because I’ve tried it and while the second way may well be the kind of vapid life advice normally heard on morning TV it’s literally all we’ve got so let’s run with it.
For starters (in both senses of the phrase) Waston and Parker aren’t a bad central defensive partnership and maybe the best course of action would be to work on eradicating the errors of 2016 rather than simply trying to fix the problem with new faces.
And if the locker room needs a revamp then, once again, that could just as easily come from within the club as it could from importing “character”.
If Robinson learned anything from last season then it’s surely that he needs to challenge his players more and forgive them a little less.
And if the players learned anything from last season then it’s surely that they can’t just coast through a number of games no matter how generous the MLS playoff structure happens to be.
We are still awaiting news of fresh signings of course but the club will have known the extent of Edgar’s injury long before we did so we can assume that has been a factor in any scouting trips or negotiations thus far.
But if Edgar’s terrible luck does mean something then it surely means that minds need to be even more focused than they were before.
That might not be a bad thing in the long run (or it might be horrendously terrible).
Hard to say really.
Soccer Shorts (The Director's Cut) 