Good day to you! Welcome to episode 50 of the Retirement Home – the final episode of the Retirement Home. We finished last week by winning the Champions League and it seems the absolutely perfect way to leave things. This will be a celebration of what has gone on over the past 49 weeks and a look forward to our new save in 2021, which has some similarities.

Importantly, I did sign four players to prepare for the new season had I chosen to carry on. Two of them are even defenders! Splinter in particular looks like he could still do a job.

Ricken and Tomasson would have been useful additions even if they are probably not better than what we have.

The squad looked fairly light in the left hand column by the time the season finished.

We had 16 great seasons with these old lads. Looking at the historical records I find it quite funny that our record win came at Premier League level despite the absolute laugh we had in Division 3 where Kerry Dixon got 41.

We’ve had one too many seasons to see Kerry’s season of glory but I assume Mick Quinn is livid he didn’t get one more that year. Mick Quinn is a definite club legend, our Karl Fletcher.

The average ratings make for interesting reading. Songo’o was great until his arms fell off. I don’t remember Glynn Snodin being that good. Fernando Couto got better with age, a great man.

We have never spent over a million pounds on a single player. That is absolutely absurd. The fact we didn’t spend anything for four years and then broke that duck by splashing £55k on Brian Tinnion is as remarkable as it is depressing.

Nothing summarises how far we’ve come like the league history because…well, that’s what it does. I forgot we got relegated from Division 1 back in 2001. We came back though, eventually. Cascarino and Cesuila or whatever he was called.

Our FA Cup record is horrific, really. Three quarter finals in 16 years. At least we won it once.

Mind you, we never even made the quarters of the League Cup.

It is pointless though, of course.

So whilst I consign this team to permanent retirement, the question on literally nobody’s lips is “what will your next save be?” Whatever I do, it’s going to have to go some way to get anywhere near this save so I approached it in very simple terms. What was my second bets save after the Retirement Home?

The answer was of course the Academy. So…

Ike Mashley is at it again! He’s set up a club in Holland combining the Academy and the Retirement Home to make something probably not quite as good as either. There’ll be old players, there’ll be young players, there’ll be transfer bids we can’t reject, there will be Mick Quinn. All the details will be revealed in episode one in January but hopefully this little teaser has persuaded you to stick around these parts in 2021.

We have a spare Sunday next week so I’ll probably do some sort of one off if time allows, who really knows. It used to be this time of year I would get an article written every week but obviously my time is not as free as it used to be. There’s always time for Champ.