The big end of pre-season round-up

Last Saturday's pre-Big Kick Off kick off against Brentford in the League Cup turned out to be quite a pleasant surprise, what with some easy on the eye football, some promising debuts and a win, writes Saddlers blogger Mark Jones.

The upshot of this is we are in something which I believe is known as the 'Second Round'.

An away tie at QPR is a decent enough reward and fits in well with the Walsall tradition of drawing the same teams over again, as we met them in the first round in the early days of Sir Ray in 1998.

Before that we play three league games though, starting with the return of Donny tomorrow, and as the obvious thing to do is look forward to the new season, naturally I'm going to take a look back at pre-season and three improvements I'd like to see.

1.Contracts – As it stands nearly all of the current squad will be out of contract again next summer. So the prospect of yet another summer of revolving doors at Bescot has a similar likelihood to that of an old Walsall factory inexplicably and mysteriously burning down.

It'll be fairly obvious, probably within the next month, which players will be worth keeping (hopefully all of them – you never know) so why not start negotiating around Xmastime instead of next May?

It won't matter that the outcome of the season will be unknown because the negotiations can be based on deals in principle, what minimum amounts players would settle for etc. That way we'd be able to prioritise and set a playing budget based on what the players we actually want might accept instead of making the squad fit the budget.

Then we might spend next summer with more than a vague idea about who will be representing the club come the kick off.

2. Kit – I quite like all three kits, apart from the Teletubby goalie strip obviously, but what is going on with the sponsor's logo? Now before anyone from the club jumps down my throat, I'm absolutely, definitely not knocking the sponsors, quite the opposite in fact. I salute any local business who stump up cash in these hard times, but surely it's in their best interests if people can tell what's being advertised? I mean is it the product or the company or what? Watching the footage of the win over Brentford you can't really distinguish it.

These are the kinds of things that fans were pointing out when the design was leaked on the internet in early June, and you might think the club would take notice of its customers, but no. I mean our Commercial Director has only got roughly a quarter of a century's experience of negotiating such deals, what could possibly go wrong?

Hows about a bit of supporter involvement in kit design, it really would be good for everyone.

3. Friendlies – Our two home friendlies attracted around 8700 fans in total with only 2000 Saddlers in attendance at each. Maybe people are fed up with the same opponents and the same relatively meaningless fixtures.

This is my solution - have a four team tournament played over half a week. We could get Banks's or someone to put up a cup. You invite Team A – one of the four 'big' local clubs, Team B – a mid-ranking local-ish club (Derby, Forest, Leicester etc) who we haven't played for a bit and Team C – one of the teams we normally go to (Burton, Telford, Kiddy).

On a Wednesday night Walsall play Team B in the first 'semi-final', they might bring a few fans and there may be a healthy home following as it would be the first friendly of the season and it's not against the same old same old opposition.

The following night big local Team A, with their big local following, could play Team C in the second semi . Let's be honest the big local team's fans don't come to see us do they?

Then on the Saturday it would be the final and 3^rd/4^th game. We could have a double-header, I went to one in the Olympics they're ace, or maybe a 12 noon and 5pm kick off if it is deemed that the ground needs to be cleared.

There are only two possible combinations of games on finals day; one is Walsall v Team C, which might not be the biggest of crowd-pullers but you never know, and Team A v Team B, which could be; the other is Walsall v Team A and Team B v Team C which should attract more than 4700 punters.

There are obviously pitfalls in this, fitting into teams' schedules, attracting fans of Team B and Team C for two games and in the organisation of the Saturday. But why not give it a go? You'd still get the big local away following twice (in theory), you'd give games a bit of a competitive edge, there'd be at least one game for us that would be more of a genuine work out and there might be more interest from Saddlers fans.

If it fails, abandon the idea and go back to the current Plan A, the one with the ever dwindling crowds. Otherwise you could make it a regular feature, rotating the big local club, possibly inviting a foreign team or even synchronising Teams B and C (Derby and Burton for instance).

We don't have anything to lose do we?

Anyway that's for the future, the question for the present is can we build on the win over Brentford? Will we keep the same formation? Will we keep trying to keep the ball on the floor? Will we miss any of our dear departed ex-players? By the time we visit Loftus Road I imagine we'll have a much better idea.

Talking of former players, last week I was fairly vitriolic towards Manny Smith following his move to big club Notts County. However I was sad to hear he was stretchered off with a nasty injury on his debut. Nobody, least of all me, wished that on him, so get well soon Emmanuel. After all I want his career to flop as a fit player.

Finally congrats to former Saddlers loanee John Ruddy on his En-ger-land debut, in a game which saw the Three Lions wearing a retro 70s WFC kit to boot. He obviously learnt everything he knows from us.

It's the big kick off and I can't wait. Come on you new Saddlers.