Vine off to Birmingham - who next?

Firstly, on Rowan Vine. He has today been sold to Birmingham City for £2.5m, which may even rise to £3m should Birmingham get promoted to the Premiership. As far as I know, he hasn't agreed terms or passed a medical at Birmingham yet, but basically he's going. This comes little more than a week after Carlos Edwards was sold on to Sunderland for £1.4m. Last season Curtis Davies, Steve Howard and Kevin Nicholls were all sold for a lot of money as well, taking the total revenue gained from players in the last two seasons since returning to the Championship to almost £9m, and potentially it could be £9m if Birmingham win promotion.

Promotion to the Championship in 2005 doesn't seem to have helped the club as much as it should have done. True, we were able to sign quality players such as Heikkinen and Edwards, players who we may not have been able to get in League One. We may have kept Newell here because of our status in the Championship as well, although if he hadn't got us promoted then other clubs may not be as interested in him. Nothing else has really changed though - we're still no closer to moving to a new ground than we were before. Newell has already said, "I can understand their (the fans) frustrations yes, but at the end of the day I'm managing a football club that hasn't got a ground, hasn't got a training ground, doesn't own anything and needs to pay wages to players so it can survive in the Championship." So despite the increase in TV money that we should get from promotion to the Championship and the amount of players we have sold recently, but the manager himself says that we still don't own anything. Maybe the money is being put towards a new ground, but this looks no nearer to completion than it ever did in the Watson-Challis years or before that. Can a club of our size really afford to just keep the money in the bank until we finally manage to start building our new stadium?

So will we be selling any more players? Can we really afford to? When Vine goes, we will have two fit strikers in Feeney and Boyd (presumably fit anyway) and Morgan as cover. Who is going to score then? Vine has been the only outstanding player of the season so far this year. Any replacements for Vine will have to settle in before they can start to replicate his form. Presumably it'll be Barnett who is the next player to leave this season, which will leave us with no pace in defence. Morgan has also been touted as another player who is on the way, so that'll mean just Feeney and Emanuel in the whole team who is quick. We sell Howard in the summer to leave us with no height in the team and now we are selling our pacy players. What will we have left? I'm all for us selling players for the sake of progress, but what progress will we make selling our only key players? So will we stay up? We'll probably have to see how we cope in the next few games to give us a good idea on our position on survival. If we do manage to stay up without a goalscorer and with a defence that lets in too many goals, then Newell really will be a miracle worker.