As ever, transfer deadline day took on a life of its own.
Supporters who a few weeks ago were lauding their club for “getting their business done early” were taking leave of their senses at the sight of Jim White’s yellow tie and the absence of their club’s name on the Sky Sports News ticker bar below it.
Deadline day has the capacity to inspire a collective rage beyond anything that actually happens on a football pitch.
A passing glance at the social media anger from Everton fans after their £30 million wasn’t enough to get a midfielder who helped get Newcastle relegated was just one example from this window just slammed shut (it never closes since Sky had their way, it always slams) of the plot being lost.
Once calm is restored Evertonians will probably realise they dodged a bullet and feel a bit sheepish about it all, just as Liverpool supporters would rather forget that they were the ones frothing at the mouth not so long ago when their new owners didn’t break the bank to land a washed-up Clint Dempsey.
It’s a spectacle that is part trolley dash, part car crash.
But it doesn’t tell the story of how your club has summered. That has to be looked at in the round, and even then there’s a finger in the wind element to it all.
Dundee United’s loan capture of Tony Andreu has been talked about as possibly the best bit of deadline day business in Scotland. And you can understand why.
If it’s the Andreu who followed Alex Neil out of Hamilton then it probably is. The Frenchman’s pedigree suggests he should be head and shoulders above most of his peers in the Scottish Championship.
Never having seen United’s two new centre-backs play, let alone knowing how they will adjust to the requirements of Ayr United away on a wet and windy Tuesday night, judgment will have to wait on Frank van der Struijk and William Edjenguélé.
United probably still lack a proven out-and-out finisher but Ray McKinnon was always going to need more than one transfer window to personalise the squad he inherited.
If the three men above all live up to their billing, he’ll have made a decent start. And maybe that centre-forward will be secured in January, if not before.
At Dunfermline, reforming a prolific Queen of the South partnership by signing Nicky Clark to play alongside Gavin Reilly, would appear to be as near to a guarantee of goals in the second tier as you can get.
It would be no surprise if the Pars get themselves into play-off contention pretty soon.
St Johnstone needed another striker, and they got one. It has plugged the one hole in their squad. They looked like top-six contenders again before Joe Gormley arrived and they look like top-six probables now.
What to make of Dundee?
Kevin Gomis and Mark O’Hara are both ready-made first team regulars, and the good window/bad window pendulum has a bit of movement left in it as a couple of free agents are still expected to arrive. One of them is likely to be a centre-forward.
But if Dundee are to occupy the same part of the table as they have over the last two seasons – either just north of the split line or just south of it – that centre-forward will need to be a good one.
Because as it stands, two works in progress – Yordi Teijsse and Faissal El Bakhtaoui – are unlikely to provide the goals of recently departed Greg Stewart and Kane Hemmings.
