THE Premiership transfer window closed this week with barely a trickle of interest for the rest of the English clubs - and that's a great shame.

About the only deal that helped any English club outside of the top-flight was the £8million that Tottenham Hotspur paid to take Andy Reid and Michael Dawson from Nottingham Forest to White Hart Lane. Other than that there was not much else to interest any club cash-wise out of the elite, more's the pity.

There was a time when leading clubs used to often take a gamble on plucking players from the lower divisions in England.

But since the advent of the Bosman ruling and the massive influx of foreign players into this country that all seems to have more or less died a death now.

And that is not good for the well-being of English football.

In the days when the Premiership gets the lion's share of all the money from Sky, from sponsors, from gate receipts, from transfers, it's more and more a case of the rich clubs getting richer and the rest getting poorer and poorer.

When you talk about smaller clubs surviving on transfer income then York City has been a prime example.

Even in my first spell at York, we had lads like John Byrne, who went from us to Queens Park Rangers for £100,000, and Gary Ford, who left Bootham Crescent for Leiester in a £25,000 deal.

More recently, there's been the likes of York players moving on to higher clubs like Jon McCarthy to Port Vale, Graeme Murty to Reading, Richard Cresswell to Sheffield Wednesday and, of course, Jonathan Greening, who went to Manchester United.

They were all given the opportunity to shine at a higher level and the money their transfers brought in helped York to stay afloat.

I remember when I was playing you had teams such as Liverpool, who went on to dominate the game, but they were never shy of snapping up players from the lower divisions. Just think of Kevin Keegan and Ray Clemence. They both came from Scunthorpe and Phil Neal joined the Reds from Northampton.

Sadly, over the last few years certainly, that filtering down of cash from the top to the bottom has started to disappear.

Last season I think the only move that really brought money to a lower League club was the £1million Blackburn paid Huddersfield Town for striker Jon Stead.

While you would class Nottingham Forest as still a big club, the £8million they've got this week from Spurs has been a massive boon for their cash problems.

Those deals apart, there's less and less evidence of the game's leading clubs willing to take a risk on a player from out of the top-flight.

And that has a poor effect on smaller clubs who have relied on the revenue brought in by nurturing youngsters.

There's a lot more pressure now on managers not to go for a gamble. They are not given the time these days to bring in a youngster and try to let him develop over a couple of years. Those days are gone.

I think that's a lot to do with the Bosman ruling whereby you can go out and get an instant fix with a foreign player, who is already an established international.

But that stops money staying in the game here as does the fees charged by agents in negotiating a large number of these deals. Their cut of the transfer fees does not benefit football, does it?

While I'm not disputing the fact that a lot of the foreign players who have come to this country have increased the standards of the game here, I fear it will have a detrimental effect on the national team later on.

There are fewer openings for home-based-players to get a place in a top-flight team. Then when they make the step up, will they survive?

Updated: 08:42 Thursday, February 03, 2005