ONLY the hardest heart will find no room for sympathy this morning for George Reynolds.

A man of the world he may be, who has crammed more into his 66 years of life than nearly all of us will manage, but he still has a childlike naivet about him.

For a while this week, he had us all dreaming his dream that Faustino Asprilla - one of the greatest showmen ever to pull on a Newcastle shirt - would be appearing at Feethams.

And while we were dreaming that dream, we forgot the reality.

It was back in February that Asprilla first floated the idea of returning to English football.

Although only 32, he'd fallen out of the big time in both England and Italy and had drifted back to South America where, earlier this summer, he'd been released by his club Atletico Nacional.

He pitched up in the North-East just as the football season was beginning, trying to rekindle his connections with Newcastle.

When they blew him out, he approached Sunderland. They too showed him the door. Then starry-eyed Reynolds came calling, dreaming of filling his 25,000 seater stadium.

The most telling aspect of this whole saga is that it was Asprilla's people who leaked the news of the negotiations with the Quakers.

Their timing was deliberate: a week before the transfer window closed so there was an opportunity for a bigger club to come in with a bigger offer.

That's all Asprilla was doing, and poor old George - and he was not alone - fell for it.

He even believed that he had a gentleman's agreement with Asprilla.

But there are no gentlemen in football. Whether it's a chairman clearing out over-paid stars or a 32-year-old with only a couple of good years left in his legs, they're all hard-headed businessmen looking for the best deal.

You can't fault Reynolds for his dreams and his visions - so enticing have they been this week that all the national newspapers have been ogling Darlington's coup.

The club has never had such publicity.

But the last few days show that Mr Reynolds is learning. His pursuit of Asprilla and Paul Gascoigne shows that he now knows that if Darlington are to progress as a football club they will need to put quality on the pitch. And quality costs money.

Unfortunately for Darlington, that realisation comes when the transfer window has effectively closed.

The club must now hope that its collection of bargain buys can at least stay in contention until the window re-opens and Reynolds can begin spending to realise his dream of higher quality football and a fairly full stadium.