Another intriguing week in the wicky wacky world of web offset. The two most-read stories on printweek.com over the past seven days relate to the sector, and those tectonic plates I was musing about at the end of last year really are starting to shift.

Am I surprised that Charles Jarrold has decided not to take up the new role offered to him at Wyndeham? No. It seemed pretty clear to me that the group has more than enough chiefs as it is, hence being unconvinced from the outset that everyone from Southernprint's senior management team would stay on under the new owners.

Charles has a lot of personal brand value, though, so the reaction of key clients will be interesting - IPC's Jasper Scott, for example, had publicly praised him in the past, and Southernprint had looked to be a likely beneficiary of Scott's current Southbank review prior to Newsquest's decision to offload it. No doubt the Wyndeham/Walstead team are putting much effort into reassigning those favourable feelings. And of course Wyndeham is strategically important to Scott as it's a vital supplier to IPC in the prepress space. 

While Walstead has created a £100m group, the consolidation play carried out in the north by Garnett Dickinson has resulted in the formation of something around half that size. It's noteworthy that this deal also involves two much-speculated about print businesses with newspaper connections. The remaining rump of Trader Media Print Group can now be viewed as an inplant.

Talking to a web print boss this morning ("we're still seeing desperation and crazy prices out there"), a further football analogy came up, that being that new shape emerging could be likened to a sort of web offset Premier League, with three tiers of performance within that. Although looking at the UK market on a plant-by-plant basis there are rather more than three in the relegation zone.  

In my dictionary consolidate is defined as "to make or become stronger or more stable". There's little sign of that in web just yet.