I saw Patrick Cryne stand a few yards in front of me at the Old No.7 and tell us that nobody at the club knew how good John Stones was.
I don’t think anyone knew just HOW good he would become. He’s way surpassed the potential he had at Barnsley. I still think we sold him a season too early?
Coventry have recently announced the departure of Gustavo Hamer for a fee believed to be somewhere between 15 and 20 million. If they want Kitching Barnsley need to demand a really silly fee as we know they've got the funds. We have no reason to sell and he's under a long contract. We need to be like clubs have been with West Ham this summer. All clubs have known West Ham have this huge fee in their pockets from selling Rice and have been asking for mad fees for players when they've gone in for them. We need to do same here. We should be asking for 5 million plus.
OK. I really don't want Kitching to go unless the club are absolutely confident we can cover his departure on the pitch which I don't see we can. That being said a fee of 2.5 rising to 3 million for him is a very decent offer (if true). And we've turned it down. So can we, just for once, dispense with the blackies egg, had our pants down, Peterborough get top dollar type comments?
Must admit I'd have sold for £2.5m and would bite their hands off if they came back with £3-3.5m. That being said, I have no real faith in us signing the necessary replacements given what's gone before this Summer. Somehow, I have a sneaky feeling Kitching might still be here on 1st September though.
How many times do we see comments that say that if we get £2/3/4 million for a player we should then spend the equivalent on a replacement? We can`t do that because players of that price will demand wages far in excess of the amount we can pay and, personally, I wouldn`t want us to. The reason we can`t is that much of those fees need to be used to guarantee the future stability of the club. I understand that this policy isn`t popular and limits our expectations but to me I`d rather see the occasional season like last year when we nearly got lucky than see us jeopardise our existence.
Fair enough still a decent amount sold about 35 million quids worth of players. Definitely not skint.
If we are truly reinvesting any transfer receipts back into the squad, I'd be taking the £4mn all day long. We can buy another 5 Forest Green players for that.
Suprised we have rejected that, I would have sold for that. Only problem is a replacement and were already trying to bring in a center back which says the club don't think we have replaced thomas and mads yet 5 games in.
The bit that I don't get is, if we can afford to reject £4m for Kitching, why can't we go out and get a replacement for Mads that has more than 150 appearances to his name, rather than buy three novice centre backs like we have done?