TVC15 wrote:Why do you “firmly” believe you think Burnley could have got him for £12m ?
Do you actually believe that or are you just saying that to have a dig at the club ?
Either way it does not make much sense.
The rest of your post is pure rumour and conjecture but again i’m sure it fits in with what you want to believe.
Just have a read back at what you posted and tell me out of everything you quoted how much of that do you know to be factual ? So far I have counted 0%.
Re read my post. i didn't say that I believed we would get Jay for 12m.
And yes it's a critical opinion based on assumptions drawn from what happened - which IS fact.
FACT - we spent all summer chasing a signing that the manager really wanted.
FACT - we made 3 (or was it 4?) offers.
FACT - West Brom didn't want to or have to sell.
FACT - West Brom wanted 40m for both Dawson and Rodriguez.
FACT - our first 2 or 3 offers were turned down as being nowhere near the selling club's valuation but we were going o 25-30m in the end.
FACT - we stopped chasing both and focused on Jay
FACT - we offered 15 or 16 m to be told that West brom wanted 20.
FACT - we then offered 18m and it was turned down.
FACT - we walked away.
I think it is a fair inference that :
a) Jay and dawson were priority targets
b) we wanted jay more than Dawson (presumably becasue we had more options as backup targets for Dawson)
c) we hoped we could get him for not a lot more than his fee to West Brom in the hope they'd want to reduce their wage bill
d) our expected top budget for the signing was probably less than the 2nd last offer because it would be bloody stupid to pass up a priority target (who had presumably already found a way to sit within our wage structure and wanted to come) with 7 days of the window to go and no real alternatives for the sake of going 2-3m overbudget when we have just secured 100m and not spent anything yet that window.
Certainly the facts as we have them support my theory a lot closer than the theory we agreed a deal and West Brom went back on it by being greedy.
You might think that is critical. It is. A number of us said so at the time. I'm mostly critical that we ****** about all summer over this and failed to land him without any credible alternatives.
I think my analysis above where we rate Jay at at say 12 to 15m is being kind to the board. We offered 25-30m for a striker and a defender - we don;t know what the split was but surely we'd expect a striker to be valued higher than a defender. Our offer of 15 to 18 for Jay therefore could be argued to be exactly the same offer as the 25m for both. No wonder it got turned down.